The Banana Peel Project

In recent months, The Banana Peel Project has increasingly focused on the way the body and its illnesses are understood in contemporary technocultures.  This turn reflects not only my own growing appreciation for the power and pervasiveness of modern biomedicine, but also the increasing attention being paid to the biological sciences in popular culture.  News […]

Looking over Foucault’s ingenious structural history of medical practice, The Birth of the Clinic (1963; English translation 1973) I was struck by how well Foucault’s early work draws together communication, critical theory, and the anthropology of medicine.  The study of communication–language, symbols, discourses–is at the heart of any serious attempt to understand–to set apart, to […]

Neurophilosophy has posted a tremendously ghoulish and thoroughly fascinating interview with Heather Perry, the Gloucester woman who in 2000 decided to trepan herself in order to attain “more mental energy and clarity.”  She denies a suggestion made by the BBC that the bathroom surgery, performed with local anaesthetic and an electric drill, was nearly fatal.  […]