What Brain Scans Can and Cannot See Seen from a Thai Bio-artscape

• In Event: Neurosocieties: Interdisciplinary Explorations of the Brain, Culture and Ethics 3

Abstract

Framing personhood in what are taken to be neurobiological terms has been criticized by science, technology and society scholars who see it as reductive to explain the interplay between genes, society, culture, and the environment with biochemical analyses of synaptic processes in the brain. Instead of resisting these tensions, this paper engages prospectively with visual images in which the neurobiological self, or synaptic self, takes center stage. This field-based intervention is a continued engagement with a global trend, theorized in my anthropological inquiry into the social lifeworlds of Southeast Asia’s growing bioeconomy and creative industries as the “art-in-science-city phenomenon.” Four stations along the “brain-art trail” connecting downtown Bangkok with Thailand’s first biopolis Pathumthani Science City are both subject and research platform of this ethnographic incursion into a Thai bio-artscape. The visual narrative of selected artworks exhibited at contemporary art galleries and material objects displayed at science and medical museums dotting this trail creates dialogue between scientific and artistically-engaged explorations of the nexus between the physical brain and the subjective mind. A closer examination of these exhibits, presented as neurobiologically and neuropsychologically-informed art or “brain art” in this descriptive analysis draws into the discussion topics reverberating in current discourses of neuroanthropology, neurolaw and neuroethics.

Author

• Birgit Ruth Buergi