Toward an Integrative Medicine: Merging Alternative Therapies with Biomedicine

responded to it (p. 14). The book explains the author’s effort to understand what she calls the “double-edged morale” of international development organizations, whose goal, since the 1980s, seems to have been the creation of a new, post– Cold War political model, promoted in part through the distribution of humanitarian aid. The five chapter headings— “The Anthropologist’s Toolkit,” “First Steps,” “The Legacy,” “Negotiating Assistance,” and “White, Red, and Gray”— reflect the author’s vision of the work of an anthropologist who is bound to combine “ethical and personal with analytical and theoretical points of view” to represent the diverse experiences that make up the development encounter without succumbing to the “temptations of voyeurism, and to the obscenity of violence and corruption that would only lead to reinforcing both anti-Soviet and antidevelopment stereotypes” (p. 17). Some of the most interesting findings on this attempt to export “democracy” through assistance to local NGOs in the regions of Central Asia and the Caucasus are presented in the chapter “Negotiating Assistance.” This includes a poignant analysis of the “conditionality of assistance” provided to local NGOs: Transcriptions of the negotiations between local actors and IDO representatives illuminate the many cross-cultural misunderstandings that inhere to the IDO’s institutional ideology that sought to control the meanings, tasks, and duties of the organizations it decides to sponsor. The IDO effort to control is then juxtaposed with a window into local resistance efforts. In the chapter “White, Red, and Gray,” the author argues that IDO’s vision is based on assumptions shaped by Cold War beliefs that the Soviet Union meant to destroy independent political associational spaces. Viewed from the perspective of the IDO, local resistance efforts are relegated in the development discourse as remnants of the “red” (Soviet) heritage and serve to legitimize the need for humanitarian aid. Yet Atlani-Duault holds that one needs to move beyond the white (Western) and red dichotomy to understand the “gray” (mixed) of the microstrategies of resistance. While the latter may contest some of the inadequacies of international development programs, the emergence of the multicolored revolutions (orange and blue), the author concludes that the IDO attempts to motivate local NGOs to alter those state governments in the nascent states that seem to still cultivate a certain nostalgia for the political legacy of the Soviet Union. The international development agencies do so in the hope to consolidate an earlier political and economic victory of the West over the rest. Taken together, the work presented here provides a comprehensive overview of the types of questions that underlie humanitarian aid projects in postsocialist countries to disentangle a web of interactions—medical, historical, cultural, economic, political—that contribute to the construction of development discourses and practices. The context-specific analysis, combined with a critical anthropological perspective, takes us beyond antidevelopment or anti-Soviet stereotypes. It will be useful to researchers and development practitioners who work in this region. Atlani-Duault’s contextual approach shows the value of multifaceted (local, national, global) analysis of humanitarian aid and has provided a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex realities related to international and local NGOs in contemporary postsocialist countries and beyond.