Abstract
Why is “everything I know is the right thing to do a million miles removed from what I do in reality?” This question posed by Rita, my main interlocutor and friend in a fieldwork that started in 2001–2003 and was taken up again in 2014–2015, opens up an exploration of moral work and moral selves in the context of the obesity epidemic and weight loss processes. I address these questions through the notion of “moral laboratories” taking up Mattingly’s argument that moral cultivation over time cannot be disconnected from a notion of self. Mattingly has consistently argued for a biographical and narrative self, which is processual and created in community. Along these lines, and by recourse to the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels’ phenomenology, I will propose the notion of a responsive self. The responsive self highlights the eventness of ongoing experimentation against the odds and captures equally pathic and agentive dimensions of a self that both persists and is transformed over time.
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Notes
As noted by Mattingly, the self as a crucial site of experience is also contested by most phenomenologically inspired anthropologists (Mattingly 2014, p. 56). Similar concerns are raised by Doug Hollan: “Ironically … what seems to be missing from some of this phenomenologically inspired work is how given individuals become dynamically ‘coupled with’ or ‘attuned to’ their ‘immediate’ environments—that is, how they become marked by a particular set of historically specific interactions with others, and in turn, how historically specific individuals come to mark and infuse, in particular ways, the lives of others.” (2012:42) Hollan advocates the approach of person-centered ethnography, Mattingly (2014) first person virtue ethics to explore the biographical self, while in this paper I propose a notion of the self from within the phenomenological tradition.
While cultural comparison is beyond the scope of this paper, there are interesting similarities between the experience of obesity in Denmark and elsewhere—as portrayed to us in in-depth ethnographic studies that have been published in recent years. In Emily Yates-Doerr’s account from postwar Guatemala (Yates-Doerr 2015) and Solomon’s from Mumbai, India (2016) I see a similarity in how the simultaneous global exports of food and preventive obesity programs challenge local perceptions about food, sociality and health—and gives rise to alien demands to which people must respond. The alienness that I have found in the experience of obesity in Danish settings, thus also comes across, I suggest, in these other sites, even if local versions differ markedly in what counts as the “good food life” or how obesity prevention is taken up and organized.
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Acknowledegments
I would like to thank Rita for generously sharing with me her life, her family and her reflections. Much of what I write is a response to the demands of her insights. I wish also to thank Cheryl Mattingly for being such an amazing and inspiring thinker and writer, mentor and friend. This study would not have been possible without a generous grant from the research foundation of Aarhus University, DK (Aarhus Universitets Forskningsfond) for Centre for Cultural Epidemics. I thank my colleagues at EPICENTER and the participants in the AAA panel, which preceded this special issue for ongoing reflections and discussions. Finally, thanks to the editors at Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry and to the two anonymous reviewers for very valuable critiques and suggestions, which helped me clarify and strengthen the argument.
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Lone Grøn has no conflict of interest.
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All procedures performed involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.
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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.
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Grøn, L. The Tipping of the Big Stone—And Life itself. Obesity, Moral Work and Responsive Selves Over Time. Cult Med Psychiatry 41, 267–283 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-017-9535-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-017-9535-x