ABSTRACT
Therapeutic life management is a billion-dollar business worldwide, woven into the fabric of daily lives through media culture, workplace activities, technology, healthcare and politics. Self-care and self-betterment are longstanding phenomena dating back to antiquity, and have been part and parcel of many different political, religious and cultural formations. Ethnography is particularly well suited to capturing the complexities and nuances of everyday life that may easily slip under the radar of grand social theory and macro-level indicators. For example, while it may seem plausible to claim that we live in a certain ‘age’ – such as therapeutic or neoliberal – the actual meaning of such ‘age’ is always interpreted, appropriated, put into effect and challenged in everyday practice. The concept of an assemblage is an open-ended collage of sorts. According to McFarlane, it is usually mobilised to connote ‘indeterminacy, emergence, becoming, processuality, turbulence and the sociomateriality of phenomena’, and it has become part of the vocabulary of contemporary social theory.
