Unsettled Ontologies and Capitalist Spirits
Journal: Medical Anthropology Quarterly
Year: 2023

On September 3, 2016, the Russian federal TV channel TNT riveted its audience of over four million viewers to a somewhat typical Saturday primetime spectacle: a man, in the telltale dress of a Sufi Dervish twirled through a parking garage in search of a woman concealed in a car trunk.At the end of the dance, interspersed with skeptical, anxious, and mildly uncomfortable close-ups of the audience, he fell to his knees in front of a dark sedan, fixed a piercing blue gaze on its trunk, and announce