The Wonder of Things as They Are: Theorizing Obesity and Family Life with Art

Abstract

I praise the opportunity given to me in this chapter of taking a detour back to the detour: to explore what it is that the drawings and the novel made possible. Before embarking on this journey back, I want to clarify that the fact that what we as anthropologists want to express is often elusive, that the arguments are complicated, is not what I am after here. Furthermore, I am not reflecting here on art as a way to represent research findings that might be more evocative or engaging than traditional academic writings—or on art as empirical examples in the style of many of my favorite philosophers. Rather, I want to reflect on art, often perceived as imprecise and elusive when compared to science, as a theoretical framework in its own right, as a way of thinking and philosophizing, which, to paraphrase Cavell, stays close to our "relationship to things as they are." I will do this in three steps. First, I will present data from the ethnographic fieldwork; then I will introduce my use of the novel and the drawings; finally, I end with some reflections on art as a mode of thinking about data, that is, as theory. The fieldwork on obesity, kinship, and relatedness was carried out with four families in 2014-2015, whom I had met initially during my Ph.D. fieldwork in 2001-2003.1 know these families very well, and they appear in this fieldwork not solely as informants or interlocutors, but as frontline researchers, helping me reflect on the obesity epidemic from within their own lived experience. The following conversation is taken from a family interview. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)