Anthropology of the Body: Fat, Fitness and Form

Catalog description

This course surveys the way our human bodies are valued, transformed, experienced and made subject to control in different societies around the world. It explores cultural constructions of fatness and obesity, fitness and sports as sites of politics, economics and social change, and bodily modification and dis-integration in tattooing, injury, biomedical technology, disability, aging, and extreme environments of war and outerspace. Uses anthropological and feminist theories and introduces ethnographic methods.