| With
more than one billion overweight
adults in the world today, obesity has become an epidemic. But fat is
not
as straightforward-or even as uni-versally damned-as one might think.
Enlisting
thirteen anthropologists and a fat activist, editors and
anthropologists
Don Kulick and Anne Meneley have produced an unconventional -- and
unprecedented
-- examination of fat in various cultural and social contexts. In this
anthology, these writers argue that fat is neither a mere physical
state
nor an inert concept. Instead, it is a construct built by culture and
judged
in courts of public opinion, courts whose laws vary from society to
society.
From
the anthropology of "fat-talk"
among teenage girls in Sweden to the veneration of Spam in Hawaii; from
fear of the fat-sucking pishtaco vampire in the Andes to the
underground
allure of fat porn stars like Supersize Betsy this anthology provides
fresh
perspectives on a subject more complex than love handles, and less
easily
understood than a number on a scale. Fat
proves that fat can be beautiful,
evil, pornographic, delicious, shameful, ugly, or magical. It all
depends
on who-and where-you are.
|
Fat
The Anthropology of
an Obsession
edited by Don Kulick
and Anne Meneley
Tarcher, 2005
Order
a copy.
|
