Harris Solomon Examines the Body Politics of Obesity and Comparison in India

In the last meeting of the South Asian Studies Colloquium series of the Fall 2012 semester, Harris Solomon, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global Health at Duke University, will deliver a paper titled: “Comparison, Causality, and the Thin-Fat Indian”.

December 5, 4:30pm • Room 203, Luce Hall, 34 Hillhouse Avenue

The paper is inspired by a medical conference in 2008, when over 150 clinicians, researchers, and dieticians across India gathered to discuss the Body Mass Index, or BMI, a measure of metric weight over height squared. Prompted by a growing concern about India’s growing rates of obesity and diabetes, the experts debated whether international BMI standards adequately reflected “Indian” bodies, and decided that the Indian BMI threshold for “overweight” should be 23, in contrast to the international standard of 25. Much of their rationale derived from hypotheses that South Asians develop diabetes, hypertension, and obesity at a BMI lower than the standard threshold for “abnormal” weight.  In this rendering, South Asians may appear morphologically “normal” on the standard BMI scale, but still are metabolically obese. As newspaper articles put it, in the wake of the consensus decision, 70 million more people in India became “officially” obese overnight, and needed to renew their efforts to self-police what they ate.  Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai about connections between food and the body, this paper uses the case of the “Indian” BMI to question how the uniqueness of South Asian bodies comes to matter.  The paper explores how themes of sensitivity inflect the diagnosis of chronic disease, and how Indian bodies face demands to produce comparative forms of biomedical knowledge.  In a broader register, the paper questions the politics of comparison in contemporary India. Crystallized in the figure of the “thin-fat Indian,” comparisons – bodily, national, and transnational – work as analytics of mortality, its relation to rural-urban connections, and its everyday threats in small pleasures.

Harris Solomon received his PhD in Anthropology from Brown University, and his MPH in Global Health from Emory University. His primary interests involve relations between consumerism and chronic illness in urban India. As India becomes increasingly portrayed as the site of an “epidemiological transition” – a shift from infectious to chronic disease burdens said to accompany economic development – his research questions the embodied politics of accumulation. He is currently working on a book manuscript that examines the relationships forged between food, fat, and the body in light of India’s rising rates of obesity and diabetes. This project draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Mumbai’s home kitchens, metabolic disorder clinics, and food companies, to better understand what have been called India’s “diseases of prosperity.” His earlier research explored the development of corporatized medical care in Indian cities and its manifestation as “medical tourism,” and the politics of language in India’s HIV treatment clinical trials. Uniting all of these interests are questions about threats to bodily and national longevity.