Obesity "epidemic" in the Kingdom of Tonga
In a worldwide obesity pandemic, where a growing number of people all over the world are classified as obese, the fight against obesity has become an international priority. Large funds, numbers of projects and international guidelines for global policies are reaching as far as the South Pacific. Th...
محفوظ في:
| الحاوية / القاعدة: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jda, |
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| المؤلف الرئيسي: | |
| التنسيق: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| اللغة: | Anglais |
| منشور في: |
Journal des anthropologues
2015
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| الموضوعات: | |
| الوصول للمادة أونلاين: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| الملخص: | In a worldwide obesity pandemic, where a growing number of people all over the world are classified as obese, the fight against obesity has become an international priority. Large funds, numbers of projects and international guidelines for global policies are reaching as far as the South Pacific. This area indeed seems to concentrate the world’s fattest and an obesity epidemic has been declared. Relying on her own fieldwork in the Kingdom of Tonga, the author questions this epidemic by criticizing the mainstream measurements employed to calculate the body weight – the BMI – which standardize one optimal size. She then positions the « war against obesity » in a wider global health frame, where global policies transpose global operating concepts to local contexts and shows that Tongan cultural practices related to food consumption and exposition, beauty and body size ideals, health and social stratification and the local of a « right body » poorly fit them. Moreover, squeezed between international health directives, local economy and trade policies, Tonga sees an increment of the diabetes and cardio-vascular diseases’ rates, addressed as the consequence of a yet to be proven obesity epidemic. |
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