This dissertation traces how obesity developed as an acknowledged social problem in India. Although public health officials estimate that chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes are rising in India, they cannot agree on a clear cause. Numerous possible explanations have circulated, including genetic influences, overindulgent middle-class consumerism, and an imagined unhealthy national diet. In this space of calculated uncertainty, the diet and the metabolism work as unique sites of bodily risk and moral intervention. Weight gain can signify the pleasures of urban, middle-class consumerism, even as it marks the attrition of life and health through chronic disease. This double bind illustrates how consumerism works as a powerful site for the medicalization of everyday life, and how obesity reflects the desires and disappointments of privatization two decades after India's neoliberal reforms. This research is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Mumbai between 2006 and 2010, and approaches obesity through the affective and political dimensions of everyday eating and its medicalization. In a seaside neighborhood, I explored rituals of food preparation and consumption, identity-making through food, and the medicalization of these practices at a nearby metabolic disorders clinic. I examined the commercialization of eating and dieting at street food stalls and in food company marketing offices, and analyzed shifting national nutritional regulations to track state influences. Two key findings emerged. First, as transnational and local food companies promote moral visions of prosperous thinness, the home kitchen has become a laboratory for the medicalization of food rituals. Second, a fluid language of biomedical standards now structures expressions of aesthetics and desire linked to food, effectively blurring moral, medical, and consumer choices. This context of medicalized eating allows consumerism to work as both the germ and the therapy for urban modernity's ill effects, which materialize in aggregate as obesity. Obesity is not an unfortunate byproduct of India's economic liberalization, but instead wraps into local, intimate, political worlds to build markets anew.
Solomon, Harris S.,
"Life-Sized: Food and the Pathologies of Plenty in Mumbai"
(2011).
Anthropology Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0Q23XH9
