TY - JOUR
T1 - Fat Is All My Fault
T2 - Globalized Metathemes of Body Self-blame
AU - Trainer, Sarah
AU - SturtzSreetharan, Cindi
AU - Wutich, Amber
AU - Brewis, Alexandra
AU - Hardin, Jessica
N1 - Funding Information:
.We acknowledge the support of the Mayo Clinic–Arizona State University Obesity Solutions initiative, which was generously funded through the Virginia G. Piper Charitable Trust and the ASU Office of the Provost, and the U.S. National Science Foundation Cultural Anthropology Program (Award SBE‐2017491) to the NSF Cultural Anthropology Methods Program. We thank our colleagues and students for supporting our efforts, especially Charlayne Mitchell, Deborah Williams, Carol Ember, and H. Russell Bernard. Acknowledgments
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 by the American Anthropological Association
PY - 2022/3
Y1 - 2022/3
N2 - Norms valorizing not-fat bodies appear to have spread around the world, combined with a globalizing belief that thinness is the result of individual management of self and hard work. We examine themes of blame and felt responsibility for weight and “fat” in four distinct geographic and cultural locations: peri-urban Georgia, United States; suburban Osaka, Japan; urban Encarnación, Paraguay; and urban Apia, Samoa. Use of a novel metatheme approach that compares and contrasts these four distinct places characterized by different population-level prevalences of obesity and by specific cultural histories relevant to body norms and ideals provides a flexible toolkit for comparative cross-cultural/multi-sited ethnographic research. We show that self-blame, marked by an articulated sense of individual responsibility for weight and a sense of failing in this responsibility, is present in every field site, but to varying degrees and expressed in different ways. [fat, obesity, metatheme, stigma, self-blame].
AB - Norms valorizing not-fat bodies appear to have spread around the world, combined with a globalizing belief that thinness is the result of individual management of self and hard work. We examine themes of blame and felt responsibility for weight and “fat” in four distinct geographic and cultural locations: peri-urban Georgia, United States; suburban Osaka, Japan; urban Encarnación, Paraguay; and urban Apia, Samoa. Use of a novel metatheme approach that compares and contrasts these four distinct places characterized by different population-level prevalences of obesity and by specific cultural histories relevant to body norms and ideals provides a flexible toolkit for comparative cross-cultural/multi-sited ethnographic research. We show that self-blame, marked by an articulated sense of individual responsibility for weight and a sense of failing in this responsibility, is present in every field site, but to varying degrees and expressed in different ways. [fat, obesity, metatheme, stigma, self-blame].
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U2 - 10.1111/maq.12687
DO - 10.1111/maq.12687
M3 - Article
C2 - 35051296
AN - SCOPUS:85123079923
SN - 0745-5194
VL - 36
SP - 5
EP - 26
JO - Medical Anthropology Quarterly
JF - Medical Anthropology Quarterly
IS - 1
ER -