Title
Assistant Professor

Department
Dept of Anthropology


Faculty URL
https://anthropology.berkeley.edu/daena-funahashi

Email
funahashi@berkeley.edu


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Research Expertise and Interest
medical anthropology, psychological anthropology, sociocultural anthropology

Research Description
Daena Funahashi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropolgy.? Her work focuses on illness alongside anthropological and philosophical concerns about death, pain, and existence. In her publications and teaching, she explores how techniques and institutional apparatuses emerge, and promise a certain hold over life. It is a promise vital in keeping capital and its system, one that demands an individual capacity to be in self-control, alive. In?Untimely Sacrifices,?her forthcoming book, she?draws upon her ethnographic work in Finland, where rising concern over burnout, a stress disorder, raised a need for state-led techniques for self-management. Rather than focus on how society molds its members, she asks instead what is left out of the techno-medical promise for self-management, and what classic texts on exchange can add to our current concerns about stress. In her more recent work in Thailand, she has?examined the role that global health movements play in local politics of mental health. Her current research examines speed, both in terms of the acceleration of capital and methamphetamine addiction, in the context of the Thai construction industry.