The project centers on an ethnography of biohacking as a discipline of self-enhancement in order to shed light on popular applications and vernacular authorization of neuroscientific knowledge and their implications with regard contemporary ideologies of somatic/mental performance. By building on an analysis of media materials, popular literature, interviews, questionnaire, and ethnographic fieldwork from the perspectives of folklore studies, linguistic and semiotic anthropology, and somaesthetics (i.e. the study of the living body as a site of creative self-fashioning), the project attends to the ramifications of biohacking as an emergent ethos of self-governance for our changing cultural values, political contexts, and understandings of the self. More broadly, it produces new knowledge on the tensions between non-institutional vs. “official” biopolitics and scientific vs. vernacular authorization of health-related knowledge in contemporary society.

2020

2023