When I began fieldwork over a decade ago, I thought I would be studying Guatemalan understandings of obesity—a term that had begun to circulate between global health meetings in the capital and markets, classrooms, and clinics in the country’s western highlands. But carrying out fieldwork made me suspicious of the understandings that I had once been after. As obesity was …
This post is an introduction to our new series, The Ethnographic Case.
We launch this series with a question: What is an ethnographic case? As ethnography is a process and practice of authorship, this question produces another: What can it be made to be?
This series explores what cases can generate, and our reasons for resisting or embracing them …
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 …
This post was contributed by Emily Yates-Doerr (University of Amsterdam)
I thank Somatosphere for inviting me to submit to their blog. I am in the process of completing my book manuscript: The Weight of the Body: Changing Ideals of Fatness, Nourishment and Health in Guatemala. My entry for this blog does not come directly from material included in the book, …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology