Rima Praspaliauskiene

This project explores informal monetary medical transactions (payments to doctors by patients) in post-socialist Lithuania. Through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this research follows these transactions and studies how they articulate social, moral, and economic relations that affect the practice of medicine. It aims to understand the complex ethical and social negotiations at play in these payments in order to evaluate in what ways they shape the experience of healthcare. By examining one aspect of healthcare practice in detail, this anthropological study looks at the configurations of the concept of healthcare itself situated at the intersection between historically embedded collective practices and emergent neo-liberal technologies of government.