Category: Inequality

Culture and Inequality in the Obesity Debate

So far in the posts I’ve done on obesity, I have been focused on the biology behind obesity.  Part of that is due to my class and what this particular section of the course covered—showing them a biological approach to a health problem.  But as I have been going over research on obesity, I’ve collected a number of links and articles on culture, social class, and obesity.  So I am going to share those here. 

Culture 

Let me say one thing.  In biomedicine and particularly in epidemiology, there is an overarching orientation towards the individual.  It is how treatment is planned, how data is collected and analysis proceeds.  This approach misses out on the central insight of culture theory—that aspects of our environment get bundled together due to accumulating human action and our cultural systems of meaning making.  Epidemiology, by separating out factors, has little recourse to understand the dynamics of these larger patterns.  At least in epidemiology, one alternative might be Nancy Krieger’s ecosocial framework (pdf), complemented by James Trostle’s Epidemiology and Culture and Carol Worthman and Brandon Kohrt’s Biocultural Approaches to Public Health Paradoxes. 

In any case, some cultural anthropology and obesity.  First, check out Gina Kolata’s article Chubby Gets a Second Look, including quotes from Emory anthropologists Peter Brown and George Armelagos, teachers of mine when I was in graduate school.  “Being thin really isn’t about health, anyway, but about social class and control.  When food was scarce and expensive, they say, only the rich could afford to be fat…  Those notions of fashion gradually gave way to a more streamlined physique… The body mass indexes of Miss America winners, according to a 2000 study, have been steadily decreasing since 1922, so much so that for most winners in the last three decades their indexes would cause them to be considered underweight.” 

Continue reading “Culture and Inequality in the Obesity Debate”

Wednesday Round Up #5

Food, Drink and Exercise 

Eric Asimov, Can Sips at Home Prevent Binges?
Good discussion of families, teenagers and learning to drink responsibly at home

Nicholas Bakalar, Skipping Cereal and Eggs, and Packing on the Pounds
Breakfast helps keep most adolescents thin (or perhaps less hefty…?)

Ginger Campbell/John Ratey, Exercise and the Brain
Podcast discussion of Ratey’s book, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain, and how exercise helps the brain

UPenn Press Release, Images of Desire: Food and Drug Cravings….
Cravings, habits and memories…

UFlorida Press Release, Imaging Disorders of Desire: Opiates, Brownies, Sex and Cocaine
Interview with Anna Rose Childress

Race 

Adam Geller, Where Should Conversation on Race Start?
In our mixed reactions to Obama’s speech, and much more

Eduardo Porter, Race and the Social Contract
Diversity and investment in public infrastructure

Mireya Navarro, Who Are We? New Dialogue on Mixed Race
Navigating the tight space between racial divides

General 

Sue Sheridan, Random Bytes
Sue has her own round-up, including make-up wearing Neanderthals and the evolution of complexity

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #5”

Neurosexism, size dimorphism and not-so-‘hard-wiring’

Cordelia Fine has a great short piece, Will Working Mothers’ Brains Explode? The Popular New Genre of Neurosexism, on the recent spate of work about the ‘female brain.’ In the article (which is short but worth reading, including for the other material she links to), she explores ‘several recent popular and influential books arguing for fundamental and “hard-wired” differences in male and female psychology.’ In her discussion, she doesn’t so much focus on the research itself but on the question, ‘What accounts for the success and appeal of the new field of neurosexism?’ I’m going to take this posting as a license to range all over the place on the ‘biology’ of sex differences, not just in the brain, as a way of thinking more about how culture and biology become inextricably entangled even in basic sexual differences, like say body size.

One explanation for neurosexim, according to Fine, is that ‘Most lay readers, of course, have neither the background nor the resources to question the many inaccurate and misleading claims made about gender differences in the brain,’ a discussion that we’ve already had on Neuroanthropology (both here and here). I especially like a quote that Fine borrows from Mark Liberman: ‘misleading appeals to the authority of “brain research” have become the modern equivalent of out-of-context scriptural fragments’ (originally on Language Log).

Fine presents the example: ‘The back cover of The Female Brain offers to explain why “a man can’t seem to spot an emotion unless someone cries or threatens bodily harm”. Were we to pick up a different sort of book that made an equally unusual sort of claim (a guide to pets, say, which promised to explain why cats can’t climb trees), we would immediately put it down and go in search of a more reliable text.’ It’s a great point; so much of our experience points to myriad exceptions to these neurosexist rules, and yet many of us don’t throw the books out immediately. Odd…

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Social Entrepreneurship

David Brooks has an editorial today, Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders, about how rich entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and Bill Drayton are turning to philanthropy and social change through a decidedly different model than a generation ago.  The old model?  “The older do-gooders had a certain policy model: government identifies a problem. Really smart people design a program. A cabinet department in a big building administers it.” 

The new do-gooders come with a different view: “[They] have absorbed the disappointments of the past decades. They have a much more decentralized worldview. They don’t believe government on its own can be innovative. A thousand different private groups have to try new things. Then we measure to see what works.” 

Brooks points to the central problem of scalability.  “How do the social entrepreneurs replicate successful programs so that they can be big enough to make a national difference?”  In my classes and talks, I often call this the franchise model, the McDonalds of social change. 

The central assumption is still the “we can drive change” model—through knowledge, market forces, financing and scientific evidence, we can “rebuild him”—we can make a Six Million Dollar Man out of a broken social body, one involved in a terrible accident of history.  It is rather like my critique of behavioral economics in Decision Making and Emotion.  A definite step forward, but leaving too many things out.  It’s still all about the program, not the social context, not the relationships, not the world view, say of black versus white, that might also impact social change.  Find the right techniques, and we can change the world.

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Obama and Race

The importance of history, the role of our own personal lives, a recognition of the power of our ideas and the stains of our faults, the emphasis on the strength of both inequality and hope.  Barack Obama’s speech on race in the United States, on the terrible patterns of the past and the foundational hopes and ideas of this nation, embodies much that I have found in trying to understand people’s lives on their own terms, those lives as both driving the same repeating patterns and offering the possibility of change. 

It was luck that I had decided to post a series on race today, and Obama’s speech, and the array of reactions today, were more than worthy inclusions—they were necessary.  Obama captures the movement towards a new way of managing our problems, of integration and reconciliation, of the best ideas presented clearly rather than as decisions hidden behind the doors of power.  Oh, he is a hard-core democrat, and I have as much cynicism about the possibility of our government working towards change.  History provides both lessons, of tragedy and triumph, and always at a cost.  And yet… 

Obama is reflexive, he sees the limits of knowledge, he sees the value of emotion as well as reason, he can judge vociferous ideas and statements but still cherish a person, he draws on his own experience to think about the larger lessons.  He is, as he says, against our continued tendency to “simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.”  We simplify politics, we simplify brain biology, we simplify anthropology—and thus distort our engagement with our own larger reality.

Race is about that distortion, and using that distortion to justify the discrimination Obama so eloquently argues against.  It is an old theme in anthropology, the theme that really founded the field in the United States.  There is no manifest destiny in our biology; we forge it, for ourselves and too often against others.  It is time to turn the page, both back to our foundational moments and forward to what we can now do. 

Wednesday Round Up #3

Race 

The New York Times, How Race Is Lived In America
Series of articles focused on how race relations are defined by “daily experience, in schools, in sports arenas, in pop culture and at worship, and especially in the workplace”

American Anthropological Association, RACE: Are We So Different?
“Looking through the eyes of history, science and lived experience, the RACE Project explains differences among people and reveals the reality – and unreality – of race.”

The New York African Burial Ground
“Return to the past to build the future”
Also check out the lead researcher’s report, “An Examination of Enslaved Lives, A Construction of Ancestral Ties”

Jennifer Eberhardt, Imaging Race (pdf)
American Psychologist article on brain imaging and the “social psychological responses associated with race”

Barack Obama’s Speech on Race
Full transcript here; Video, with comments across the spectrum, here
And for those people coming here, seeking more commentary on Obama’s speech, I now have a post on Obama and Race.

Embodiment & Sense Making

20/20, Blind People Who Interact with the World like Dolphins & Bats
Humans can echolocate!  Absolutely amazing.

Mind Matters, Thinking With The Body
Reading, Movement, and Embodied Cognition

CF Kurtz & DJ Snowden, The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-making in a Complex and Complicated World
Challenging three basic assumptions—order, rational choice, and intent—in decision making

Continue reading “Wednesday Round Up #3”