Technologies of the Self and Ethnographic Praxis

The authors contributing to this special issue draw on Foucault's notion of technologies of the self: the means by which people operate on their own bodies and souls in pursuit of self-transformation, always according to particular regimes of value. Foucault's notion remains attractive to anthropology: the technologies are ethnographically visible, and they illustrate how power affects the intimate realms of social life. The authors in this issue take up three problems: (1) the process by which people craft new subjectivities, (2) the genealogy of the new technologies of the self now circulating in East Asia, and (3) the forms of governance and political rationality that they justify. The articles as a whole testify to the fruitful encounter between ethnographic praxis and Foucault's philosophical project. They also show how transnational movement and hybrid cultural forms inflect the strategies of governance associated with modern technologies of the self, especially those allied with biomedicine.