Being and Well-Being: Health and the Working Bodies of Silicon Valley (review)

Since World War II, Silicon Valley has been the epicenter for the high-tech industries that have revolutionized the nation’s economy. The current boom in personal computers, software, and the Internet has transformed the nature of work. Requiring high output in a volatile economy, corporations have re-thought production and shifted more responsibilities from the organization to the individual through contract work, work-at-home, and temporary employment. Managing the blurred worlds of work and private life creates job instability and stress among employees. Using extensive ethnographic research, anthropologist J. A. English-Lueck shows how this intense high-tech economy shapes the bodies of knowledge workers. Through their health and health regimes, employees embody their place of habitation and work; their bodies physically represent the cultural values of a specific place and economy. In this way, workers’ bodies “feel capitalism” (p. 190).

Silicon Valley has a particular “health culture” (p. 33) that blends a history of non-Western immigration, a strong counterculture contingent, and an American Transcendentalism emphasizing romantic nature. Residents manage their own health by delving into the area’s “deep medical diversity” (p. 17) that pragmatically combines biomedicine with Asian and New Age alternative medicines. Depending on their age and thus the work available to them, Valley inhabitants experience the area’s health culture differently. English-Lueck organizes the central chapters of her book around three age-defined groups. The first wave, which correlates to the baby boom generation born between 1946 and 1964, originated the Silicon Valley health culture. Although raised within scientific medicine, they experimented with nontraditional medicines to create a hybrid health regime suited to individual tastes. Determined to age well and retain their productivity, first-wave members intertwined health practices with their work, setting a precedent for later generations.

Their children in the second wave inherited the pluralistic health culture and feel completely comfortable with mixing and matching a wide array of practices to intensify their productivity. The generation with the most economic pressure, second wavers use all means available to be “better than well” (p. 127) and meet the demands of both young families and work that heaps more responsibilities on individual workers. The third wave and youngest cohort is thoroughly immersed in a fast-paced technological society. Its constituents “augment” (p. 141) their bodies with their intimate digital knowledge, commitment to fitness, and use of “neurochemical prostheses” (p. 161) such as caffeine and prescription stimulants. In their teens and early twenties, these young people recognize that they may never have access to traditional health institutions and must manage their own health. English-Lueck’s many stories of Valley residents in these groups illuminate her analysis and provide an intimate perspective on the circumstances and decisions of twenty-first-century workers.

English-Lueck contends that “hidden structural violence” is built into the high-tech industry (p. 188). Those who have access to regular employment can take full advantage of health benefits. But those outside of the employer-provided insurance system—contract and temporary workers and the retired, for instance—must cobble together solutions with the help of their families. Their bodies and health reflect the inequities of twenty-first-century capitalism. This individualized, unequal system seems to be the wave of the future. English-Lueck argues that the Silicon Valley’s health-care innovations are modeling national changes. More and more, workers will bear “the burden of empowerment,” being responsible individually for enhancing their productivity through technology and pluralistic medical practices (p. 219).

Clearly written with compelling stories, English-Lueck’s anthropological study has much to tell historians of technology. Emphasizing place and geography signals the intellectual shift to considering the materiality of life and the past, a shift that fits well with the burgeoning field of environmental history. Her book enriches the envirotech subfield where scholars consider the intersection of technological and environmental changes. It highlights how place, culture, and technology influence...