Bodies, current vehicles, or embodied agents? : An anthropological study of the human body and the human condition in an age of Transhumanism

Sammanfattning: Transhumanism is a philosophy and a contemporary movement dedicated to improving the human condition in various ways. This thesis explores how the transhumanist movement contributes to the contemporary conceptualization or reconceptualization of the human body and the human condition. Furthermore, this thesis discusses three transhumanist key concepts, namely Mind Uploading, Cryonics, and the Primo Posthuman, and how these ideas might affect the research participants’ understanding and enactment of the human body and the human condition. By relying on ethnographic methods, including semi-structured interviews and participant observations from a 12-week fieldwork in Arizona, the ethnographic material is then discussed with the use of Annemarie Mol’s body multiple theory. In addition to this, the material is also analyzed with literature discussing the three main themes of this thesis, namely the re-conceptualization of the body, the mind, and body dualism, and the redefinition of death and the dying body. The ethnographic material and the accounts made from the research participants illustrate that the body is enacted and understood as insufficient and fragile, cartesian, a current vehicle readable and quantifiable through numbers and graphs, and a body whose mind can be uploaded into a computational substrate by the transhumanist community. It also describes how the body can be enacted as alive, an anatomical object, and a body with agency and personhood. Furthermore, the thesis concludes that the transhumanist movement contributes to the contemporary conceptualization and reconceptualization of the human body and the human condition by enacting multiple bodies as well as discussing and imagining new possible human conditions and human bodies. Lastly, this thesis does not only address important anthropological questions regarding ontology and the enactment of the human body. It also discusses relevant questions about humans and technology, as well as questions regarding death and imagination.