University Scholar Series: Jan English-Lueck

Unique and Medically Diverse Health Culture in the Silicon Valley On October 24, 2012 Dr. Jan English-Lueck spoke in the University Scholar Series hosted by Provost Ellen Junn at the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Dr. Jan English-Lueck is the associate dean of the College of Social Sciences and a distinguished anthropologist. She has written ethnographies detailing the lives of California\u27s alternative healers and China\u27s scientists. She is also the author of several books on Silicon Valley that explore how working in Silicon Valley shapes our communities, families, and bodies.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/uss/1015/thumbnail.jp

Silicon Valley Reinvents the Company Town

California\u27s Silicon Valley, famous for its innovative high-technology corporations, makes an ideal laboratory for exploring certain cultural inventions. It is a bellwether for a particular kind of social order—one dominated by work. In anthropology we encounter many frameworks through which life is organized—kinship, religion, and politics. Work is another lens through which life can be filtered. People may move to California for the weather, but they go to Silicon Valley to work. High-technology work draws on a global pool of talent and shifting skills that creates a culturally complex community. Migrants to Silicon Valley bring and enact an image of a place to do cutting-edge work. Leaders and pundits in the region consciously market the idea that the Valley can reinvent itself to continue to dominate its distinctive economic niche. Out of this reinvention a novel version of the company town has emerged, a twenty-first century reworking of a community where work penetrates and dominates the lives of its inhabitants