Using acupuncture and pharmaceuticals as examples, the project looks at institutional attempts to make care an structured, standardized service for life. A peculiar way of treating people via meridians inside their bodies punctuated by regulatory points, acupuncture has been used as a therapy for thousands of years, without losing popularity after the wide acceptance of bio-medicine in East Asia. Focusing on the endeavor to lay a scientific foundation for acupuncture, this project investigates technical guidance concerning the practice of acupuncture. It argues that these attempts for acupuncture not only have given this art a semiotic/marital identity, in which the body of practitioner and the patient’s body are universal and thus their interactions can be regulated.

In the same vein, this project traces the socio-pharmaceutical conditions drugs create for aging people. Departing from existing literature that treats aging care and hospice/end-of-life care separately, this project focuses on hospice wards, out-patient clinics, and health promotion centers to follow how drugs composes a necessarey part of infrrastructed care for people toward the end of their lives. It hopes to reveal not only the ways aging people are provoked into taking drugs in order to maintain their way of life, but also the transfiguration of these people as they start losing control over their bodies and social lives and become subject to institutional care/death.