“Oh God, Save Us from Sugar”: An Ethnographic Exploration of Diabetes Mellitus in the United Arab Emirates

Baglar, Rosslyn

doi:10.1080/01459740.2012.671399

Cited by 20 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 23 publications

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“…Chronicity of overnutrition is heightened by the cultural values placed on commensality of food with obligatory dinners, gifts of sweets and chocolates. Chronicity of stress is evidenced by identity contradictions as women transition from submissive, dependent roles to meet expectations for them to take major roles in economy (Baglar in press).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Native American Embodiment of the Chronicities of Modernity: Reservation Food, Diabetes, and the Metabolic Syndrome among the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache

Wiedman

2012

Med Anthropol Q

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As a physical embodiment of modernity, the prevalence of obesity, diabetes, and the metabolic syndrome (MetS) among Native Americans reflects their body's biological response to social and cultural structures that routinize daily behaviors and contain their physical body. This article explains why Native Americans were one of the earliest populations manifesting this epidemic. Ethnohistorical methods identify the conjuncture of chronic behaviors among Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache of Oklahoma that promote inactivity, overnutrition, and psychosocial stresses. Correspondence and primary documents of Federal Indian Agents who managed the reservation food rations and annuity systems beginning in the 1860s, details a culture history of nutrition and food technologies that standardized and established the unhealthy modern diet that continues among Native Americans today. By identifying structural chronicities affecting specific populations and life situations, policies and interventions can be more effective in promoting positive changes for reducing the global pandemic of diabetes and MetS.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Native American Embodiment of the Chronicities of Modernity: Reservation Food, Diabetes, and the Metabolic Syndrome among the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache

Wiedman

2012

Med Anthropol Q

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“…(Poss and Jezewski []; Scheder []; Schoenberg and Drew []; Weaver and Hadley []; and Yates‐Doerr [] all use data that reference religion.) Whether food is pictured as a gift from God, or health is represented as in God's care, scholars acknowledge how those living with metabolic disorders draw from myriad religious resources to create well‐being (Baglar ). However, looking to instances where God, church, or religion is invoked does more than assign meaning to the experience of suffering.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Embedded Narratives: Metabolic Disorders and Pentecostal Conversion in Samoa

Hardin

2017

Med Anthropol Q

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Drawing from interviews and participant observation, this article explores the intersection of diagnosis of metabolic disorders and religious conversion among Pentecostal Christians in Samoa by analyzing what I call embedded narratives--conversion narratives embedded in illness narratives. Drawing from ethnographic data, I examine how using conversion narrative conventions enabled those living with metabolic disorders to narrate behavior change in a culturally and socially valorized way. By embedding their narratives, I suggest those living with metabolic disorders shifted the object of care from a disease process toward the creation of a religious life and in turn transformed the risks associated with metabolic disorders, including diet, exercise, and pharmaceutical use into moral risks associated with everyday religious life. In these cases, Pentecostal conversion created possible scripts for changing health practices, managing stress, and shifting resource use in the name of religious commitment, providing insights into how self-care can be an expression of religious practice.

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“…At the same time, the spaces that will undermine non‐communicable disease prevention efforts through the perpetuation of risky behaviours – bars, nightclubs, supermarkets, fast food restaurants, fortressed gated communities, privatised green space – have already mushroomed (Solomon ; Watson ). Running alongside this, the commercial palliatives to non‐communicable diseases – gyms, Zumba classes, sugar‐free options, weight‐loss surgery – are already a firm fixture for the urban middle classes across the global south (Baglar ; Whitmarsh ), even as they remain absent from global health research priorities regardless of discipline. This is a huge oversight because residents of the global south do not just subsist with and suffer through what Susan Whyte () has called ‘life conditions’, but rather increasingly have the same ‘lifestyle’ aspirations and rights as those in the global north.…”

Section: The Absent Spaces Of Global Healthmentioning

confidence: 99%

When places come first: suffering, archetypal space and the problematic production of global health

Herrick

2017

Trans Inst British Geog

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The rise of global health as a field of study and site of intervention has animated significant critical social science engagements. Of these, medical anthropology has arguably emerged as the ascendant in the field with its growing corpus of writing and advocacy largely animated by the discipline's 'suffering slot'. This paper thus applies a geographical critique to anthropology's moral, humanitarian impulse to give voice to suffering by exploring the spatial consequences of this mode of scholarship. It argues that the suffering slot inevitably leads global health researchers to certain archetypal spaces and that, in turn, these places: (i) are overwhelmingly biomedical; (ii) come to function as 'truth spots' in the production and circulation of global health knowledge and (iii) perpetuate a global health riddled with 'ignorance spots'. Given this, the paper asks what happens if we look beyond suffering to consider the hidden geographies of global health that might then be revealed. It argues that in order to develop a richer topography of global health knowledge and critique, we must also consider those spaces where pleasure and suffering intersect in ways that challenge the humanitarian impulse and crisis-led readings of health. These other archetypal spaces of global health -gyms, bars, supermarkets and more -are not flippant distractions from the grave reality of human suffering, but rather spaces that condition the genesis of suffering and where affliction is put aside in favour of pleasure. In arguing that we need to be far more attuned to the non-medical spaces where global health is produced, experienced and challenged, the paper also articulates how geography might productively meet anthropology in critical studies of global health.

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“Oh God, Save Us from Sugar”: An Ethnographic Exploration of Diabetes Mellitus in the United Arab Emirates

Cited by 20 publications

References 23 publications

Native American Embodiment of the Chronicities of Modernity: Reservation Food, Diabetes, and the Metabolic Syndrome among the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache

Native American Embodiment of the Chronicities of Modernity: Reservation Food, Diabetes, and the Metabolic Syndrome among the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache

Embedded Narratives: Metabolic Disorders and Pentecostal Conversion in Samoa

When places come first: suffering, archetypal space and the problematic production of global health

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