Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity

by Joseph Dumit

By showing us the human brain at work, PET (positron emission tomography) scans are subtly--and sometimes not so subtly--transforming how we think about our minds. Picturing Personhood follows this remarkable and expensive technology from the laboratory into the world and back. It examines how PET scans are created and how they are being called on to answer myriad questions with far-reaching Is depression an observable brain disease? Are criminals insane? Do men and women think differently? Is rationality a function of the brain?


Based on interviews, media analysis, and participant observation at research labs and conferences, Joseph Dumit analyzes how assumptions designed into and read out of the experimental process reinforce specific notions about human nature. Such assumptions can enter the process at any turn, from selecting subjects and mathematical models to deciding which images to publish and how to color them. Once they leave the laboratory, PET scans shape social debates, influence courtroom outcomes, and have positive and negative consequences for people suffering mental illness. Dumit follows this complex story, demonstrating how brain scans, as scientific objects, contribute to our increasing social dependence on scientific authority.


The first book to examine the cultural ramifications of brain-imaging technology, Picturing Personhood is an unprecedented study that will influence both cultural studies and the growing field of science and technology studies.

Genres: Anthropology, Technology, Science, Neuroscience, Ethnography

272 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2003

About the author

Joseph Dumit is Director of Science and Technology Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity and editor, with Regula Valérie Burri, of Biomedicine as Culture: Instrumental Practices, Technoscientific Knowledge, and New Modes of Life.

Reviews

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is great. It is a great look at the production of knowledge, subjectivity and techniques through the interplay of "expert" knowledge and popular culture. I have heard that it is "not ethnographic enough" ... but it is not ture it is plenty ethnographic and brilliant ... (did I metion he is my advisor.)

[Sophia Hall · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite a frustrating read. Dumit takes such an interesting topic and manages to make it quite boring, thus producing a difficult text. Questions of the sublime seem to be central for him -- but then, what is the sublime?

[Ellen Osborn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really fascinating and well written. I think my main takeaway is that scientists are necessarily engaged in a philosophical anthropology when they perform experiments, and it takes considerable but important work to locate the assumptions (and their histories and consequences) that are imbedded in scientific practice. Though PET scans and neurobiology are not of particular interest to me, I found plenty to think on and translate to my own research field.

[Lloyd Farley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever wrangling of a fairly diverse collection of data sets, from lab ethnography to media analysis. It is a bit lean on the lab side of the analysis and resorts to generalizing fairly broad types of scientific gestalt.

[Chris Friend · Rating 2 out of 5]

Interesting thinking; poorly proofread. It was far more repetitive than I had hoped. The language shifted from downright casual to challengingly technical in jarring ways. If the author wanted us to understand his ideas, he gave very few indications of it.

[Kay]

Got to this via Daniel Buchman's blog. Sounds good to me!