Page 1 |
Save page Remove page | Previous | 1 of 258 | Next |
|
small (250x250 max)
medium (500x500 max)
large ( > 500x500)
Full Resolution
All (PDF)
|
This page
All
Subset |
EXECUTING AGING: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF PROCESS AND EVENT IN
ANTI-AGING MEDICINE
by
Courtney Everts Mykytyn
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ANTHROPOLOGY)
May 2007
Copyright 2007 Courtney Everts Mykytyn
Object Description
| Title | Executing aging: an ethnography of process and event in anti-aging medicine |
| Author | Mykytyn, Courtney Everts |
| Author email | everts@usc.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Anthropology |
| School | College of Letters, Arts and Sciences |
| Date defended/completed | 2006-10-26 |
| Date submitted | 2007 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2007-05-04 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Mattingly, Cheryl |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Jacobs-Huey, Lanita Bengtson, Vern |
| Abstract | Anti-aging medicine has emerged over the past twenty five years with the explicit goal of biomedicoscientifically intervening into aging. Anti-aging practitioners treat patients in their clinics with a wide array of anti-aging strategies: nutrition, exercise, supplements and hormone therapies (human growth hormone being the most contentious). Anti-aging researchers search for ways to intervene into the aging process, having to first grapple with the unsettledness of what that process might entail. Interventions into aging have been dubbed by many detractors as a linkage between aging and disease. This dissertation, drawing from more than six years of ethnographic interviews, participant observation in clinics and conferences, and a review of pertinent literature, argues that practitioners do not conceptualize their work in this way. Instead, anti-aging proponents generally eschew this linkage arguing that aging is not a disease but that it is not inevitable and thus subject to scientific scrutiny and biomedical intervention. The meaning of aging, nature, and the role that biomedicoscience plays in shaping and responding to these conceptions is explicitly at stake. Anti-aging medicine raises a number of critical issues: access to care, the mandate of biomedical treatment, how we think of ourselves in relation to our life-cycles and time, how we construct nature and its categorical power. I argue that the notions of process and event underlie these issues. By thinking of aging as a process, its naturalness becomes less significant. By avoiding the construction of disease, anti-aging practitioners bypass the inherent politics that herald fears of medicalization. Nature is not completely irrelevant here, however. Instead of relating to nature as a kind of sanctuary in which biomedical intervention is constructed as hubristic at best, anti-aging proponents argue that nature is more significant in the human drive to overcome biological constraints.; Thus, it is more natural to pursue anti-aging medicine than to regard aging as natural and do little beyond attend to its "associated" diseases such as Alzheimer's Disease. This dissertation attends to anti-aging proponents' attempts to make sense of these seeming contradictions and ultimately argues that the ever-expanding catalog of scientific possibilities render inadequate our currentvocabularies. |
| Keyword | anti-aging medicine; aging; biomedicine; science |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m483 |
| Rights | Mykytyn, Courtney Everts |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/services/ask_a_librarian/email/ |
| Filename | etd-Mykytyn-20070504 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume32/etd-Mykytyn-20070504.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | EXECUTING AGING: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF PROCESS AND EVENT IN ANTI-AGING MEDICINE by Courtney Everts Mykytyn A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ANTHROPOLOGY) May 2007 Copyright 2007 Courtney Everts Mykytyn |
Comments
Post a Comment for Page 1
