As death rates from heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes in Latin America escalate, global health interventions increasingly emphasize healthy eating, exercise, and weight loss. This book explores how scientific descriptions of body weight are translated from policy boardrooms, clinics, and classrooms into everyday life. It is one of few attempts to ethnographically study the emergence of obesity as a social fact—describing what obesity means for people who have been diagnosed as obese and how they respond to protocols of treatment. Whereas scientific and epidemiological projects have analyzed ... More

As death rates from heart attacks, strokes, and diabetes in Latin America escalate, global health interventions increasingly emphasize healthy eating, exercise, and weight loss. This book explores how scientific descriptions of body weight are translated from policy boardrooms, clinics, and classrooms into everyday life. It is one of few attempts to ethnographically study the emergence of obesity as a social fact—describing what obesity means for people who have been diagnosed as obese and how they respond to protocols of treatment. Whereas scientific and epidemiological projects have analyzed global obesity using population-level statistics, this book takes an anthropological approach, studying how obesity is lived and experienced by those who have recently found their diets—and their weight—radically transformed. The stories included illustrate how the circulation of information about obesity in Guatemala’s postwar, postcolonial landscape is changing how people know their bodies and organize their lives. The book demonstrates that dieting techniques routinely seek to configure the body as a bounded object to possess and control. Though the evaluation of health through weight could have powerful and dangerous effects, the book also illustrates the how people worked around and refigured standards and measures. The book makes clear that the joys of eating and non-metric forms of health remained valuable in people’s lives.