Dagestani Complementary and Alternative Medicine Practitioners on the Move: From the Post-Soviet Era to the Covid-19 Pandemic

Abstract This paper employs a case study approach and contributes to the field of North Caucasian area studies by demonstrating how the professional activities of selected complementary and alternative medicine ( CAM ) specialists in Dagestan are shaped by gradual re-Islamization, post-Soviet demographic processes, and the Covid-19 pandemic. Engaging with the theoretical frameworks of medical pluralism and the social ecology of medicine, we pose the questions, what elements and processes in the changing social environment have been essential for the dynamics of CAM in Dagestan? How have changes in this environment influenced the strategies of CAM practitioners in designing their practices? We argue that the medical field in Dagestan outside of the state system is relatively weakly restricted by political, institutional, ideological, and cultural factors. This relative freedom allegedly makes CAM responsive more to large social-level environmental processes than to the mechanisms emphasized elsewhere in the literature about medical pluralism.