[Reader-list] Researching Mumbai Lecture Series: Harris Solomon: Fat territories: “Globesity” and the medicalization of life in Mumbai

[Shilpa Phadke]

*Researching Mumbai Lecture Series*

*Urban Aspirations in Global Cities*

*A collaborative project of *

 *Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Max Planck Institute and Partners for
Urban Knowledge Action & Research*

invites you to a talk titled

*Fat territories: “Globesity” and the medicalization of life in Mumbai*

by

*Harris Solomon*
Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global Health at Duke
University



 *Date: Thursday, August 2, 2012*
*Time:* *4.3**0 p.m.*
*Location: Room 602, Above the Guest House, Main Campus, TISS, Mumbai*

*Abstract: *

Public health officials are growing increasingly alarmed at rising rates of
diabetes and obesity among Indians, yet they cannot agree on a clear cause.
As these debates unfold, relations between food and the body emerge in new
arrangements in popular media, in clinics, and in everyday acts of cooking
and eating. In my presentation, I will focus specifically on the
relationship between the phenomenon called “globesity” and its more local
instantiations in Mumbai. Globesity, an amalgam of the words
“globalization” and “obesity,” describes the spread of weight gain and its
correlates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease along West-to-East
channels of cultivated prosperity and “Westernized” eating habits. My paper
sketches out these assumptions and their limits, by drawing on long-term
ethnographic research in Mumbai. I discuss how narratives of chronic
disease articulate concerns about the vulnerabilities of the urban Indian
body to accumulation and enjoyment. I also focus on the methodological
challenge of this research: How to trace the accumulative body to better
understand the medicalization of city life.


 *About Harris Solomon:*

Harris Solomon is Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Global
Health at Duke University. He received his PhD in Anthropology from Brown
University, and his MPH in Global Health from Emory University. His primary
interests are the relations between consumption and 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 in the city.He is currently working on a book
project based on ethnographic research in Mumbai that examines the
relationships forged between food, fat, and the body in light of India's
rising rates of obesity and diabetes. 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.


 *"Urban Aspirations in Global Cities"* is an international collaborative
project in which researchers from TISS, Mumbai, Max Planck Institute (MPI),
Germany and Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research (PUKAR),
Mumbai, are working together. The project aims to compare post-colonial
mega-cities in Asia, including Mumbai, Singapore and Shanghai, and
understand how the urban community of rapidly growing mega-cities impacts
the development of urban aspirations.

*The Researching Mumbai Lecture Series* aims to foster a conversation about
the contexts of researching the city of Mumbai, the complex engagements
with the field, and to enable critical reflections on questions of
methodology.