This article analyses performance consumptions among young people. The theme is explored along two main axes. The first concerns the social heterogeneity in this field, considered on two levels: the different purposes for those investments - cognitive/mental and physical performance; and the different social contexts - university and work - where performance practices and dispositions may be fostered. The second axis explores the roles of pharmacological and natural consumptions, and their interrelationship, in the dissemination of these practices. The empirical data for this analysis were drawn from an ongoing research project on performance consumptions among young people (aged 18-29 years) in Portugal, including both university students and young workers without university education. The results correspond to the stage of extensive research, for which a questionnaire was organised at a national level, using non-proportional quota sampling. On the one hand, they show that (a) there is a hierarchy of acceptance of consumptions according to their purposes, with cognitive/mental performance showing higher acceptance and (b) both pharmaceuticals and natural products are consumed for every type of performance investment. On the other, the comparison between students and workers introduces a certain heterogeneity in this general backdrop, both in terms of the purposes for their consumptions and their opting for natural or pharmacological resources. These threads of heterogeneity will prompt a discussion of the dynamics of pharmaceuticalisation within the field of performance, in particular how therapeutic cultures may be changing in terms of the way individuals relate to medications, expanding their uses in social life.

<span>This article focuses on the use of pharmaceutical drugs and natural products to manage personal performance — i.e. the consumption of performance-enhancing substances, or what the authors refer to as performance-enhancing consumption. This in turn serves as the basis for an analytical reflection on the change in therapeutic cultures. Taking the current issue of pharmaceuticalisation and the role of the natural in the expanding use of medicines as their points of reference, the authors show that the pharmaceuticalisation of daily life is also emerging in fields other than just health, giving rise to new logics in people’s relationships with this type of resource. The empirical basis for this approach was a national study on the consumption of performance-enhancing substances among the youth population in Portugal.</span>

*This text analyses lay knowledge and rationales in which self-medication practices are involved. After a brief critical review of the main theoretical landmarks in the analysis of lay knowledge compared with expert knowledge, the objective is to demonstrate the current forms of lay appropriation and reconversion of expert knowledge and the modes of expertisation that this shared knowledge reveals. The text discusses, on the one hand, the new forms of lay dependence on expert knowledge and, on the other, the sociological potential which these forms entail in terms of the development of new areas of lay autonomy, by focusing on the topic of selfmedication and a typology of modes of lay cognitive construction, namely spontaneous knowledge, mediated knowledge and confirmed knowledge. The constructed nature of this knowledge, which is not simply mimetically reproduced from expert sources, reveals the need for a new epistemological dialogue between the different theoretical trends that explore the reflexivity of modern societies.

NOéMIA MENDES LOPES Automedicação, saberes e racionalidades leigas em mudança 1 Analisam-se neste texto os saberes e racionalidades leigas em que se inscrevem as práticas de automedicação. O objectivo é demonstrar, após uma breve recensão crítica dos principais marcos teóricos da análise dos saberes leigos frente aos saberes periciais, as actuais formas de apropriação e reconversão leiga do saber pericial e as modalidades de pericialização que tais saberes comuns revelam. A discussão sobre as novas formas de dependência leiga em relação à pericialidade, em contraposição com as potencialidades sociológicas que essas formas encerram para o desenvolvimento de novos espaços de autonomia leiga, é desenvolvida através da temática da automedicação e de uma tipologia de modalidades de construção cognitiva leiga constituída por saberes espontâneos, saberes mediados e saberes confirmados. O carácter construído destes saberes, e não meramente mimetizado a partir do contacto com as fontes periciais, deixa em aberto a necessidade de um novo diálogo epistemológico entre as diferentes correntes teóricas que se debruçam sobre a reflexividade das sociedades modernas.