Metabolic Living: Food, Fat, and the Absorption of Illness in India (Critical Global Health: Evidence, Efficacy, Ethnography) - Hardcover

Solomon, Harris

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082236087X ISBN 13: 9780822360872

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2016

Synopsis

The popular narrative of "globesity" posits that the adoption of Western diets is intensifying obesity and diabetes in the Global South and that disordered metabolisms are the embodied consequence of globalization and excess. In Metabolic Living Harris Solomon recasts these narratives by examining how people in Mumbai, India, experience the porosity between food, fat, the body, and the city. Solomon contends that obesity and diabetes pose a problem of absorption between body and environment. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Mumbai's home kitchens, metabolic disorder clinics, food companies, markets, and social services, he details the absorption of everything from snack foods and mangoes to insulin, stress, and pollutants. As these substances pass between the city and the body and blur the two domains, the onset and treatment of metabolic illness raise questions about who has the power to decide what goes into bodies and when food means life. Evoking metabolism as a condition of contemporary urban life and a vital political analytic, Solomon illuminates the lived predicaments of obesity and diabetes, and reorients our understanding of chronic illness in India and beyond. 

About this title

Review:

"As we travel the streets of Mumbai with Harris Solomon we come to understand the empirical complexity of any too-simple analysis of 'globesity' and discover that India's rising rates of obesity and metabolic disorders cannot be reduced to a problem of overeating. Solomon's writing is vivid, and he represents the dilemmas, resources, and popular cultures of contemporary India with sympathy, occasional humor, and considerable skill. This compelling and thought-provoking book will find eager audiences in medical anthropology, science studies, public health, and South Asian studies." Author: Rayna Rapp, author of Source: Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America

From the Author:

Harris Solomon is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global Health at Duke University. 

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 082236087X
• ISBN 13: 9780822360872
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 304