Alexandra Brewis

Amber Wutich

Drawing on the authors' keen observations and decades of fieldwork, Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting combines a wide array of ethnographic evidence from around the globe to demonstrate conclusively how stigma undermines global health's basic goals to create both health and justice.

Stigma and the Undoing of Global Health

Lazy, Crazy, and Disgusting

Sarah Trainer

Cindi SturtzSreetharan

Jessica Hardin

This unique comparative ethnography uses a systematic and nuanced approach to delve into the myriad meanings of "being fat" within and across different global sites.

A Global Ethnography of Weight

Fat in Four Cultures

Eileen P. Anderson-Fye

The average size of human bodies all over the world has been steadily rising over recent decades. The total count of people clinically labeled “obese” is now at least three times what it was in 1980. Fat Planet represents a collaborative effort to consider at a global scale what fat stigma is and what it does to people. Making use of an array of social science perspectives applied in multiple settings, the authors examine the interplay of weight, wealth, history, culture, and meaning to fat and its social rejection. They explore the notion of symbolic body capital—the power of non-fat bodies to do what people need or want. In so doing, they illustrate the complex and quickly shifting dynamics in thinking about fat—often considered personal yet powerfully influenced by and influential upon the broader world in which we live.

Obesity, Culture, and Symbolic Body Capital

Fat Planet

"Bariatric surgery rates have increased exponentially, both within the United States and worldwide. At a time when dieting is widespread throughout the US and beyond, bariatric surgery, most commonly gastric bypass and sleeve gastrectomy, is one of the only effective interventions for rapid and sustained weight loss. The surgeries, however, are not without their controversy. Public perceptions of surgery recipients often paint them as lazy for taking the easy way out, and pictures of the bypassed gut and reduced stomach often provoke shivers of revulsion. Individuals who experience surgery must deal with such perceptions, while also becoming accustomed to their dramatically changed physical bodies. This book is based on four years of ethnographic research in one particular bariatric program in the US. The key theme of the book centers on the concept of physical weight, as well as the less visible social weights that accompany it. Weight is intimately bound up with a great deal of social suffering in the world today, and yet, because of cultural perceptions that fatness is a physical reflection of moral laziness, the suffering is rendered unsympathetic and even invisible. In this volume, we delve into the perspectives and experiences of people who have lived with excess weight and who then, through surgery, have brought their bodies more in-line with social expectations and societal norms"--

Alexandra Brewis

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