TY - JOUR AU - Elliott Michael Reichardt PY - 2018/12/19 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Relocating obesity with multiauthor ethnography JF - Medicine Anthropology Theory JA - MAT VL - 5 IS - 5 SE - Think Pieces DO - 10.17157/mat.5.5.637 UR - http://www.medanthrotheory.org/article/view/4901 AB - Reflecting on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) account of obesity and recent developments in ethnography, I advocate for a collaborative, multiauthor approach to studying obesity and, more broadly, chronic disease. To illustrate this, I show how recent ethnographies of obesity and metabolism have convincingly challenged and reframed the WHO’s account of obesity. I further suggest that future ethnographic studies of obesity (and chronic disease) could expand their analytical scope – without sacrificing a critical and people-centred approach – through coordination and collaboration. A multiauthor approach to obesity research would increase the capacity of ethnography to demonstrate the many conditions that must be fulfilled for a person to become ‘obese’, productively foregrounding how ‘obesity’ emerges out of a web of social, economic, political, chemical, and historical connections. This would enable a more comprehensive understanding of the uneven emergence of obesity (and other chronic diseases) worldwide. ER -