The Excavating the Biosocial series has so far focused on birth cohorts as ethnographic object (Gibbon and Pentecost 2020). In this post, I explore the expansion of interest in the early life period, particularly for Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) research, to include ‘the preconception period.’ Recently, interest in this period has produced new kinds of trial communities …
Tag Archives: Obesity
Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich’s Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health
Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting: Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health
Alexandra Brewis and Amber Wutich
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. 288 pages.
Background
Dr. Alexandra Brewis & Dr. Amber Wutich—anthropologists at Arizona State Universities School of Evolution and Social Change and The Center for Global Health—make a provocative argument: people at the receiving end of health interventions are stigmatized …
Book Forum — Emily Yates-Doerr’s “The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala”
It is a pleasure to convene this forum for The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala. Marianne de Laet, Simon Cohn, and Jeannette Pols, have provided spirited commentaries on Emily Yates-Doerr’s ethnography of metrics, weight, and care in highland Guatemala. The author’s talent to illustrate the complex choreographies that produce the problem of obesity makes …
Book Forum––Harris Solomon’s Metabolic Living: Food, Fat and The Absorption of Illness in India
Harris Solomon’s Metabolic Living traces patterns of consumption, calories, and chronic disease to tell a story about the enfolding––the absorption and regulation––of food in and about the body in Mumbai. Solomon’s book is a powerful ethnographic reflection on how factors held as exterior (local and global cuisine, evolving and competing norms regarding eating and body image) are wholly interiorized. …
Ontology as an analytical approach to concerns of medical anthropology
What might arise from an encounter between medical anthropology and science and technology studies (STS) as they investigate the common subject of health and (bio)medicine? One answer could be found at the panel Repositioning health, illness and the body: the challenge of new theoretical approaches to medical anthropology, organized by Simon Cohn and Rebecca Lynch at ASA[1] decennial …
Scale
Guatemala, 2013.
Someone had drawn two footprints on green construction paper and taped it to the back of a box of cornflakes to show patients how to stand. In one corner the person had written out the word Nutrición; in another, perhaps because the impending task was at once ridiculous and frightening, the person had placed a sticker of the …