|
Proposed Informal Session: Obesity and Oceania How Pacific peoples live in their bodies, objectify them, imagine themselves, in a climate of professional alarm and social prejudice about their high weights initiated discussion. Migrants embody the double binds of transitions from traditional foods now unaffordable, to high-calorie meals of urban settings. They witness the construction of problems, such as introducing the concept of "picky eaters" in current advertising in Papua New Guinea. A category of exercise to replace the former work inevitable in rural life is undermined by exhaustion from employment and ease of entertainment. Adolescents may go to gyms, exposing themselves to stress injuries; patrolling nightclubs may be the available employment. As migrants to metropolitan countries, they may use their large size to assert an identity of strength and power in non-islander communities--often racist, bullying cultures. This identity of physicality highlights problematics of advocating weight loss. Earlier eating patterns in unstable food supplies, such as voluntary vomiting to be able to consume more food at feasts, would today be diagnosed as eating disorders, as would death by intentional starvation because of heartbreak. Now there are reports of conventional eating disorders in Fiji, precipitated by exposure to the thin body sizes of television. Although there are claims, Maori for instance, that everything went wrong as soon as whites arrived and that includes body weight, there are leaders stating that their people eat, drink, and smoke too much. The politics of suffering is complicated by questions of how to prevent adverse consequences from high-fat diets and diabetes when genetic heritage compounds urban inactivity, when heaviness becomes a key marker of identity, and when there are very low rates of sustained weight loss in treatment anywhere in the world. Lacking seven committed speakers, we do not intend to move to meet again in 2009. Margaret Mackenzie, California College of the Arts, P.O. Box 1286, Point Reyes, CA 94956, USA; <mmackenzie@horizoncable.com>
|
