In the crowded and busy arena of obesity and fat studies, there is a lack of attention to the lived experiences of people, how and why they eat what they do, and how people in cross-cultural settings ...understand risk, health, and bodies. This volume addresses the lacuna by drawing on ethnographic methods and analytical emic explorations in order to consider the impact of cultural difference, embodiment, and local knowledge on understanding obesity. It is through this reconstruction of how obesity and fatness are studied and understood that a new discussion will be introduced and a new set of analytical explorations about obesity research and the effectiveness of obesity interventions will be established.
The motivation to write this paper was sparked during conversations with public health practitioners and Pacific scholars after returning from preliminary fieldwork trips over the course of three ...years.¹ Whenever I would mention to Pacific scholars working in the United States or public health practitioners working with Pacific Islanders that I was doing research on fasting, the response was generally: “Samoan people fast?” This motivated me to explore why the Samoan practice of fasting seems like such a contradictory idea.
The first part of this puzzle is that anthropologists often associate Samoans with lavish food presentations as a key dimension
Introduction Megan B. McCullough; Jessica A. Hardin
Reconstructing Obesity,
10/2013, Volume:
2
Book Chapter
“That is child abuse!” one my Anthropology of the Body students declared, ruffled and affronted, after learning about gavage, the forced feeding and fattening of young Muslim girls in certain West ...African subcultures (Popenoe 2005). When thinking about fat, college students articulate very clear ideas about what constitutes a “healthy” body, and their responses to fatness and obesity, words often used interchangeably, range from baffled, outraged, curious, to liberated as they are asked to unpack their ideas about fat, value, and health. When my classes have analytically examined fat and obesity, individually and collectively, students learned to identify tendrils of
This article employs Oceanic epistemological theories to explore the body as a site of knowledge production among Samoan Pentecostal women as they dance in a church‐sponsored Zumba session, tracking ...foods, words, and feelings: I call these moving materialities. In their work together, these women contextualized health, sickness, and weight as generated from the circulation of these kinds of moving materialities. Their work theorizing health through material change is quite different from those imagined and circulated in the literatures on diabetes and obesity. The article orients critical studies of health toward an interrogation of the dynamic qualities of materiality, including both the moving body and materials that move between or within bodies. By expanding what might be considered material and movement in the context of health, this article offers an alternative to theories of metabolism that have come to dominate how we understand the body in terms energy expenditure. Ultimately, this approach calls for anthropologists to consider the circumstances in which theory is understood to be “culturally specific” or “generalizable.”
Resumen
Este artículo emplea teorías epistemológicas oceánicas para explorar el cuerpo como un sitio de producción de conocimiento entre las mujeres samoanas pentecostales en la medida que ellas danzan en una sesión de zumba patrocinada por la iglesia mientras localizan alimentos, palabras y sentimientos: lo que llamo materialidades en movimiento. En ese trabajo conjunto, estas mujeres contextualizan salud, enfermedad y peso como generado por la circulación de estas clases de materialidades en movimiento. Su trabajo de teorizar la salud a través del cambio material es bastante diferente de aquellos imaginados y que circulan en las literaturas sobre diabetes y obesidad. El artículo orienta estudios críticos de salud hacia un interrogante de las cualidades dinámicas de materialidad, incluyendo tanto el cuerpo como materiales en movimiento que se mueven entre o dentro de los cuerpos. Al expandir lo que puede ser considerado material y movimiento en el contexto de la salud, este artículo ofrece una alternativa a las teorías de metabolismo que han venido a dominar cómo entender el cuerpo en términos de gasto de energía. En últimas, esta aproximación hace un llamado a los antropólogos a considerar las circunstancias en las cuales la teoría es entendida como “culturalmente específica” o “generalizable”. conocimiento, género, materialidad, cristiandad, Oceanía.
ʻOlo'o fa'aaogāina i lenei tusitusiga tōmai ma agava'a o le tino ʻina ʻia mafai ai ona maua se mālamalamaga iʻ auala ʻolo'o fa'aaogāina e tinā o le ʻEkālēsia Penetekoso Sāmoa e mātauina ai a'afiaga o meaʻai, ʻupu lafo, fa'apea fa'alogona i totonu o a lātou tino.ʻ Olo'o fa'aaogāina ai se su'esu'ega na faia i se vasega Zumba na fa'atinoina e le ʻekālēsia. I le fa'atinoina ai o lenei vasega, na fa'asoa ai tinā e fa'atatau i le soifua mālōlōina, ʻo gasegase ʻolo'o maua ai, ʻo le mamafa o le tino, ʻātoa ai ma a'afiaga o ʻupu lafo, mea'ai, ma fa'alogona i totonu o a lātou tino, fa'apea a'afiaga i o lātou so'otaga ma isi tagata. ʻO lo lātou talitonuga i le māfua'aga e soifua mālōlōina ai se tagata, tupu ai se fa'ama'i, pe maua ai fo'i se isi i le tino puta, e ʻese lea mai māfua'aga māsani e pei ona iloa tele i nei vāitau, e pei ʻo le ʻave lea ʻo le fa'amamafa i le taumafa tatau ma le fa'amālosi tino. E tu'uina atu ai lā se talosaga e ala i lenei tusitusiga, ʻinaʻ ia fa'ataunu'uina se su'esu'ega e fa'atatau i ʻauala e a'afia ai le soifua mālōlōina o se tagata ʻona ʻo “materialities.” Ma le fa'amoemoega mulimuli o lenei tusitusiga, e vala'au atu i ‘anthropologists’ po ’o ʻi lātou ʻuma ʻoloo su'esu'eina tagata ma aganu'u ‘ese'ese ʻina ʻia mata'itūina a lātou filosofia e a'afia ai tū ma aganu'u a ni isi tagata.
ABSTRACT
Since the 1950s, Samoa has faced rapid changes in food systems and labor practices, creating an environment in which health conditions such as diabetes touch every individual. Through an ...ethnographic analysis of Samoan people's attitudes toward the novel food category of vegetables, this article explores how intersecting health promotion and development discourses instrumentalize vegetables as a source of both health and sickness, and as signs of poverty or wealth. This dual instrumentalization simultaneously positions vegetables as objects of trade that may generate wealth for farmers and as objects of health that may accrue nutrition to combat chronic sickness. I introduce the notion of subjunctive health to analyze people's preoccupation with vegetables, even when these are rarely eaten. In Samoa, subjunctive health frames the consumption of vegetables in several ways: as if vegetables were both plentiful and essential to a proper meal, as if people were not healthy before imported vegetables were introduced, as if it were possible to sustain one's family through gardening alone. The subjunctive highlights how health is constructed as aspirational, relying on an as if logic that entangles economic and nutritional conditions. It operates through the daily acts of nourishing one's family to erase from view those biocolonial processes that generated an environment in which chronic diseases flourish.
Drawing from interviews and participant observation, this article explores the intersection of diagnosis of metabolic disorders and religious conversion among Pentecostal Christians in Samoa by ...analyzing what I call embedded narratives––conversion narratives embedded in illness narratives. Drawing from ethnographic data, I examine how using conversion narrative conventions enabled those living with metabolic disorders to narrate behavior change in a culturally and socially valorized way. By embedding their narratives, I suggest those living with metabolic disorders shifted the object of care from a disease process toward the creation of a religious life and in turn transformed the risks associated with metabolic disorders, including diet, exercise, and pharmaceutical use into moral risks associated with everyday religious life. In these cases, Pentecostal conversion created possible scripts for changing health practices, managing stress, and shifting resource use in the name of religious commitment, providing insights into how self‐care can be an expression of religious practice.
Father released me HARDIN, JESSICA
American ethnologist,
05/2019, Volume:
46, Issue:
2
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
ABSTRACT In Samoan Pentecostal churches, ritualized friendships among women are an informal but essential relationship through which churches grow. The mentorship that women provide when a new ...convert is introduced to church life creates escalating forms of care and obligation, as well as an experience of urgency and acceleration. Converts learn how to construct rupture in their narratives and spiritual practices, which are modeled in peer socialization practices. This period of intense yet temporary mentorship creates a temporality of “repair”—embodied, linguistic, and social practices that restore the convert's identity, which has been disrupted by conversion. This care work compels us to consider the temporalization of care as a future‐making endeavor. temporality, care, gender, conversion, Pentecostalism, Christianity, Samoa
ʻotoʻotoga E tāua fefa'auōa'iga ma fefa'amāsaniga fa'asamasamanoa a tinā o ‘Ekālēsia Penetekoso i Sāmoa ‘auā ‘o le ‘auala lea e fa'ato'ateleina ai se ‘ekālēsia. E iai fesoasoani ma ta'ita'iga e vave ofoina atu e tinā o le ‘ekālēsia mo ni uso fa'ato’ā liliu mai. E talatalanoa ma fefa'asoaa'i tagata fou fa'ato’ā liliu mai i o lātou ōlaga tuai ma suiga i o lātou ōlaga talu ona liliu mai, e pei ‘o le māsani o so'o se sui fou lava e ulufale mai i le ‘ekālēsia. E fesoasoani sui tuai o le ‘Ekālēsia e fautuaina sui fou nei, mo se taimi pu'upu'u, i ‘auala e mafai ai ona lātou matuā liliu ma fulitua i o lātou ōlaga tuai, e aofia ai la lātou tautala ma ‘upu lafo, fa'apea a lātou uiga ma āmioga fa'aali i nofoaga fai tele. ‘O nei fo'i ta'iala ma fesoasoani mo sui fou fa'ato’ā liliu mai, e fesoasoani tele ia ‘auā le fa'amāsani ai o sui fou i gāioiga fa'ale'ekālēsia, ma fa'amoemoe e fa'aauau ai pea ona liliu ‘ese mai le ōlaga tuai sā ola ai, ‘ae maise ai la lātou taula'i atu i le lumana'i. lē tūmau , tausiga , itūpā , suiga , Fa'apenetekoso , Fa'akerisiano
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