Paper short abstract:

This paper will draw upon documentary and ethnographic research data to support its main argument that contemporary developments of CAM in local (e.g. Canada) and global settings simultaneously embody self-responsibilization and self-actualization of individuals in their use of CAM.

Paper long abstract:

Rather than viewing CAM as a monolithic "Other" versus a hegemonic biomedicine, recent social science scholars rightly argue that "hybridity" offers a more spatially-informed analysis of the ways in which CAM and biomedical knowledges are co-constituted in a complex nexus of negotiated power enabled by transnational cultural flows. Yet, given the current global economic downturn, which has yielded a globalized neoliberal climate, CAM is also discursively shaped by neoliberal strategies of governance to focus on enabling citizens to accept individual responsibility for their own health, thus diverting collective responsibility for health care.

In order to make sense of this tension between hybridity and neoliberal governance in which CAM is implicated, I will use a Foucauldian perspective to examine contemporary developments of CAM that simultaneously embody self-responsibilization and self-actualization of individuals in their use of CAM. In particular, I will highlight Foucault's concept of biopower to understand how individuals become self-regulating subjects through CAM as "technologies of the self" (Foucault 1988) whereby individuals take it upon themselves to ensure they function as healthy subjects for the state not through coercive but desirable means as this is perceived to be in their own best interests. Further, I will draw upon Foucault's theorizing of the "care of the self" (1987) to demonstrate CAM use as an increasingly popular form of self-care that enables self-actualization, an embodied wellness that is personally meaningful, simultaneously embracing holism, vitalism, spirituality and nature - all benevolent symbols of CAM.