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Dying Unneeded: The Cultural Context of the Russian
Mortality Crisis by Michelle A. Parsons (review)
Inna Leykin
Anthropological Quarterly, Volume 88, Number 4, Fall 2015, pp. 1131-1135
(Review)
Published by George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic Research
DOI:
For additional information about this article
[ Access provided at 25 Oct 2020 09:54 GMT from Open University ]
https://doi.org/10.1353/anq.2015.0048
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/598466
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BOOK REVIEW
Inna Leykin, The Open University of Israel
Michelle A. Parsons, Dying Unneeded: The Cultural Context
of the Russian Mortality Crisis. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press,
2014. 224 pp.
Russia has been experiencing a unique population crisis. With total fer-
tility rates ranging between 1.2 and 1.4 over the last two decades (well
below the replacement level of 2.1) and a rapidly aging population, the
country’s birthrates resemble demographic trends of other (both Eastern
and Western) European countries. Unlike other European countries,
however, Russia has significantly high mortality rates and a significantly
truncated life expectancy at birth for both women and men. In these re-
gards, Russian statistics more closely resemble population trends in the
developing world than in Europe. In 1995, the apex of Russia’s popula-
tion crisis, life expectancy for men was estimated to be a mere 58 years.
In 2009, life expectancy for men rose to 62.8 years (and 74.7 for women)
(Federal State Statistics Service 2011). This means that approximately 45
percent of males who turned 15 in 2009 will not survive to celebrate their
60th birthdays.
The mortality crisis has an undeniable presence in the lives of ordinary
Russian citizens. On the now canceled Russian TV show “Paris Hilton’s
Projector,” a member of the audience asked a popular Russian comedian,
“Why do Russian men lead shorter lives [compared to their counterparts
in the West]?” The comedian was quick on his feet: “Because they live
at a higher velocity.”1 The joke nicely captures the focus of Michelle A.
Parsons’s book, Dying Unneeded: The Cultural Context of the Russian
Mortality Crisis. She too is unsatisfied with an array of existing epidemio-
logical explanations, and she is searching for an answer in culture and in
the everyday experiences of ordinary Russians. The book is concerned
with the little-understood issue of Russian mortality, especially mortality
Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 88, No. 4, p. 1131–1136, ISSN 0003-5491. © 2015 by the Institute for
Ethnographic Research (IFER) a part of the George Washington University. All rights reserved.
Michelle A. Parsons | Dying Unneeded: The Cultural Context of the Russian Mortality Crisis
1132
among working-age men. Yet, the book moves beyond the strictly epide-
miological explanations that dominate existing literature. Parsons situates
population shifts associated with the fall of the Soviet Union within broad-
er social and political contexts and illuminates local cultural concepts that
give meaning to both life and death in post-Soviet Russia.
In eight relatively concise chapters, Parsons documents how those
most affected by the mortality crisis—“men and women between 55 and
70 years old in 2006–2007” (5) who have spent their entire adult lives in
a city (Moscow) with one of the highest mortality rates—experience the
crisis. Studying this generation’s perceptions and experiences of the fall
of the Soviet Union, Parsons argues that “being needed”—by both others
and the state—is what made life worth living in the Soviet Union. The dra-
matic political and social changes that followed its fall crippled the sense
of “being needed” through which people asserted themselves in society.
Linking social experiences with death, Parsons further asserts that the
dissolution of social relations, created by the experience of social exclu-
sion and isolation brought about by the breakdown of the Soviet Union,
has become “a distal driver of the mortality crisis” (11).
Although death is the focus of Parsons’s ethnography, the book begins
with the question of “what makes life worth living for men and women
in Russia” (20). The first two chapters analyze the cultural concepts of
space and order through which Parsons’s informants have been trying to
make sense of mortality and the fall of the Soviet Union. The most fasci-
nating part of Parsons’s study—and in my mind, the core of the book’s
argument—discusses the following paradox: although her informants had
spent a lifetime trying to circumvent the Soviet system, they now long for
the order it once imposed. What they desire, she writes, are “the social
connections of the past, which were structured and granted potency by
the Soviet order” (52).
For Parsons’s informants, the experience of “becoming unneeded”
is grounded in space (prostor). Since the early 1990s, they have com-
municated their experiences of political and economic change through
a local cultural concept of prostor—both physical and metaphysical. For
example, older Muscovites understand the new post-Soviet public space
with its extravagant shops and expensive restaurants, as a site of social
exclusion that limits their freedom of action and their sense of belong-
ing. Moreover, prostor has both individual and national dimensions. It is
through the concept of physical and metaphysical prostor—which I would
INNA LEYKIN
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translate as “vastness” or “spaciousness” rather than “space”—that or-
dinary Russians make sense of the general population decline in their
country. Thus, Russians often cite the geographic spaciousness of their
country, coupled with its shrinking population, as an imminent threat to the
integrity and future of the Russian nation.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 further explore the story of “becoming unneeded”
through the experiences of war, work, and the economic shock therapy
that arrived after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Parsons’s informants
had a strong sense of being needed by both the Soviet state and oth-
ers as they sacrificed their lives and worked to help rebuild the country
after World War II. In the context of the Soviet shortage economy, they
were also full-fledged participants in the exchange of favors (Ledeneva
1998), offering others access to goods that the state could not provide.
Because in post-Soviet Russia there is no longer a shortage of goods
and because this generation sees their sacrifices as underappreciated by
younger Russians, “becoming unneeded” has become a formative experi-
ence. Parsons’s informants are no longer able to “offer favors and goods
to others around them” (77), and this has had significant ramifications for
their social relations and identities in post-Soviet Russia.
In the final two chapters, Parsons returns to mortality and tries to bal-
ance “statistical regularities and cultural meanings” (Johnson-Hanks
2007:9). Using epidemiological data to disassemble an immediate link
between alcohol and poor health, Parsons provocatively argues that in
the Russian case, “being unneeded” (much more than alcohol use per
se) propelled the country’s mortality crisis. Alcohol does not automatically
lead to poorer health outcomes and individual behavior is determined by
larger social and cultural logics than epidemiological scholarship tends to
address. Thus, Parsons writes that drinking during the early 1990s “was
not only an attempt to escape problems but perhaps primarily an attempt
to address them…” (159). In her interpretation, drinking pales in compari-
son to the death of society and the destruction of social connections,
which she claims have made Russian bodies vulnerable to risk. While
striking, this part of Parsons’s argument needs more ethnographic evi-
dence. Clearly, dramatic social and political shifts can help us understand
changes in individual behavior. It is unclear, though, how she arrives at
the conclusion that a particular social experience rather than alcohol con-
sumption itself (and its attendant health consequences) has caused the
mortality crisis. It is one thing to suggest a connection, but quite another
Michelle A. Parsons | Dying Unneeded: The Cultural Context of the Russian Mortality Crisis
1134
to assert a cause. Moreover, I could not find enough evidence to support
Parsons’s claim that people drank in order to address the problem rather
than to avoid it.
The story of Russia’s mortality crisis merits further study. For one, the
Russian crisis has a clear gender dimension, as expressed in highly dif-
ferentiated life expectancies for men and women. Though gender is of
course mentioned in Parsons’s ethnography, the gendered nature of “be-
ing unneeded” is rarely analyzed in the book, if at all. How does the gen-
eration of Moscow dwellers with the worst life expectancy at birth make
sense of this imbalance? How do they organize their everyday lives know-
ing that many men in their families and immediate social circles will die?
What are the tacit understandings and practices through which women
come to terms with the expectation of death of their partners, fathers, and
sons? Parsons leaves these important questions unanswered.
The book will be of interest to academic readers and students of post-
socialist societies, the anthropology of public health, and medical anthro-
pology, as well as to public health scholars and practitioners. Different
chapters of the book can be assigned as stand-alone pieces for under-
graduate seminars in anthropology. For example, the introduction con-
trasts epidemiological research with ethnographic methods, making it a
clearly written and accessible way to explain anthropological methodol-
ogy and the concept of culture to undergraduate students.
Parsons’s well-written book provides new insights into the relation-
ships among culture, social change, and health. Her detailed ethnography
augments epidemiological literature on the Russian mortality crisis by ef-
fectively presenting behavioral factors within their cultural context. It is
precisely the power of ethnographic methods in capturing social and cul-
tural processes not reflected in quantitative research that makes Michelle
Parsons’s book a timely and valuable addition to the growing body of lit-
erature dealing with post-socialist societies and politics. n
INNA LEYKIN
1135
Endnotes:
1Prozhektorperishilton was a popular satirical show aired on Channel One for four seasons, 2008–2012.
The episode featuring the joke I refer to aired on December 6, 2008. For more information on the program
and on the episode see: http://www.1tv.ru/sprojects_in_detail/si=5745 (last accessed on July 7, 2015).
References:
Federal State Statistics Service. 2011. “Life Expectancy at Birth.” Russia in Numbers. Accessed from
http://www.gks.ru/bgd/regl/b11_12/IssWWW.exe/Stg/d01/05-07.htm on July 7, 2015.
Johnson-Hanks, Jennifer. 2007. “What Kind of Theory for Anthropological Demography?” Demographic
Research 16(1):1-26.
Ledeneva, Alena V. 1998. Russia’s Economy of Favors: Blat, Networking, and Informal Exchange.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.