Negotiating Responsibility: Ethics of Choice and Care in Postsocialist Oncology Wards in Serbia

Abstract

This dissertation problematizes the, often taken for granted, assumptions about individual agency in the realms of the body, disease and medicine. I show that ethics of care, as framed in contemporary Serbian postsocialist context, serves as a unique example of simultaneously coexisting ideas about the assumed neoliberal agency and imagined socialist obedience as both equally necessary for navigating the complex landscape of rapidly privatizing health care in Serbia. To this end, I elaborate concrete interactions occurring in Serbian oncology clinics in order to illuminate the intersections among state and global politics; politicaland legal transformations; and the formal and informal strategies patients and doctors employ on behalf of personal and collective interests. Here, there is a commitment to a complex understanding of ethics of care as people work to navigate the transition from socialism that embodies longstanding ideas about state and citizenship, marked by tropes of, respectively, patronship and obedience to an imagined neoliberal capitalist future articulated in terms of individual responsibility and agency. Finally, I show that the storytelling practice of using nostalgia and resignation as a backdrop for describing hope and hopelessness, marks one of the fundamental tools used to embody “Serbianness” - the skill of melancholic letting go and grieving the lost, both past and future, opportunities.