First published online as a
Review in Advance on
April 20, 2005

Scholarly interest in body size has increased in concert with recent efforts to shape and assess bodies in particular ways within industri- alized social contexts. Attending to both overt and covert references to Eurocentric body projects, this chapter reviews literature in an- thropology, sociology, and cultural studies that addresses the cultural politics of body size in various parts of the world. It begins with a discussion of biocultural paradigms, which accept certain biomed- ical categories even when challenging or recon\ufb01guring their hege- monic power. Next is a survey of works analyzing body size within \u201cnon-Western\u201d groups as well as European and North American subgroups. These studies often employ culturally powerful \u201cWest- ern\u201d constructs as foils, an approach that risks cultural othering. The analysis then turns to the extensive literature that unpacks dominant Euro-American body practices and discourses. Here, diverse per- spectives on several key concerns in sociocultural anthropology are considered; concepts of culture and power, theories of the body and embodiment, and understandings of human agency vary in instruc- tive ways. The chapter concludes with a review of scholarship on postcolonial processes and representations that incorporates a criti- cal perspective on Eurocentric preoccupations with body size.

INTRODUCTION................. 14 BIOCULTURAL PARADIGMS..... 15 REPRESENTING CULTURAL

UNRAVELING
EURO-AMERICAN
CONSTRUCTS................. 18
Theoretical Overview............. 18
Embodiments of Power........... 19
Fracturing Corporeal Norms...... 21
The Cultural Constitution

of Bodies...................... 23 POSTCOLONIAL BODIES........ 24 SUMMARY......................... 26

Since the 1980s, the social sciences have seen an increasing interest in the body, and much anthropological scholarship on the cul- tural politics of body size bears a relation- ship to speci\ufb01c social concerns about bodies in postindustrial contexts. Most of the literature interrogates dominant Euro-American prac- tices and discourses. Some anthropologists have offered or invited comparisons between contemporary \u201cWestern\u201d ideals of slimness and \u201cnon-Western\u201d preferences for large bod- ies; thus, \u201cthe West\u201d appears\u2014either implic- itly or explicitly\u2014as an anomaly in need of explanation. Juxtapositions of \u201cWest\u201d and \u201cnon-West,\u201d of dominant and minority groups, or of \u201ctraditional\u201d and \u201cmodern\u201d societies are unavoidably a product of Eu- rocentric preoccupations that shape an in- terest in the topic at hand. This recursive phenomenon potentially embeds representa- tions of otherness in knowledge formations (Mohanty 1984, Said 1978). However, a num- ber of scholars are highly re\ufb02exive about such epistemological questions in their approaches to body size in various parts of the world. Much of this work overtly engages cultural politics, requiring or inciting critical re\ufb02ec-

tion about, for example, normalizing cultural beliefs about the body, hierarchies of power and exclusion that are supported by and help constitute these norms, and the cultural role of scienti\ufb01c discourse about bodies.

Writings on body size often query received concepts of social order and owe much to sociologist Bryan Turner. Turner\u2019s bookThe

the inclusion of the body in sociology, which generally ignored bodies until the late 1980s when analyses of the body and embodiment erupted into what has become a veritable industry involving sociologists, anthropol- ogists, feminist scholars, and researchers in cultural studies. While providing a historical account of the government of bodies in Euro-American, Christian, gendered, and capitalist contexts, Turner critically examines various permutations of a nature/culture dichotomy\u2014\u201ca product of Western meta- physics\u201d (Lock 1993, p. 135)\u2014evident in Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. Drawing on the work of Foucault, Turner refuses to stabilize the body as a \ufb01xed object that can be used to justify a given social system. He focuses on dietary management, which \u201cemerged out of a theology of the \ufb02esh, developed through a moralistic medicine and \ufb01nally established it- self as a science of the ef\ufb01cient body\u201d (Turner 1984, p. 3)\u2014and attends to certain \u201cdisorders of women,\u201dincluding anorexia nervosa, which he takes to be \u201ccultural indications of the problem of control\u201d (p. 2) at different histor- ical moments. Turner\u2019s work and its powerful in\ufb02uence point to the cultural and historical speci\ufb01city of scholarly interest in body size.

Turner\u2019s writings have been criticized for retaining structuralist elements (Probyn 1987) and typological schemes (Wacquant 1995), as well as traces of the gendered power relations and of the \u201cnatural body\u201d Turner seeks to problematize (Gremillion 2003, MacSween 1993). A burgeoning literature on the body examines multiple discourses at work in the speci\ufb01cation or constitution of bod- ily forms and often highlights possibilities

for contesting dominant ideals and practices. A small but important set of works in this vein (discussed toward the end of this article) brings a critical, self-re\ufb02exive perspective on the historically Eurocentric concern with body size to analyses of the body in relation to postcolonial cultural encounters.

The vexed question of how to theorize the body as sociocultural entity permeates many analyses of body size. The perceived dilemma here turns on a persistent dichoto- mization of nature and culture that raises dif\ufb01cult questions about the role of human agency in the making and interpretation of bodily forms. However, a number of an- thropologists (Franklin 1997; Rabinow 1992; Strathern 1992a,b) and in\ufb02uential feminist scholars in a range of \ufb01elds (Butler 1990, 1993; Grosz 1994; Haraway 1991) have thor- oughly troubled the boundaries of \u201cnature\u201d and \u201cculture\u201d (but without collapsing mate- rialities and meanings into one another), in- spiring nuanced understandings of how bod- ies, agents, symbols, and social structures articulate.

This article reviews scholarship that ex- amines the meanings and/or power relations entailed in producing, assessing, or managing bodies when size matters. It is limited to the study of entire bodies (versus body parts) and, for the most part, to works that include but also move beyond ethnographic description when discussing body size. Although I focus on anthropological literature, I also survey writings from sociology and cultural studies that engage pertinent themes for a topic that increasingly calls for interdisciplinary analysis.

One trajectory in the study of body size brings sociocultural anthropology to bear on sci- enti\ufb01c discourse about the causes and ef- fects of fatness. This research allows for a limited acceptance of medical categories and truth claims, even as it challenges and at- tempts to recon\ufb01gure their hegemonic power.

is Better?\u2019 Biocultural Dynamics of Body Shape,\u201d Ritenbaugh (1991) outlines a pop- ular set of ideas along these lines. Noting that contributors wish to rede\ufb01ne \u201cbiocul- tural studies,\u201d moving it away from a strictly adaptational or ecological model to include conscious or purposive behavior steeped in \u201ccultural values, cultural ideals and myths\u201d (p. 174), Ritenbaugh seeks a recognition of \u201cfeedback loops between biology and culture\u201d (p. 174) (see also McElroy 1990 and Landy 1990). Studies in this vein embrace certain biomedical tenets\u2014for instance, the survival value of adipose tissue, particularly in situa- tions of food scarcity\u2014while also suggesting that corporeal processes cannot always be sep- arated from cultural ones.

These studies take as a backdrop re- search that points to positive valuations of corpulence in many parts of the world, par- ticularly for women (Brown & Konner 1987, Brown 1991), as well as research that links fatness with high socioeconomic status everywhere except among the vast majority of women and many men in industrialized contexts (Powdermaker 1960, Sobal & Stunkard 1989). A central goal is to provide explanations for fatness that do not adhere to medicalized, Euro-American standards of \u201cnormal\u201d and \u201chealthy\u201d body sizes. In part on the basis of Turner\u2019s (1984) work, \ufb01xed and universalized measures of obesity are questioned and historicized (Pollock 1995a; Ritenbaugh 1982, 1991). Some scholars des- ignate obesity as a \u201cculture-bound syndrome\u201d (Ritenbaugh 1982); most distinguish it \ufb01rmly from what is often a highly valued \u201cfatness\u201d (Pollock 1995b, Cassidy 1991), which is discussed widely as a signi\ufb01er of beauty and health and variously as a form of conspicuous consumption(Brink 1989, 1995), a projection of power (Cassidy 1991), an embodiment of dependent and domestic femininity (Massara 1989), a symbol of well-being within and between communities (Pollock 1995b), and a collective boost of prestige (de Garine 1995).