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In his study of what he calls “the psychotherapeutic turn” in St. Petersburg, Russia, the anthropologist Tomas Matza works from a Foucauldian point of view with a dash of Marx thrown in. The importance of class shows in Foucault's critique of “bourgeois social difference,” but by shifting his
examination of the technologies of power to biopolitics rather than class conflict as such, Foucault refocused Marxian class analysis and macro-predictions to the micro-level of power. Matza practices his critical anthropology at the sites where psychotherapists acquire their skills, interact with their peers, deliver their therapeutic services, and experience their own enthusiasms, dilemmas, and conflicts.
Matza's terminology reflects his complex position. “Neoliberal” has negative connotations rather than positive ones. It signifies the rule of capitalism and the embourgeoisement of professionals in the health sector. “Precarity” denotes precariousness of care. “The psychotherapeutic turn is not simply a symptom, or function, of neoliberal governmentality. Instead it has inaugurated a form of precarious care that intersects with some, but not all, of the forms of rule specific to neoliberal states” (p. 229). Matza thus deploys his critical anthropology at the level of biopolitics: the loci of power, the damage done by experts, and the ethical quandaries caregivers face. His subjects left a world that had discouraged uniqueness and the self as opposed to the collective, but that now approved of individual emotional needs and the quest for happiness.
Matza's study of postsocialist Russia focuses on the period 2005-2013, when he did fieldwork in the Russian Federation. He had imagined himself doing an anthropological study of emerging psychological therapies serving a new Russian individual, with both therapist and client reflecting the breakdown of Soviet orthodoxies and also the therapeutic eclecticism of that period in the West. In 2005 many American academics still embraced