Increasing resolution, intensifying ambiguity: an ethnographic account of seeing life in brain scans

Abstract

This paper argues that current images of the brain are providing a potent way in which human life itself is being constructed. In addition to material conceptions, exemplified by the human genome, scans that claim to illustrate features of the living brain serve to augment these with the idea of life as activity. Drawing from ethnographic research, the paper illustrates how, even among neuroscientists themselves, life is used as an implicit notion to hold together a range of contradictory methodological features of their work. The final section suggests that because this version of life is necessarily restricted, it may have a number of wider social and cultural consequences.

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