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

Solomon, Harris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822361019 ISBN 13: 9780822361015

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:

"Metabolic Living is an important contribution to contemporary medical anthropology, especially in regards to the study of disease chronicity and to contemporary South Asian studies. In addition, Solomon provides a welcome challenge to the existing universalizing public health discourse on 'globesity.' Even while describing the seeming inevitability of metabolic disease in Mumbai, he uncovers the complex elements of social life that contribute to and circulate around it, and the suffering that stems from it. The focus on metabolism and absorption opens up new ways of viewing intersections between bodies and their environments, as well as new ways of thinking about urban vitality in 21st century India." (Andrea S. Wiley Anthropological Quarterly)

"The book offers a novel way to talk about metabolic illnesses in urban space, often directly or indirectly talking back to medical and public health discourses on food, bodies, and urban and urbanizing spaces.... The poetic humanity of metabolic precariousness in India is visible in every page of this rich ethnographic narrative, making it a valuable contribution to literatures in medical anthropology, science studies, area studies, food studies, and public health policy." (Nayantara Sheoran Appleton Medical Anthropology Quarterly)

“A wonderfully evocative ethnography, Solomon’s book makes one reflect on the very nature of metabolic syndrome.... Through this book, Solomon ... challeng[es] medical experts to consider a multi-layered approach to solving the issues of obesity and diabetes that plague contemporary India." (Gauri Anilkumar Pitale FoodAnthropology)

"Pointing out that food is never just food—that it incorporates joyous and toxic social lives and historical traces—the book effectively shifts the conversation about metabolism away from junk food or obese bodies and towards absorptive and thoroughly social processes. Metabolic Living provides health-care professionals valuable insight into how people are living with metabolic illness." (Emily Yates-Doerr The Lancet)

"In the sophistication of its crafting, Metabolic Living achieves its tricky aspiration to understand metabolism both as a tool for ethnographic observation and as a site of anthropological analysis. Indeed, it is this blurring of instrument and object, the ethnographer and the ethnographic, that gives Metabolic Living its persuasive force." (Dwaipayan Banerjee American Anthropologist)

"This study is an excellent observation of current anxieties over prosperity diseases in urban India, locating the connections between food, bodies, and environments. While Solomon’s ethnographical accounts revolve around different sets of frameworks and narrations of common people, patients, nutritionists and experts, he cautiously avoided stigmatic fears and pain and presented metabolic suffering throughout within a cultural context." (Santhosh Abraham South Asia Research)

"Solomon takes us through domestic kitchens and social service centers, slaughterhouses and food processing plants, streets and street-side food stalls, and waiting rooms and hospitals to provide nuanced and insightful descriptions of life in Mumbai." (GauriI Pathak Journal of Anthropological Research)

"Metabolic Living is the ?rst ethnographic monograph on the diabetes epidemic in South Asia, and this alone marks it as an important contribution to the study of health and illness in the subcontinent. It also provides an evocative and complex picture of being a person with a metabolic illness in Mumbai."
  (Lesley Jo Weaver Journal of Asian Studies)

"Metabolic Living is a rich, ambitious book whose theoretical and ethnographic model builds bridges across chapters with disparate topics and actors. . . . For readers curious about how to research and write the complexities of embodiment – and are open to experimenting with how to get there – Metabolic Living is a productive and exhilarating read." (Stephanie Maroney The Senses and Society)

About 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: 0822361019
• ISBN 13: 9780822361015
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304