Feeding Desire: Fatness, Beauty and Sexuality Among a Saharan People

by Popenoe,Rebecca

• ISBN13: 9780415280969
• ISBN10: 0415280966
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Nonspecific Binding
• Copyright: 2003-11-11
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

While the Western world adheres to a beauty ideal that says women can never be too thin, the semi-nomadic Moors of the Sahara desert have for centuries cherished a feminine ideal of extreme fatness. Voluptuous immobility is thought to beautify girls' bodies, hasten the onset of puberty, heighten their sexuality and ripen them for marriage. From the time of the loss of their first milk teeth, girls are directed to eat huge bowls of milk and porridge in one of the world's few examples of active female fattening. Based on fieldwork in an Arab village in Niger, Feeding Desire analyses the meanings of women's fatness as constituted by desire, kinship, concepts of health, Islam, and the crucial social need to manage sexuality. By demonstrating how a particular beauty ideal can only be understood within wider social structures and cultural logics, the book also implicitly provides a new way of thinking about the ideal of slimness in late Western capitalism. Offering a reminder that an estimated 80% of theworld's societies prefer plump women, this gracefully written book is both a fascinating exploration of the nature of bodily ideals and a highly readable ethnography of a Saharan people.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Prologue: There is more to beauty than meets the eye	1	(10)
Beauty universals and cultural particulars	2	(2)
Fatness and fattening cross-culturally	4	(3)
Preview of the book	7	(4)
PART I Entering the field	11	(40)
1 Coming into the Azawagh	13	(20)
The Azawagh	13	(4)
Who are the "Azawagh Arabs"?	17	(3)
Peace Corps prelude: Tchin Tabaraden	20	(2)
Fieldwork: Tassara	22	(5)
Stasis and change	27	(6)
2 Getting fat	33	(18)
Travelers and explorers, 1352-1936	33	(4)
French colonial officials in the Azawagh	37	(2)
Anthropologists on fattening in the Sahara	39	(1)
Getting fat in the Azawagh today	40	(1)
Aichatou	41	(2)
Talking about getting fat: leblüh and al-gharr	43	(1)
When does fattening begin?	44	(1)
Who fattens?	45	(2)
What to eat?	47	(1)
Why fatten?	48	(3)
PART II Self-representations	51	(82)
3 In the name of Allah, most benevolent, ever merciful	53	(22)
The centrality of Islam in Azawagh Arab life	54	(2)
Islam and Islams	56	(1)
The world Allah made	57	(2)
Islam and the body	59	(2)
Islam, gender, and the social fabric	61	(2)
Structures of Islamic life	63	(3)
Spirits	66	(3)
Heaven, and heaven on earth	69	(2)
Abetting Gods order	71	(1)
Lived Islam	72	(3)
4 Ties of blood, ties of milk, ties of marriage	75	(36)
Kith and kin in daily life	75	(2)
Ahmed and Aminatou	77	(3)
The challenges of marriage	80	(3)
Ties of blood	83	(3)
Ties through men	86	(3)
Tribes	89	(3)
Ties through women	92	(1)
Milk kinship	93	(3)
Kinship and sentiment	96	(1)
Marriage	97	(3)
Divorce	100	(1)
Weddings	101	(6)
Fattening and marriage	107	(4)
5 "The men bring us what we will eat": herding, trade, and slavery	111	(22)
Material value and aesthetic values	111	(2)
Honor and pride	113	(1)
Caste in Moor society: slaves, freed slaves, artisans, and Arabs	114	(1)
Slavery	115	(6)
A license to leisure: women's "work"	121	(2)
Subsisting in the Sahara: mens work	123	(5)
Investment of milk from cows in women	128	(1)
Imbuing life with value	129	(4)
PART III Veiled logics	133	(36)
6 The interior spaces of social life: bodies of men, bodies of women	135	(18)
Male bodies and female bodies	136	(3)
Azawagh Arab bodies	139	(3)
Metaphorical bodies	142	(3)
The connectedness of bodies to the world around them	145	(1)
The connectedness of bodies to non-bodily domains	146	(1)
Willful bodies	147	(2)
Heavenly bodies	149	(4)
7 The exterior spaces of social life: tent and desert	153	(16)
Orienting oneself in the world	153	(1)
The gendered geography of everyday life	154	(2)
The tent: women's world	156	(3)
Engendering space: center and periphery, stasis and movement	159	(4)
Engendering space: placehood	163	(1)
Town and desert: women's changing worlds	164	(5)
PART IV Negotiating Life's challenges	169	(30)
8 Well-being and illness	171	(16)
Understanding disease: "hot" and "cold"	171	(4)
Hot and cold vs. Western biomedicine	175	(1)
The social consequences of hot and cold	176	(2)
Open women, closed men	178	(1)
Pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum	179	(1)
The daily diet	180	(2)
Sex	182	(2)
Mind and body, women and men	184	(1)
Exercising agency	185	(2)
9 Beauty, sex, and desire	187	(12)
A review of the argument	188	(2)
Socializing sexuality	190	(2)
Feeding desire	192	(7)
Notes	199	(10)
Glossary	209	(2)
Bibliography	211	(10)
Index	221