Body, Self, and Society: The View from Fiji

In Body, Self, and Society Anne E. Becker examines the cultural context of the embodied self through her ethnography of bodily aesthetics, food exchange, care, and social relationships in Fiji. She contrasts the cultivation of the body/self in Fijian and American society, arguing that the fascination of Americans with and motivation to work on their bodies' shapes as a personal endeavor is permitted by their notion that the self is individuated and autonomous. On the other hand, because Fijians concern themselves with the cultivation of social relationships largely expressed through nurturing and food exchange, there is a vested interest in cultivating others' bodies rather than one's own. So while Fijians vigilantly pay attention to weight and appetite changes among community members, they demonstrate a striking relative disinterest in self-reflexive work on the body. In chapters on attitudes toward body shape, the social dynamics of food exchange, and the collective appropriation of the body's space and experience in reproduction and illness, Dr. Becker demonstrates how the individual body is communally observed, cared for, worked upon, and interpreted in Fiji, and how it is in many ways regarded and experienced as a manifestation of its community rather than of the self. Indeed, Fijian embodied experience not only reflects and encompasses community processes but also at times transcends the body's physical boundaries, in essence revealing that Western notions about the discreteness and circumscription of embodied experience and the fixed identity between body and self are our own particular cultural metaphor.


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