Feeding desire : fatness, beauty, and sexuality among a Saharan people / Rebecca Popenoe.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

While the Western world adheres to a beauty ideal that says women can never be too thin, the semi-nomadic Moors of the Sahara desert have for centuries cherished a feminine ideal of extreme fatness. Voluptuous immobility is thought to beautify girls' bodies, hasten the onset of puberty, heighten their sexuality and ripen them for marriage. From the time of the loss of their first milk teeth, girls are directed to eat huge bowls of milk and porridge in one of the world's few examples of active female fattening. Based on fieldwork in an Arab village in Niger, Feeding Desire analyses the meaning.

Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- CONTENTS -- List of illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue: There is more to beauty than meets the eye -- Beauty universals and cultural particulars -- Fatness and fattening cross-culturally -- Preview of the book -- PART I Entering the field -- 1 Coming into the Azawagh -- The Azawagh -- Who are the "Azawagh Arabs"? -- Peace Corps prelude: Tchin Tabaraden -- Fieldwork: Tassara -- Stasis and change -- 2 Getting fat -- Travelers and explorers, 1352-1936 -- French colonial officials in the Azawagh -- Anthropologists on fattening in the Sahara -- Getting fat in the Azawagh today -- Aichatou -- Talking about getting fat: leblūḥ and al-gharr -- When does fattening begin? -- Who fattens? -- What to eat? -- Why fatten? -- PART II Self-representations -- 3 In the name of Allah, most benevolent, ever merciful -- The centrality of Islam in Azawagh Arab life -- Islam and Islams -- The world Allah made -- Islam and the body -- Islam, gender, and the social fabric -- Structures of Islamic life -- Spirits -- Heaven, and heaven on earth -- Abetting God's order -- Lived Islam -- 4 Ties of blood, ties of milk, ties of marriage -- Kith and kin in daily life -- Ahmed and Aminatou -- The challenges of marriage -- Ties of blood -- Ties through men -- Tribes -- Ties through women -- Milk kinship -- Kinship and sentiment -- Marriage -- Divorce -- Weddings -- Fattening and marriage -- 5 "The men bring us what we will eat": herding, trade, and slavery -- Material value and aesthetic values -- Honor and pride -- Caste in Moor society: slaves, freed slaves, artisans, and Arabs -- Slavery -- A license to leisure: women's "work" -- Subsisting in the Sahara: men's work -- Investment of milk from cows in women -- Imbuing life with value -- PART III Veiled logics.

6 The interior spaces of social life: bodies of men, bodies of women -- Male bodies and female bodies -- Azawagh Arab bodies -- Metaphorical bodies -- The connectedness of bodies to the world around them -- The connectedness of bodies to non-bodily domains -- Willful bodies -- Heavenly bodies -- 7 The exterior spaces of social life: tent and desert -- Orienting oneself in the world -- The gendered geography of everyday life -- The tent: women's world -- Engendering space: center and periphery, stasis and movement -- Engendering space: placehood -- Town and desert: women's changing worlds -- PART IV Negotiating life's challenges -- 8 Well-being and illness -- Understanding disease: "hot" and "cold" -- Hot and cold vs. Western biomedicine -- The social consequences of hot and cold -- Open women, closed men -- Pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum -- The daily diet -- Sex -- Mind and body, women and men -- Exercising agency -- 9 Beauty, sex, and desire -- A review of the argument -- Socializing sexuality -- Feeding desire -- Notes -- Glossary -- Bibliography -- Index.

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