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19

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.

When the woman did share food, it was fresh (unsalted) and otherwise ill prepared. She doled out small portions Hot big enough to fill belly but only, Vy said, to "nasty up me teeth" (to dirty the mouth without satisfying hunger). The woman would boil soup from the same piece of dried fish every day for a week, removing the piece each evening to use the following day. The soup carried nothing of substance and lost its salted taste by day three. It served as a sign of this woman's lack of a will to nurture, as did her thin, husklike form. A body with more vital juices inside would have housed a more social and giving person.

Store-bought snack food is also associated with thinness. The procurement and inges­ tion of packaged ready-to-eat foods (e.g., cookies, cheese puffs, sweet buns) do not involve the regular division of labor and tradition of sharing. Money is instrumentally exchanged for packaged food so that no reciprocity expectations ensue. Not having been prepared by a loving and morally obligated other and especially when ingested alone and away from home, store-bought foods-not coincidentally called dryers-represent the antiso­ cial. Accordingly, those who eat dryers in lieu of home-cooked meals will be thin.

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The Sweetness of Fat 263

KINSHIP AND SOCIABILITY

Jamaican kinship ideally involves a sense of interdependence and obligation, which ensues from shared bodily substance. Thin people have little bodily substance to spare. But sharing one's substance and having children generally are required to attain full adult­ hood because they affirm one's link to a social network.s

Through procreation, a person puts the parental gift of lifeblood from which his or her body was built back into social circulation, confirming and tightening his or her bonds to kin and community. Those who do not reproduce their social networks through procreative relationships physically subvert the social and moral order, as do those who act selfishly, hoarding resources or keeping to themselves so that others cannot ask for favors and so entangle them socially. The bodieS of those elite individuals who are thin­ ner than the poor reveal (to the poor) how they came to enjoy their uplift: through stingy meanness and by divorcing themselves from a social network of kin.

Jamaicans ascertain kinship through blood ties, in which both kinds of blood figure. Male and female sexual fluids are parallel types of white blood, and mingling white blood is key to conception. Pregnancy occurs when male semen meets a ripe female egg (sometimes equitably referred to as a sperm) or the female equivalent of semen-female white blood-in a woman's reproductive tract. Eggs mature and are discharged either monthly or upon sexual excitation. They burst when overripe and no longer fertilizable (as if decaying fruit), and they are excreted through the tube (the vagina).

During gestation, parents feed and so build and grow the fetus with their bodily sub­ stances. At first the fetus develops through simple accretion. After a few months, the babymother's (red) blood and food that she has ingested get eaten by the fetus and are then transformed into its bodily components. The fetus also eats semen ejaculated into its mother during its gestation. If a woman has many lovers, whosoever has invested the most sperm should receive credit for paternity.

The white blood that lovers share in nonreproductive sex only mixes temporarily. But in reproductive sex, blood mingles permanently in an offspring, creating an indi­ rect link between parents. Siblings are related by virtue of having incorporated blood from the same source (or sources, when both parents are shared); other kin links, such as those between cousins, are similarly traced to a consanguineal origin.

The creation of kinship is not always seen as fixed or finished at birth. Older, more traditional Jamaicans say that babies continue the consubstantiation process that cre­ ates kin even after birth by drinking their mothers' milk, which is a kind of white blood. Accordingly, kinship ties can be created between a baby and an otherwise unrelated wet nurse. While biological motherhood is central in establishing maternity rights, tradi­ tional Jamaicans subscribe to an attenuated form of what Watson (cited in Meigs 1987: 120) refers to as "nurture kinship"-kinship that can be altered after birth by what Meigs calls"postnatal acts."

A child not related by virtue of received blood can become as if related to someone by virtue of that person's caretaking efforts. Feeding children is important outside of the womb as in it; food sharing can be a source of, as well as an index of, relatedness. A woman who feeds a child after it is born can claim motherhood: she grows it, as the genetic mother did when she fed it in her womb. Likewise, a man who spends his money on food for a child can claim fatherhood. Following the ethnophysiological model of

264 Elisa J. Sobo

parenthood, kinship can be established and claimed by a caretaker who puts great amOunts of effort into raising, growing, feeding, and so building a child. Food from a caretaker that is taken into and made part of a child's body works like incorporated blood to ere. ate and maintain kin ties.

A big family provides, ideally at least, a big network of unselfconscious, altruistic support. People are physically driven to lend this support simply because they originate from or share one blood and are thus of one accord, sharing one heart and one love. Kin terms express and add an enduring, unconditional quality to relationships, and so cloak instrumental dealings that would otherwise seem self-centered, competitive, anti~ social, and thus distasteful, given the ideology of sociable reciprocity.

Fecundity represents reciprocation-blood for blood. This reciprocity is practical, tangible, and homologous with the idealized reciprocal exchange of resources between kin. A daughter often sends one of her own children to live with and help her mother, giving a life (in the form of her young child) in return for having been given her own life. My neighbor Estelle could hardly wait for her grandson to come up in age so that she could send for him to come live with her and help with those tasks she could not manage.

Procreation confirms male and female virility and fecundity, demonstrating that one has life inside to give and that one's vital essence or life blood will persist. Thin people have little nurturant, willingly sociable capacity, while plump ones-including those with pregnant bellies-are full with it. Those who do not reproduce only serve to work. Their blood disappears from the social circles that individuals, joining together in the cultur­ ally recommended fashion, create and re-create.

THE INFERTILE MULE

Mules do not reproduce. Mules just work. Like mules, women are known for their car­ rying capabilities; women carry wood, water, and so on, and mules serve as pack animals. Donkeys and old women are traditionally associated (Chevannes 1990). One saying about women holds that God made two kinds of donkeys, but one kind cannot talk (Hurston 1990: 76). Nonfecund women are called mules: unlike fertile women and donkeys (the more common beast of burden), mules do not breed.

Mules (and so nonfecund women) are traditionally associated with prostitutes (Chevannes 1990). In addition to defying female role expectations and posing an antisocial chal­ lenge (whether intended or not), nonmonogamous and nonfecund women fulfill the culturally informed sexual but not the procreative needs of men (nor do they fulfill their own cul­ turally constructed childbearing needs). Although as sexual and subsistence workers nonfecund women, like prostitutes and mules, are useful, those who do not provide society with children are said to "have no use" in the end. This phrase implies that the ultimate pur­ pose of the individuals-and of sex, which ideally ends in discharge (the release of sperm and eggs)-is to re-create society.

Mules do not reproduce and so cannot establish any enduring form of community. They do not share their blood with other mules-they do not establish relationships confirmed by offspring. They are stubborn and uncooperative. Mules represent partic­ ularly antisocial and selfish beings uninterested in growing up to establish new bonds and unable to return the gift of life by fulfilling the social obligation of creation.

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The Sweetness of Fat 265

dence on parents. Nonfecund women can never really achieve social adulthood because they, like mules, do not overtly signal childhood's end by having babies and establish­ ing bonds-blood bonds-with the larger society outside their immediate family circles (infertile men can, of course, claim to have fathered children not really their own).

Those who do not have children are generally not well articulated into a social net­ work. They have no blood ties to any babyfathers' households (so no paternal grandmothers, aunts, or uncles are bound to help them with the children). Furthermore, without chil­ dren to response for, their claims on the resources of their own natal networks are weak. (Such a situation does not always entail suffering. Those with small networks and no offspring are minimally obligated to others.)

Having children expresses a readiness to fulfill obligations to society and one's rela­ tives. It demonstrates a willingness to share resources and also one's body substance in order to maintain and regenerate the social environment into which one was born. Peo­ ple who do not create and maintain network ties tacitly release themselves from their social group's hold.

PLUMPNESS AND SEXUAL FLUIDS

The thin body lacks vital fluids, which can cause embarrassment and shame because this means a person can be cast as infertile and antisocial. That is why it cut Dara when a girl who hated her asserted that Dara had to wear two suits or layers of clothing to look presentable-to pad her mauger frame. Dara was slim, but Jamaicans denigrated for thinness were never extraordinarily slender in my culturally conditioned opinion. Even the women pictured in a British hardware company's Jamaican give-away calen­ dar would be judged fat by mainstream U.S. standards. But two teenaged male participants in this research laughed at their picture, calling them mauger dogs.

People are sensitive to such insults. Some prepubescent girls buy special so-called anorexa pills to help them put on weight. Pharmacists sold the Anorexal brand until it was with­ drawn from the market; now most carry a brand of anorexa pill called Peritol. The pill, an antihistamine (cyproheptadine) that enhances the appetite, can be bought with no questions asked.

As a child matures and begins to develop a healthy libido or nature, the body swells with sexual fluids. A good shape is a matter of firmness and proportion. Men should be muscular, never flabby. Women's bottoms should be broad (my fictive brother boasted that Jamaican women have the broadest bottoIl1s in the world) and breasts should stand up high. A sagging or diminutive bosom indicates a lack of plumping juices. Thin, tomboy­ ish girls with short hair arid girls whose hair stays short because it is dry and brittle and breaks off are insultingly called dry-head pickney, which alludes to their immaturity (pickney means child or children) and, moreover, to their lack of vital moistness and so to their potential roles as infertile subversives.

Sexual fluid, like fatness itself, is good, but here again too much can be harmful and balance must be maintained. Orgasm releases body-swelling sexual fluids. Celibate women or those with poor lovers may become sick through the retention of too much sweet water. (Wet dreams help keep males well.) A young woman, Jean, once pointed to her friend Titia's crotch, calling "punani fat, eee?" jean's joke about the size of Titia's punani or pubic area implied its disuse. IfTitia did not have sex soon, Jean suggested, a buildup of overripe sexual juices would cause bodily harm.

266 Elisa J. Sobo

A buildup of unreleased semen or sweet water can cause teenager bumps or pimples as excess sexual fluid tries to work its way out through the pores. The association between pimples and unused sexual discharge is a logical extension of the notion that a good thing like money or vital fat can go bad if not properly dispersed, and of the idea that overfull, overripe fruit bursts and sours. Some say teenager bumps are more common among youths whose caretakers can afford to provide them with expensive rich foods but who also insist that they remain celibate, in keeping with the behavioral expecta­ tions for those of high station (regarding the maintenance of respect, see Wilson 1973).

DISCHARGE AND DECAY

Bodily equilibrium is essential, so sexual fluids must be discharged now and again. Women receive men's discharge during intercourse. Like their own sexual fluids, sperm taken in fattens women, making them sexually appealing and attractive. A teenaged girl's increas­ ing plumpness is as much a perceived result of her becoming sexually active as it is a positive result of her own growing moistness and fertility. Some people, to support their claim for the health-enhancing value of sperm, say that prostitutes and other women who perform oral sex get fat.

But prostitution and oral sex are not condoned (Sobo 1993a). The reasons for pros­ titution's poor standing have to do with its instrumental nature and the popular belief that prostitutes seek to avoid pregnancy. Conception does not have to happen during sex, but the possibility of conceiving should exist; the interpersonal flow of sexual flu­ ids, like resources, should not be blocked. With oral sex, conception cannot occur; furthermore, the mouth is meant for food, not sexual fluids. So in situations where the morality of oral sex and prostitution are called into question, people will say that the toxicity of discharge improperly or excessively taken in makes women who have oral sex or who prostitute themselves pull down or lose weight.

Semen can cause problems even for women who participate only in socially sanc­ tioned sex acts. When conception does not happen, discharge can lodge in inaccessible spaces. It rots quickly, growing toxic and polluting. Menstruation serves as a purifying washout for the female reproductive system (Sobo 1992).6

DRY SPINE

Men also need to be careful about semen, albeit for different reasons. Men emphasize the importance of intercourse and ejaculation for clearing the line. If this is not done, excess amounts of undischarged semen and sinews harden up in the spine, causing back pain and sexual problems. Drinking beer helps promote the flow of fluids through the penis. It is assumed that men will find partners and so need never masturbate to clear the line. Women who stay celibate too long may get nerves problems, as the nerves sys­ tem contains sinews.Discharging cleanses the body, promoting as well as signaling good health. People-mostly men-use this knowledge to justify frequent sex and to coerce others into partnership. Asymmetric gender power relations find support in traditional health beliefs.

Jamaicans believe that men, as opposed to women, always want sex and cannot eas­ ily control their urges. Male sexual behavior is justified as an inherent part of their biology. However, sex taxes the male constitution. Men lose much more sinews when discharg­ ing than do women. Like any resource, semen must be shared. But people with too many

demands on or even driea tion involvir

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The Sweetness of Fat 267

demands on their energy or resources inevitably end up feeling sucked out, eaten out, or even dried out. A man who runs out of sinews comes down with dry spine, a condi­ tion involving ejaculatory dysfunction.

Dry spine can occur if a man involves himself with an abnormally libidinous or white liver woman-a woman who works her men far too hard, that is, bone-dryas well as to the bone. The livers of sexually hungry women may be described as white because they are full of sinews, because of the symbolic link between egoism and lightness, or because such women conform to the stereotyped view of sexually ravenous white female tourists. White liver women are feared by men insecure about their power to satisfy women sexually. Such men experience performance anxiety, and impotent men or those who simply can't do the work of sex are vindictively called soft, which harms their rep­ utations.

,Men with dry spine will draw down thin as their stores of vital juice are dried out and depleted. They grow infertile (like mules) and are sexually useless. Some have trou­ ble urinating: not a drop of sinews remains to help ease urine's passage through the genital tube. Squatting like women helps. Ma Bovie, telling me about a man so dam­ aged by an overenthusiastic partner that he could hardly walk, offered a story about a cock with light, dry, stingy meat. Rooster meat should be dark, moist, fatty, and rich. Hindsight told her that this cock must have suffered a terrible case of dry spine: she remembered that his hen wives demanded "plenty" sex.

Dry spine can reverse itself over time, but recovery demands total sexual abstinence so that the body can renew its store of sinews. Sufferers can take lime juice because, as it draws out heat, it dissipates the libido or nature. One woman surmised that the pope must drink lots of lime juice, for having nature is only natural and health requires expur­ gating it rather than simply repressing and not spending it. But anyone who has gone too far in expressing his nature and has dried his sinews or juice stores must add plenty of slimy okra, gelatinous cow foot, and other sinews-building foods to his diet. Drinks made from condensed milk and soursop (Annona muricate) juice or from the seaweed Irish moss (Gracilaria spp.), which resembles semen, and coconut jelly (the white, gel­ like meat of young coconuts) are especially helpful to put it back.

A healthy libido or nature, which demonstrates one's physical and social vitality, depends on healthy blood. Roots tonic, made mainly from plant roots gathered during the full moon (when they are supposedly plumpest and most powerful), energizes the body by building, cleansing, and mobilizing the blood. A man with dry spine takes root tonic once every morning and night to replenish and enrich his blood stores. After a year of this treatment, his spine and his sex life should be fine. His body will have grown moist and full with vital fluid. Many men whose spines are fine take the roots regularly any­ how, swearing by its effects on potency. Women take it too, for general health enhancement.

BAD SHAPE

Fluid loss in women is most noticeable in the bosom, which, after a woman has had children or after a miscarriage or abortion, sags flat and low. A sagging bosom indi­ cates a declining physical condition-a used up, postreproductive body. Too soft, with no babies in her belly and no life-giving milk to make firm her breasts, a woman with a "bad" shape is, like an overripe fruit, on her way to decay.

Cow's milk and other foods that build sinews increase a woman's store of breast milk

The life-affirmin~ in the traditional sa~ either fatten or brin dilated with vitallif

268 Elisa]. Saba

and so plump the bosom. Sperm also increases the amount of white blood women carry. A nursing woman should only have intercourse with lovers whose sperm helped grow the nursing child. Otherwise, the child will get sick from drinking breast milk that Con­ tains foreign sperm and from contact with or the ingesting of any foreign sweat that remains on the mother's breast after sex with the nonfather. The baby will fail to thrive.

A woman with a small, slow child risks being accused of having an outside man. Peo­ ple may surmise that economic instability forced the woman into the liaison. This will shame her, and it will shame her babyfather by indicating that he failed to provide for his child.

Through early weaning, women with new lovers can avoid harming their babies, their reputations, or their conjugal relationships. Early weaning also helps women maintain figures that are attractive to men, as prolonged nursing tires their bodies.

Bosoms sag with use and age, but they also fall after abortions or miscarriages, or when a body is overworked and so depleted of its stores of blood. Women not blessed with firm breasts risk being accused of taking purgatives to wash away baby (abortion is not condoned: Sobo 1995). They risk being labeled prostitutes, who overwork their bodies with sexual labor exchanged directly for instrumental gain and which is there­ fore antisocial labor. The body shape associated with a separation between sex and reproduction, and with aging and death, is thin and flaccid, not firmly plump like the sociable one.

SOCIABLE PLUMPNESS

Meanings attributed to personal appearances are context-specific, and circumstances such as personal vendettas affect which meanings get linked with whose bodies. The good as well as the bad can be highlighted. For example, a thin individual can escape ridicule if his or her svelte shape is caused by working long and hard for the benefit of others. As a general rule, however, and especially when a slender person's behavior gives others cause to disparage him or her, the thin person is cast in a bad light as lacking the willingness and the capability for giving life. The individual is branded selfish and mean, and people point to his or her body's dry, husklike nature as a confirmation of these antisocial, nonprocreative leanings. Like the person too rich, the person too thin-whether through circumstances or choice-is seen to shirk his or her social duties to share with and nurture kin. The thin individual is seen to contribute little to society, and the shape of his or her body is used to bear witness to this.

The condition of a person's relationships is inferred by others when they observe and comment on the state of his or her body. In turn, people try to mold the shapes of their bodies in order to affect the inferences other people make. Bordo (1990) explores main­ stream U.S. dieting and body sculpting through exercise with this notion (and typical U.S. ideas about self-control) in mind. While mainstream Americans prefer regimes that lead to thinness, Jamaicans attempt to fatten their bodies (and those of others whom they care or response for). Both types of manipulations are efforts to construct and pro­ mote oneself as a sociable, desirable individual within a given cultural context.

A fuller understanding of the interactive dimension of body sculpting and the read­ ing of bodily shape opens one avenue to the study of the cultural aspects of ideas about nutrition and the standards for physical beauty and health. The study of traditional health beliefs and social and moral ideals exposes much of the logic behind body shapes and the regimes people attempt to adhere to in order to affect them.

and happy to fulfill with death, but the turant and construe

This chapter is part oj mation presented in t and in various article out with the guidance naja, and Drexel Wo°

1. Many of the im of the people d low villagers (ll

2. Works dealing v, 1985; Phillips one's ancestral Some people b; Color conscioll over social mal be shifting as II

3. For this reasor: or have rural ill retain traditio I

4. Drexel WoodsH them (strife)-­ The flow of em son, personal

5. Just bearing i( 1993b), resp« essential for [ for themselv<; commitment tor, healer, all guaranteed i

6. The menstrul denigrated a has to do wii over, it has to with their II food. Once just as bloo

Austin, D. 1984. borhoods.

Bailey, F. G. 197 Becker, A. 1990

Harvard l Blake, J. 1961. ­ Bordo, S. 1990.

S. Shuttle'

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