Overview

The technological capacity to transform biology - repairing, reshaping and replacing body parts, chemicals and functions - is now part of our lives. Humanity is confronted with a variety of affordable and non-invasive 'enhancement technologies': anti-ageing medicine, aesthetic surgery, cognitive and sexual enhancers, lifestyle drugs, prosthetics and hormone supplements. This collection focuses on why people find these practices so seductive and provides ethnographic insights into people's motives and aspirations as they embrace or reject enhancement technologies, which are closely entangled with negotiations over gender, class, age, nationality and ethnicity.

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9781800730311

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This is a brilliant collection of essays about recent trends on body modifications and bodily performances... this is a great example of how anthropology can move on, addressing new issues while keeping grounded on the overarching questions of free-will and social determinations, resources and inequalities. Cristiana Bastos, University of Lisbon The book presents a timely and serious interdisciplinary analysis of contemporary body modification practices located in diverse cultural contexts. A range of topics/practices are covered and the importance of an intersectional frame is emphasized throughout. It constitutes an original contribution to a field dominated by health-focused and psychological accounts. Brendan Gough, Leeds Beckett University

Author Information

Alvaro Jarrin is Associate Professor of Anthropology at College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of The Biopolitics of Beauty: Cosmetic Citizenship and Affective Capital in Brazil (University of California Press, 2017).

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