Overview
- Provides much needed analysis of the harsh realities of obesity and poverty in a first world economy, demonstrating that obesity is not just one thing but has multiple realities
- Positions experiences of obesity in wider theoretical debates and global situations of health, social class and inequality, arguing that these must be considered in obesity interventions that aim to create social change
- Examines the politics of fat – the politics of language, of knowledge and of palatability – with relevance for anthropologists, social scientists, governments, and external partners
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Table of contents (8 chapters)
Keywords
- politics of fat
- childhood obesity
- suburbs
- obesity prevention
- State health bureaucrats
- public health
- nutrition
- nutritionists
- government workers
- healthy eating
- health
- local government
- classed-based politics
- public health interventions
- nutritional knowledge
- cultural capital of bodies
- Australian suburbs
- health care
- prevention
About this book
This ethnography takes the reader into the Australian suburbs to learn about food, eating and bodies during the highly political context of one of Australia’s largest childhood obesity interventions. While there is ample evidence about the number of people who are overweight or obese and an abundance of information about what and how to eat, obesity remains ‘a problem’ in high-income countries such as Australia. Rather than rely on common assumptions that people are making all the wrong choices, this volume reveals the challenges of ‘eating healthy’ when money is scarce and how, different versions of being fat and doing fat happen in everyday worlds of precarity. Without acknowledgement of the multiple realities of fatness and obesity, interventions will continue to have limited reach.
Authors and Affiliations
About the authors
Megan Warin, PhD, is a social anthropologist and an Australian Research Council (ARC) Future Fellow at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She is the author of Abject Relations: Everyday Worlds of Anorexia (2010), published in the series Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology.
Tanya Zivkovic, PhD, is a social anthropologist who holds an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Research Award at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Tanya’s book Death and Reincarnation in Tibetan Buddhism: In-Between Bodies was published in the Routledge Critical Studies in Buddhism seriesin 2014.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Fatness, Obesity, and Disadvantage in the Australian Suburbs
Book Subtitle: Unpalatable Politics
Authors: Megan Warin, Tanya Zivkovic
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01009-6
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-01008-9Published: 25 March 2019
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-01009-6Published: 18 March 2019
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 228
Number of Illustrations: 8 illustrations in colour
Topics: Social Anthropology, Ethnography, Medical Anthropology, Social Structure, Social Inequality, Medical Sociology, Sociology of the Body