ABSTRACT
These two quotations have an uncanny resemblance. In the first,Turner (1982a) documents the nomenclature “diaetetick management” that was popularized by George Cheyne, a physician in eighteenth-century England, to promote healthy eating habits among affluent British men. Cheyne’s contention was that the body was like a hydraulic system and human beings must avoid a heavy diet of meat products to prevent it from clogging.The second quote is from a young Indian woman I interviewed for my study of urban, upper-middle class Indian women’s dieting practices. Like many of the women I interviewed, she spoke of dieting and religious fasting as scientific practices that enabled her to become energetic and healthy (Talukdar 2012, Talukdar and Linders 2013). Similar to Cheyne’s contention, the women I interviewed believed that their bodies are objects that would yield better results if subjected to the control and modification of a managed diet. In spite of being separated by a large landmass, a span of two centuries, and other obvious differences, the similarity in responses between Cheyne and the women in my study point to critical periods in modern history when cultures discover and embrace “new” sciences of body and food that promise great physical benefits. The historical moment when the women in my study were discovering new sciences of the
body and diet is, however, drastically different from the time when Cheyne was writing his books on dietary restrictions based on food charts.The last several decades – starting perhaps with the discovery of the recombinant DNA (rDNA) technology in the 1970s1 – has seen the morphing of fields of technology, engineering, medicine, and biology into one large conglomerate field, typically referred to as biomedical technological sciences (hereafter biotechnological sciences), which produce intricate knowledge of how the human body functions. In this system,
biologists, physicians, engineers, and technicians collaborate to develop sophisticated techniques of excavation and analysis that seek solutions and remedies for illnesses and vehicles that promote general wellbeing at molecular and chromosomal levels. The desire to know more about bio-scientific advancements that promise reengineering of the molecular or genetic foundations of life-threatening or debilitating conditions is no longer restricted to a scientific vocation, but is part of a modern cultural imperative. Individuals learn the functioning of the body at its most fundamental biological levels. Developments in the biotechnological sciences mark a new phase in individualization
processes of the modern post-industrial self (Giddens 1991); they have opened up a new frontier in terms of biological solutions to bodily ailments (Rose 2001).These advances also mark a shift in the field of scientific research of the human body, where parameters of investigation are now bound by the use of neoliberal economic principles of “standardized, corporately framed diagnostic and prescribing procedures” (Rose 2007: 11). At first glance, then, it would seem that the women in my study and their desire to manage their food consumption, combine food groups, or learn more about the biological properties of food or their bodies were part of a larger project of self-making (Maguire 2008, Moore 2010) that characterizes modern living across the globe. For the women in my study, weight loss efforts were directed toward feeling “energetic,” or productive in their day-to-day life, or making an “investment in their health” (Talukdar 2012) to lead physically robust lives.The women were exhibiting what Rose would call a “modern personhood” or a mindset dedicated to being constantly engaged in how to optimize the functions of the physical body and maximize its returns. After all, knowledge of how we function at the very core of our biological being, or our “ability to relate to ourselves as ‘somatic’ individuals” (Rose 2007: 26) means that we can correct or even enhance our bodies’ functioning to determine the kind of individuals we want to be. But it soon became clear to me that the nature of women’s engagements with scientific knowledge in my study belied the notion that that there is an identifiable, clear progression in how scientific knowledge spreads; a progression that requires breaking away from old, conventional knowledge systems presumed to be non-scientific, and embarking upon new, radically novel ways of thinking about the inner workings of the human body. In the accounts of women, scientific engagements in the pursuit of robustness emerged out
of a multitude of worldviews and cultural worlds that they inhabited.The women made distinctions between vital and non-vital sciences of the body, which were either anchored in traditional views of bodily wellbeing or in “new” discoveries in laboratories in America they had read about in newspapers. On still other occasions, the women concocted a hybridized notion of what they believed was scientific knowledge of healthy and robust bodies. Most of the time, the women were speculatively modern (Talukdar 2012) about how they engaged with new sciences of body and diet. For instance, the women expressed a lot of interest and desire in acquiring knowledge of fitness to improve overall efficiency and productivity of the body to better fulfill responsibilities associated with being good employees, good mothers, and, in general, good and responsible citizens (Talukdar and Linders 2013). But at the same time, discernable in some of these connections was a certain amount of
skepticism toward new discoveries in the field of “aesthetic medicine” (Edmonds 2003) of the body such as cosmetic enhancements and diet supplement usage.Very few women experimented with weight-loss pills or diet supplements, which guaranteed quick fixes and instantaneous results, on grounds that they only served aesthetic functions and hence were not essential or vital to the functioning of the body.This indicates that culturally specific ideologies of wellbeing tend to shape the spread of modern “technologies of optimization” (Rose 2007). Another noticeable feature of the spread of biotechnological sciences in the Indian context was
the eagerness of the professional classes or those with aspirations of becoming part of India’s urban elite to embrace new sciences of the body, diet, and food items.The purpose of this essay is to offer a thick description of urban Indians’ engagements with biotechnological sciences of the body and diet, which alert us to the surprising and diverse ways in which new scientific ideas spread or are embraced by a culture. To do so, I situate my arguments in a larger epistemological debate over whether there exists
a unidirectional causal relationship between “science” and “society,” where science is the transformative agent of a culture or if instead both are parts and products of a larger “heterogeneous matrix of culture” (Martin 1998: 30), in which modern science as a social institution does not reside outside the purview of the politics of class distinctions or value judgments (Turner 1982a, 1982b). In other words, the path along which ideas move from the scientific complex into larger society and among lay individuals is crisscrossed with cultural institutions that shape and bend these ideas in varied ways (Rajan 2006).This query also requires that we understand that the “scientific enterprise” as a connotative term is not considered exclusive to western thought systems or that formerly colonized societies lacked educational or scientific institutions prior to their encounters with western knowledge systems (Alter 2004, Harding 2008). Biotechnological scientific theories of good health and wellbeing that were developed in
western contexts are indeed gaining ground in the urban Indian landscape (Moore et al. 2011, Rose 2007). English dailies and a burgeoning fitness enterprise in the country – the main disseminators of new sciences in India – repeatedly remind urban Indians that a “wellness wave” (Sarkar 2009) is about to engulf them, as global companies compete among themselves to introduce new health products in the market. Against this backdrop, the women in my study, and urban Indians in general, were eager to develop a biotechnological approach toward life as a way to express their commitment to strive for physical vitality amidst the risks, anxieties, and biological hazards that characterize contemporary existence (Beck 1992). However, very little research has been done on the actual interface between biotechnological theories of the body and diet and urban Indians, or one that illuminates how adoption of biotechnological sciences unfolds in postcolonial, non-western settings that exhibit some amount of ambivalence, and in some cases resistance, to western knowledge systems. I seek to remedy this.
