Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Intervals of confidence: Uncertain accounts of global hunger

  • Original Article
  • Published:
BioSocieties Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Global health policy experts tend to organize hunger through scales of ‘the individual’, ‘the community’ and ‘the global’. This organization configures hunger as a discrete, measurable object to be scaled up or down with mathematical certainty. This article offers a counter to this approach, using ethnographic cases to illustrate how the calculated referent of ‘hunger’ does not hold stable. In the highlands of Guatemala, where obesity has become a matter of concern, many people treated hunger as a sensation connected to family and history. For doctors working in the region, hunger was determined through body mass indices and global risk statistics. For global health experts it was different still, operating as an indicator derived from agricultural and population data. I draw these different, yet connected, versions of hunger together to explore dilemmas of scaling an object that is not solid but is made and unmade variously. This allows me to illustrate that global hunger is not a summation of hunger in the world, but its own version of hunger. I further suggest that ‘multi-object ethnography’, which allows for the persistence of uncertainty, can help to develop policy responses to hunger(s) that will, in some cases, be more appropriate and effective than scale-based evaluation.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Expertise is fraught and contingent (cf. Carr, 2010) but in referring to experts here and throughout the article I adopt my informants’ terminology.

  2. Some of these meetings, such as the Global Health Metrics and Evaluation meeting in Seattle, Washington, were open to the public; others, such as the International Congress of Nutrition-2 at the FAO in Rome, were highly restricted. Some of the conferences had no registration fee (for example, the annual LCIRAH conference in London) while the registration fee for many of the meetings, such as the Public Health Nutrition meeting in Gran Canaria, or the 20th International Congress of Nutrition in Granada, Spain, or the Global Food Security meetings in Noodwijkerhoot, the Netherlands, was roughly €500, greatly limiting access.

  3. For more on the idea of socio-material enactments, and how they differ from social constructions, see Law and Mol (2002), Moreira (2006) and Moser (2008).

  4. The reliance on this number has been heavily criticized for several reasons, not the least of which is that this is reported to be the caloric needs for a “sedentary lifestyle” whereas many hungry people are anything but sedentary (cf. Lappé et al, 2013). For more on the problematics of “macro body counting”, see Sparke (2014).

  5. Latour’s (1996, p. 371) analysis of scale has inspired my thinking in many ways, but I remain troubled by his insistence that one of the problems with the small-scale/large-scale model is that it “implies that an element ‘b’ being macro-scale is of a different nature and should be studied thus differently from element ‘a’ which is micro scale”. In my research on global hunger, the practice of scaling did precisely the opposite: it flattened away difference, treating macro- and micro-level interactions as though they were equivalent in quality, simply different in size.

References

  • Adams, V. (2013) Evidence-based global public health. In: J.G. Biehl and A. Petryna (eds.) When People Come First: Critical Studies in Global Health. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Adams, V., Burke, N.J. and Whitmarsh, I. (2014) Slow research: Thoughts for a movement in global health. Medical Anthropology 33 (3): 179–197.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Arnold, D. (1994) The ‘discovery’ of malnutrition and diet in colonial India. Indian Economic & Social History Review 31 (1): 1–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Asad, T. (1994) Ethnographic representation, statistics and modern power. Social Research 61 (1): 55–88.

    Google Scholar 

  • Candea, M. (2007) Arbitrary locations: In defence of the bounded field-site. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 13 (1): 167–184.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Carpenter, K.J. (1994) Protein and Energy: A Study of Changing Ideas in Nutrition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Carr, E.S. (2010) Enactments of expertise. Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (1): 17–32.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Casazza, K. et al (2013) Myths, presumptions, and facts about obesity. New England Journal of Medicine 368 (5): 446–454.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • CFS (2011) Technical Background Paper, Measuring Food Insecurity: Meaningful Concepts and Indicators for Evidence-Based Policy Making: Round Table On Monitoring Food Security. Rome, Italy: Committee on Food Security i-21.

  • CFS (2013a) The Madrid High Level Consultation on Hunger, Food Security, and Nutrition in the Post-2015 Development Framework: The World We Want. Madrid, Spain.

  • CFS (2013b) The World We Want, 2015: Hunger, Food Security, and Nutrition in the Post-2015 Development Agenda, http://www.fao.org/fsnforum/post2015/sites/post2015/files/files/Issues_Paper_Post_2015_Eng.pdf, accessed 8 July 2014.

  • Crane, J. (2010) Unequal ‘partners’: AIDS, academia, and the rise of global health. Behemoth: A Journal of Civilization 3 (3): 78–97.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cullather, N. (2010) The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle against Poverty in Asia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Escobar, A. (2001) Culture sits in places: Reflections on globalism and subaltern strategies of localization. Political Geography 20 (2): 139–174.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ferguson, J. and Gupta, A. (2002) Spatializing states: Toward an ethnography of neoliberal governmentality. American Ethnologist 29 (4): 981–1002.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Geissler, P.W. (2013) Public secrets in public health: Knowing not to know while making scientific knowledge. American Ethnologist 40 (1): 13–34.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gluckman, P.D. and Hanson, M.A. (2006) Developmental Origins of Health and Disease. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Green, L.W. (2006) Public health asks of systems science: To advance our evidence-based practice, can you help us get more practice-based evidence? American Journal of Public Health 96 (3): 406–409.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Guthman, J. (2011) Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Habicht, J.-P. and Martorell, R. (2010) Introduction: The development and legacy of the INCAP oriente studies 1969–2009. Journal of Nutrition 140 (Suppl 4): 392–393.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hacking, I. (2007) Where did the BMI come from? In: Bodies of Evidence: Fat across Disciplines. Newnham College, Cambridge University.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haraway, D. (2010) When species meet: Staying with the trouble. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (1): 53–55.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Herod, A. and Wright, M.W. (2008) Placing scale: An introduction. In: Geographies of Power. Blackwell Publishers, pp. 1–14.

    Google Scholar 

  • High, C., Kelly, A. and Mair, J. (2012) The Anthropology of Ignorance: An Ethnographic Approach. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hinchliffe, S. (2008) Reconstituting nature conservation: Towards a careful political ecology. Geoforum 39 (1): 88–97.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Howitt, R. (1998) Scale as relation: Musical metaphors of geographical scale. Area 30 (1): 49–58.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ilcan, S. and Phillips, L. (2010) Developmentalities and calculative practices: The millennium development goals. Antipode 42 (4): 844–874.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jarosz, L. (2011) Defining world hunger: Scale and neoliberal ideology in international food security policy discourse. Food, Culture and Society 14 (1): 117–139.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jiménez, A.C. (2005) Changing scales and the scales of change: Ethnography and political economy in Antofagasta, Chile. Critique of Anthropology 25 (2): 157–176.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kennedy, E. (2003) Keynote paper: Qualitative measures of food insecurity and hunger. In: FAO (ed.) Measurement and Assessment of Food Deprivation and Undernutrition. Rome, Italy: FAO.

    Google Scholar 

  • King, N.B. (2004) The scale politics of emerging diseases. Osiris 19: 62–76.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Knorr-Cetina, K. (1981) The Manufacture of Knowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Nature of Science. Oxford; New York: Pergamon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Landecker, H. (2011) Food as exposure: Nutritional epigenetics and the new metabolism. BioSocieties 6 (2): 167–194.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lappé, F.M. et al (2013) How we count hunger matters. Ethics & International Affairs. First View 27 (3): 251–259.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, B. (1996) On actor-network theory: A few clarifications. Soziale Welt 47 (4): 369–381.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, B. (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Latour, B., Jensen, P., Venturini, T., Grauwin, S. and Boullier, D. (2012) ‘The whole is always smaller than its parts’ – A digital test of Gabriel Tardes’ monads. The British Journal of Sociology 63 (4): 590–615.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Law, J. (2004) And if the global were small and noncoherent? Method, complexity, and the baroque. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (1): 13–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Law, J. and Mol, A. (2002) Complexities: Social Studies of Knowledge Practices. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Lepawsky, J. and Mather, C. (2012) Rubbish Electronics through the Baroque. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: AISSR.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, S. (2007) Toward a general theory of indifference to research-based evidence. Journal of Health Serv Res Policy 12 (3): 166–172.

  • Linn, J. (2012) Scaling up in Agriculture, Rural Development, and Nutrition. 2020 Vision for Food, Agriculture, and the Environment. Washington DC: International Food Policy Research Institute.

  • Lock, M. (2012) The epigenome and nature/nurture reunification: A challenge for anthropology. Medical Anthropology 32 (4): 291–308.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mackenzie, D. (1999) Nuclear missile testing and the social construction of accuracy. In: M. Biagioli (ed.) The Science Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, pp. 342–357.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marcus, G.E. (1995) Ethnography in/of the world system: The emergence of multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology 24: 95–117.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marcus, G.E. and Fischer, M.M.J. (1986) Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marques, I.d.C. (2004) Mathematical metaphors and politics of presence/absence. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 22 (1): 71–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marston, S.A., Jones, J.P. and Woodward, K. (2005) Human geography without scale. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30 (4): 416–432.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Martorell, R., Stein, A.D. and Schroeder, D.G. (2001) Early nutrition and later adiposity. Journal of Nutrition 131 (3): 874S–880S.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mason, J. (2003) Keynote paper: Measuring hunger and malnutrition. In: FAO (ed.) Measurement and Assessment of Food Deprivation and Undernutrition. Rome, Italy: FAO.

    Google Scholar 

  • McGoey, L. (2012) Strategic unknowns: Towards a sociology of ignorance. Economy and Society 41 (1): 1–16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Menjívar, C. (2011) Enduring Violence: Ladina Women’s Lives in Guatemala. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Merry, S.E. (2011) Measuring the world: Indicators, human rights, and global governance. Current Anthropology 52 (S3): S83–S95.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mol, A. (2008) The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mol, A. (2012) Layers or versions? Human bodies and the love of bitterness. In: B.S. Turner (ed.) Routledge Handbook of Body Studies. Abingdon, UK; New York: Routledge, pp. 119–129.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mol, A., Moser, I. and Pols, J. (2010) Care in Practice: On Tinkering in Clinics, Homes, and Farms. Rutgers; Transcript.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Moreira, T. (2006) Heterogeneity and coordination of blood pressure in neurosurgery. Social Studies of Science 36 (1): 69–97.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moser, I. (2008) Making alzheimers disease matter. Enacting, interfering and doing politics of nature. Geoforum 39 (1): 98–110.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Murray, C.J.L. et al (2012) GBD 2010: Design, definitions, and metrics. The Lancet 380 (9859): 2063–2066.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nestle, M. and Nesheim, M.C. (2012) Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Niewöhner, J. (2011) Epigenetics: Embedded bodies and the molecularisation of biography and milieu. BioSocieties 6 (4): 279–298.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Orta, A. (2004) Catechizing Culture: Missionaries, Aymara, and the ‘New Evangelization’. New York: Columbia University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Pfeiffer, J. and Nichter, M. (2008) What can critical medical anthropology contribute to global health? Medical Anthropology Quarterly 22 (4): 410–415.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Phillips, L. and Ilcan, S. (2003) ‘A world free from hunger’: Global imagination and governance in the age of scientific management. Sociologia Ruralis 43 (4): 434–453.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pigg, S.L. (2013) On sitting and doing: Ethnography as action in global health. Social Science & Medicine 99 (0): 127–134.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ramirez-Zea, M., Melgar, P. and Rivera, J.A. (2010) INCAP oriente longitudinal study: 40 years of history and legacy. Jounral of Nutrition 140 (2): 397–401.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reddy, M.J. (1979) The conduit metaphor – A case of frame conflict in our language about language. In: A. Ortony (ed.) Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • SCN (2010) Scaling up nutrition: A framework for action, http://www.unscn.org/files/Announcements/Scaling_Up_Nutrition-A_Framework_for_Action.pdf, acessed 8 July 2014.

  • Scott, J.W., Kaplan, C. and Keates, D. (1997) Transitions, Environments, Translations: Feminisms in International Politics. New York: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Solomons, N.W. (2009) Developmental origins of health and disease: Concepts, caveats, and consequences for public health nutrition. Nutrition Reviews 67 (S1): S12–S16.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sparke, M. (2014) Health. In: R. Lee (ed.) The Sage Handbook of Human Geography. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stengers, I. (2005) Introductory notes on an ecology of practices. Cultural Studies Review 11 (1): 183–196.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Strathern, M. (1999) Property, Substance, and Effect: Anthropological Essays on Persons and Things. London; New Brunswick, NJ: Athlone Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Strathern, M. (2004) Partial Connections. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • SUN (2010) A road map for scaling-up nutrition (SUN): Committee on World Food Security, http://www.un-foodsecurity.org/node/768, accessed 8 July 2014.

  • Tsing, A. (2005) Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tsuda, T., Tapias, M. and Escandell, X. (2014) Locating the global in transnational ethnography. Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 43 (2): 123–147.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Vernon, J. (2005) The ethics of hunger and the assembly of society: The techno-politics of the school meal in modern Britain. The American Historical Review 110 (3): 693–725.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Waldby, C. (2012) Medicine: The ethics of care, the subject of experiment. Body & Society 18 (3–4): 179–192.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Whitmarsh, I. (2010) Asthma and the value of contradictions. The Lancet 376 (9743): 764–765.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Whitmarsh, I. (2008) Biomedical ambivalence: Asthma diagnosis, the pharmaceutical, and other contradictions in Barbados. American Ethnologist 35 (1): 49–63.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Whyte, S.R. (1997) Questioning Misfortune: The Pragmatics of Uncertainty in Eastern Uganda. Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilk, R.R. (2006) Home Cooking in the Global Village: Caribbean Food From Buccaneers to Ecotourists. Oxford; New York: Berg.

    Google Scholar 

  • World Bank (2010) Nutrition at a Glance. Guatemala: World Bank, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTLACREGTOPNUT/Resources/Guatemala4-20-10.pdf, acessed on 8 July 2014.

  • Yates-Doerr, E. (2012) The weight of the self: Care and compassion in Guatemalan dietary choices. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 26 (1): 136–158.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yates-Doerr, E. (2014a) Refrigerator units: Normal goods. Limn 4: 32–35.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yates-Doerr, E. (2014b) Scale. Somatosphere: Science, medicine and anthropology, http://somatosphere.net/2014/05/scale.html.

  • Yates-Doerr, E. (2015) The Weight of Obesity: Hunger and Global Health in Postwar Guatemala. Berkeley, CA: UC Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

This research was enabled by research grants from the Wenner Gren Foundation, Fulbright Hays, and the ERC Advanced Grant, AdG09 Nr. 249397. The author is grateful to all those who shared their stories with her. Thanks are also due to Emily Martin, Tom Abercrombie, Sally Merry and Renato Rosaldo, Annemarie Mol and the Eating Bodies team, Tjitske Holtrop, Emily McDonald, Janelle Taylor, Rachel Chapman, Mercedes Duff and Andrew Roper. This article has benefited from the feedback from participants at the Bergen retreat sponsored by the University of Amsterdam (2012) and the Cascadia Seminar for Medical Anthropology (2013), as well as from early commentary from Marilyn Strathern and the careful attention of two anonymous reviewers. Rayna Rapp, to whom the author owes the title, deserves particular recognition.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam, P.O. Box 15618, 1001 NE, The Netherlands

    Emily Yates-Doerr

Authors
  1. Emily Yates-Doerr
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Yates-Doerr, E. Intervals of confidence: Uncertain accounts of global hunger. BioSocieties 10, 229–246 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2015.9

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/biosoc.2015.9

Keywords

Search

Navigation