What does it mean when jamaicans say blood clot

Reading Journal

TIle Sweetness of Fat Health, Procreation, and Sociability

in Rural Jamaica

ELISA]. SOBO

In the United States there is a well-known saying that you can't be too rich or too thin, but in rural Jamaica, amassing wealth and keeping slim have antisocial connotations. Ideally, relatives provide for each other, sharing money and food. Because kin share wealth, no one gets rich; because kin feed each other, no one becomes thin. Cultural logic has it that people firmly tied into a network of kin are always plump and never wealthy.

Especially when not well liked, thin individuals who are neither sick nor poor are seen by their fellow villagers as antisocial and mean or stingy.l These individuals do not create and maintain relationships through gift-giving and exchange. They hoard rather than share their resources. Their slender bodies bespeak their socially subversive natures: thinness indicates a lack of nurturant characteristics and of moist, procreative vitality­ things on which a community's reproduction depends.

Rural Jamaicans' negative ideas about thinness are linked with their ideas about health. As Sheets-Johnstone points out, "The concept of the body in any culture and at any time is shaped by medical beliefs and practices" (1992: 133). Notions concerning health can profoundly influence the interactive and symbolic communications made through our bodies. These notions greatly influence the ideal standards set for bodies and affect the ways we experience, care for, and shape (or try to shape) our bodies and those of others (Browner 1985; Ehrenreich and English 1979; Nichter and Nichter 1987; Payer 1988).

Importantly, notions about health are-in a very tangible way-notions about body ideals, and they have social meaning. Health traditions do not exist in isolation from other realms of culture, such as gender relations and economy (Farmer 1988; Jordanova 1980; Martin 1987), nor are they isolated from extracultural influences, such as ecology and global political conditions (Farmer 1992; Vaughan 1991). Often, ideas about the body and its health are put forward as rationalizations or ideological supports for con­ ditions, such as class and gender inequalities or personal maladjustments (e.g., Kleinman

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The Sweetness of Fat 257

1980; Laws et al. 1985; Lock 1989; Scheper-Hughes 1992). In this chapter, I describe the traditional health beliefs that inform understandings of body shape in rural Jamaica, and I trace the connections between these ideas and Jamaican understandings about sociability (see also Sobo 1993b).

For rural Jamaicans, the ideal body is plump with vital fluids, and maintaining the flow of substances through the body is essential for good health. Taylor (1992) argues that an emphasis on maintaining a continuous, unimpeded flow through the body is common among those who value reciprocity and emphasize the obligation kin have to share with each other, which Jamaicans do. Sickness occurs when the flow is blocked or otherwise "anomic" (Taylor's term, 1988); individual pathologies are homologous with social pathologies, caused by disturbances in the flow of mutual support and aid.

Taylor shows that health-related symbolism "establishes implicit connections between the bodily microcosm and the social macrocosm" (1988: 1343). "Liquids are especially privileged vehicles of this symbolism," he says, "because they possess the capacity to flow, and thus to mediate between distinct realms of being ... attenuating the opposi­ tion between self and other" (1988: 1344). In rural Jamaica, people are physically linked by bodily liquids-fluids like semen and the blood that flows from mother to fetus dur­ ing gestation. They also are linked through food that is shared. Both vital bodily fluids and foods fatten the body, making plumpness an index of the quality and extent of one's social relations as well as an index of good physical health (see Cassidy 1991).

The concept of the body-in-relation may seem foreign to U.S. or Western European readers who tend to view the body like they view the self-as autonomous, individual, and independent. Their bodies serve primarily as vehicles for the expression of the indi­ vidual self, and so of self-directed denial, control, and mastery (Becker 1990: 1-10). Jamaicans, however, recognize the body's shape as an index of aspects of the social net­ work in which a person is (or is not) enmeshed and of those individual traits that affect that person's social connectedness, such as the ability and willingness to give (see Cas­ sidy 1991).

Influenced by British interests, much of the anthropological literature on Jamaica deals with kinship and social structure (e.g., Blake 1961; Clarke 1957; Douglass 1992; Smith 1988). Some studies examine the cultural construction of kinship, but none examine the ethnophysiology of blood ties and most overlook the body as such, despite its nec­ essary role in procreation. Some works concerned with Jamaican family planning include descriptions of the reproductive body (e.g., Brody 1981; MacCormack 1985), but the health-related significance of blood and the physical intricacies of consanguineal and other consubstantial kin ties (and of their behavioral ramifications) are left unexplored. Pan-Caribbean ethnomedical notions about blood are discussed by Laguerre (1987), but the social and cultural meanings of body morphology and of bodily components (and the sharing thereof) have received little attention.2

METHODS AND SETTING

Research for this chapter was carried out in a coastal village of about eight hundred people in the parish of Portland, where I lived for a year in 1988 and 1989 (see Sobo 1993b for a full account of the research). Data were collected through participant-observation and interviews that took place in community settings and in private yards. I also solicited drawings of the body's inner workings from participants.

258 Elisa J. Sobo

Like most Jamaicans, the majority of the villagers were impoverished descendants of enslaved West Africans.3 Many engaged in small-scale gardening, yet few could man­ age on this alone. To supplement their meager incomes, people also took in wash, hired themselves out for odd jobs, engaged in part-time petty trade like selling oranges, and relied on relatives for help.

Jamaican villages typically consist of people brought together by ancestry, or by prox­ imity to a shop or postal agency. In some cases, they are organized around an estate where village members sell their labor. Households are often matrifocal (see Sargent and Harris 1992: 523; Smith 1988: 7-8), and nonlegal conjugal unions and visitingrela_ tionships (in which partners reside separately) are common. Houses are generally made of wood planks and zinc sheeting; often they lack plumbing and electricity. People build their houses as far apart as possible, but they are usually still within yelling distance of a neighbor.

BODY BASICS

Jamaicans value large size, and they build the body by eating. Different foods turn into different bodily components as needed, either for growth or to replenish substances lost through work and other activities. Comestibles that do not so much build the body but serve to make people feel full are called food. In common Jamaican usage, food means only tubers-belly-filling starches not seen as otherwise nutritious.

Blood is the most vital and the most meaning-invested bodily component. It comes in several types. When unqualified by adjective or context, the word blood means the red kind, built from thick, dark liquid items such as soup, stout, and porridge and from reddish edibles such as tomatoes. Red wine, also referred to as tonic wine, can be used to build blood, and blood is sometimes called wine. Some think that the blood of meat­ kind, such as pork or beef, is directly incorporated into human blood; others say that meat's juices build blood. Wild hog meat, redder than regular pork, is supernutritious and vitality boosting because wild hogs feed mainly on red-colored roots, said to be beneficial blood-builders. People point out that meat-kind left sitting out or from which all vital fluid has drained (as when cooked for a long time in soup) loses its nutritive value and serves only as food to fill belly.

Sinews, another type of blood, comes from okra, fish eyes, and other pale slimy foods, such as egg white or the gelatinous portions of boiled cow skin or hoof. Sinews refers to, among other substances, the joint lubricant that biomedical specialists call synovial fluid, which resembles egg white. Sinews is essential for smooth joint movements and steady nerves. The functioning of the eyes depends on sinews too: the eyes are filled with it and glide left and right and open and shut with its aid. Sinews, also associated with procreation, is found in sexual effluvia and breast milk. Many call sinews white blood, as opposed to red.

People have less elaborate ideas about what edibles other bodily components are made of. Vitamins, contained in the strengthening tablets and tonics that are popular and eas­ ily available, build and fatten. Some Jamaicans argue that meat-kind builds muscles. Most agree that corn meal builds flesh. A few suggest that milk builds bones, at least in children but not necessarily in adults whose bones have already developed.

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The Sweetness of Fat 259

bags and tubes, such as the baby bag and the urine tube. A main conduit leads from the top of the body through the belly to the bottom, with tributary bags and tubes along its length. Sometimes, tube and bag connections are not tightly coupled. A substance improperly propelled can meander off course, slide into an unsuitable tube or bag, lodge, and cause problems.

FOOD SHARING AND SOCIAL RELATIONS

In reviewing the social significance and health benefits of big size cross-culturally, Cas­ sidy (1991) found that socially dominant individuals who are enmeshed in sound relationships are usually large. Bigness tends to ensure reproductive success and survival in times of scarcity, and plumpness is generally considered attractive. According to Brink (1989), such is the case in many of the West African societies from which people were taken to Jamaica as slaves. In these societies, those who can afford to do so seclude their ado­ lescent girls in special "fattening rooms" and, after a period of ritual education and heavy eating, the girls emerge fat, attractive, and nubile.

In Jamaica, where a respected adult is called a big man or a big woman, good rela­ tions involve food sharing, and people on good terms with others are large. Weight loss signals social neglect. A Jamaican seeing someone grow thin wonders about the sorts of life stresses that have caused the weight loss (rather than offering congratulations for it and attributing it to a "good" diet, as many middle- and upper-class people in the United States do).

In the ideal Jamaican world, mothers feed their children, kin feed kin, and lovers feed each other. Men involved with women put on pounds from the meals their women serve them. Likewise, women display the status of their relations with their measurements; the breadth of the backside is particularly symbolic. Villagers noticed when a woman named Meg began to mauger down (get thin, grow meager) and lose her once-broad bottom; they knew-and they broadcast-that her affair with a rich old man had ended as she apparently no longer received food or resources from him.

Food sharing is a part of good social relations, and it, as well as other kinds of shar­ ing, ends when people fall out. People with something between them (i.e., strife) both cease to give gifts and refuse to receive them. For instance, they refuse food from each other (often because they fear being poisoned; Saba 1992). A disruption in the flow of goods and services signals the disintegration of a relationship.4 Sister Penny knew that her relationship with Mister Edward was in trouble on the day he refused and sent back the dinner that she regularly prepared and had her daughter carry down the road to him at his mother's house, where he lived.

Good relationships and good eating go hand in hand, but plumpness depends on more than mere food-it depends on pleasant household conditions. Living in a household where the conditions (that is, the group dynamics) are harmonious and agreeable ensures both physical and mental vitality. No matter what they eat, unhappy people who live where the conditions are unpleasant lack energy, and they draw down (get thin) as fat melts off.

When a young woman named Any lost weight and grew lackadaisical, villagers knew that she and her live-in boyfriend were having problems. Indeed, Amy's young man had taken up with his sister's boyfriend's sister. Amy's declining physical state and lethargy indicated this change in the conditions. Even with plenty to eat, a person in her posi­

260 Elisa J. Sobo

tion would lack energy and pull down mauger because, as one woman commenting On the situation explained, "people with worries can't fat."

SWEETNESS, RIPENESS, AND DECAY

Fatness at its best is associated with moistness, fertility, and kindness (a sociable and giving nature) as well as with happiness, vitality, and bodily health in general. People know that drinks and warm, moist, cooked foqt:! can fatten them, while cold rice, overnight food (leftovers), and dryers such as store-bought crackers usually cannot. Fatness con­ notes fullness and juicy ripeness, like thai: of ripe fruit well sweet and soon to burst. Young boys fill out when they approach adulthood; young girls plump up in late ado­ lescence as a prelude to childbearing. Men often call pubescent girls soon ripe, and they allude to sex with ripe girls through talk of harvesting.

Jamaicans call pleasing things sweet. When someone unexpectedly laughs or smiles, they are commonly asked, "Is what sweet you so?" People associate sweet goodness with fatness too. Men often describe plump women whom they find attractive as sweet. Good food also is sweet. Something sweet is ready to eat or ripe for enjoyment. As it approaches maturity, fruit swells and sweetens. A dream of fruit at its fullest, sweetest stage of development means that the time is ripe for whatever project the dreamer had in mind. Ripeness connotes urgent readiness (as for sexual relations). It can also mean ill-mannered precociousness, just as green (unripe, unprocessed) can describe naivete. Unruly, disrespectful children are put down: "You too ripe!"

Overripe fruit rots and its sweetness sours. After it swells and ripens it declines, com­ ing to resemble feces-soft, dark, fetid, and sometimes maggot infested. Overripe fruit is never eaten. By picking fruit just as it turns (from green), Jamaicans avoid the possi­ bility of contamination with rot.

Ideas about decay give expletives power. The curse rhatid expresses, as a homonym, the connection between rotted matter and problems worthy of wrath, pronounced "rhat" or "rhot" (see Cassidy 1982: 175). The negative connotations of rot and decay make bumbo clot, rhas clot, and blood clot among the most insulting epithets available, for these phrases describe the cloth (clot) diapers used to sop up dangerous waste that seeps out from the bowels of the body. Bumbo clot loosely refers to the diapers once used to catch the fecal and other matter that oozes from corpses when they are moved (morti­ cians generally take care of this now), while blood clots serve as menstrual rags. Rhas clots do either.

Ideas about decay also fuel subversive banter. While playing bingo in the back room of a shop on the main road, which only more rebellious characters do as it brings dis­ approval, one rowdy woman named Pet denounced another boisterous player, Glory, for not having bathed. Glory, who had bathed, retorted: "You stink like ripe banana" (in other words, "you stink like feces"; picture overripe banana flesh). Pet playfully drew power from this complaint, warning Glory that most of the bellyful of ripe fruit that she had lately eaten was ready for gaseous rectal expulsion.

All that gets taken into the body, whether to build or fill belly, must get used or expelled because unincorporated excess begins to swell and decay. This knowledge leads people to associate superfluous or unutilized food, fat, health, and such with filth and the inevitable process of decomposition that accompanies death. Some Jamaicans speak of "good" fat and "bad" fat, the good being firm like a fit mango and the bad being spongy, soft,

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The Sweetness of Fat 261

hanging slack, and denoting declining fitness as if a person was an overripe fruit, begin­ ning to break down or rot.

WASTE AND WASHOUT

Not all that gets ingested is transformed into specific components like sinews or blood, and some things are not utilized in the body's structure at all. Extra liquids become urine, and solid food turns to didi or feces, which move out from the belly cavity through the tripe (digestive tubing) and are expelled. People who do not use the toilet often enough literally fill up with waste. Trisha once asked her five-year-old daughter why the white missionaries always had such soft and overfat bellies. The little girl explained that "the tripe them fulla didi." Delighted, Trisha reiterated, "theyfulla shit!"

A body that does not efficiently rid itself of excess and rotting waste turns septic inside because too muck:'decomposition then takes place internally (most of waste's decom­ position should take place outside of the body). A number of things can cause digestive inefficiency. Too much of a rich, strength-giving food such as cheese or cream can elide or clog the inner works, causing sluggish digestion and a backup of food in the belly. So can gluttony, which also reduces the amount of food available to others. Things like coffee grinds or undigested hard food-tough edibles such as bones or coco (a very hard tuber)-can also cause problems by settling in the belly-bottom and blocking the exit tubes. Held too long, food rots in place, festers, and sickens. The belly might even burst from buildup.

The most popular cure-all, the washout or laxative purge, eliminates blockages and harmful waste from the system. A washout once a month-a schedule modeled gyno­ centrically on the menstrual cycle (Sobo 1993a)-is advised. The importance of keeping clean inside explains one woman's choice of survival essentials (made as she fled her house during the 1988 hurricane), which included only "the ingredients for a washout" plus a blanket and some biscuits. It makes clear why every household medicinal supply includes, if nothing more, a purgative such as Epsom salts, cathartic herbs, or castor oil. And it explains why so many people understand the life-support devices seen in hos­ pitals, such as the nasogastric tube, to be mechanically effecting washout cures.

The importance of keeping clean inside so that proper, balanced flow can be main­ tained parallels the importance of keeping goods and services flowing through networks of kin and corresponds in a number of ways to the idea that hoarding is bad. An over­ abundance of perishable resources not passed on will rot. Even money uncirculated is associated with decay, as the traditional association between feces and money (Chevannes 1990) reveals. Hoarding means neglecting one's social network, possibly allowing oth­ ers to experience avoidable hardship, which can lessen the network's cohesiveness.

THINNESS

Like cleanliness and balance, plumpness is important for good health. Few rural Jamaicans want to reduce. Diet foods and beverages are only seen in bigger towns. People gener­ ally assume that they are meant for diabetics, because no one should wish to be thin. Thinness is associated with ideas antithetical to those that "good" fat connotes. Thin­ ness and fatness are to each other as the lean, dry, white meat of a chicken is to its fatty, moist, dark parts-the parts that most eaters prefer. Ideas about infertility and unkind­ ness are linked with the notion of thinness. People taunt others by saying they will dry

262 Elisa]. Sobo

up and grow thin from antisocial meanness. Their observations of the elite and those in power who are light-skinned and whom they see as thin reinforce this belief.

Thin people are understood to lack the vitality associated with moist and juicy "good" fat. Like an erect penis or breasts plumped with milk, like a fat juicy mango, the body seems more vital when full of fluid and large in size. While too much blood or food overburdens the body and can rot and cause sickness, as noted above, dry bodies have no vital nature at all (low levels of bodily fluids and fat can lead women to have trou­ ble conceiving). A slim person, especially a slim woman, is called mauger-meager and powerless-as if not alive at all and, like a mummy or an empty husk, far beyond that powerfully dangerous state of decay. A thin, dry body reveals a person's non-nurturant nature and his or her lack of social commitment.

BEING SKINNY, BEING MEAN

Kindness involves altruistic, kinlike sharing. Kind people give what is asked for and also offer things. They treat others as if family. A mean person, like a stranger (not kin), never shares and always refuses requests. Everyone hates a person who is near or exact, such as someone who never cooks extra dinner-someone stingy with food and so with their sociability. People concerned with their reputations are free with what money they have, buying drinks and putting on a show of kindness so that others cannot call them mean.

Mean people use very little salt in their cooking. Salt costs money, and it is associ­ ated with (among other things) imported foods, healing, good spiritual forces, and heaviness. It affects food's flavor, and most Jamaicans declare that they simply will not eat fresh (unsalted) food because it tastes bad. Like their cooking styles, their bodies give mean people away. Those who are near have a cubbitch hole or dent of covetousness at the neck-back; in other words, they are thin. Jamaicans say that mean people's bodies "dry down," "dry out," and "come skin and bone."

Vy and her brother, both in their early twenties, laughed about the mean old woman with whom their mother sent them to live fifteen years ago when she had no money and could not keep (support) or care for them herself. The old woman's thin body and flat cooking betrayed her nearness. Some stingy people draw down mauger or slim because, on top of not feeding others, they starve themselves, Vy explained.