Christopher E. Forth, Fat. A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life
Christopher E. Forth, Fat. A Cultural History of the Stuff of Life
复制标题
克里斯托弗·E·福斯 (Christopher E Forth)，《脂肪：生命物质的文化史》
DOI：
10.1093/shm/hkz133
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发表时间：
2020
影响因子：
0.7
通讯作者：
Alexander Pyrges
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Alexander Pyrges
在过去的二十年里，肥胖的历史越来越受到学者们的关注。大多数研究试图回答的问题时，为什么和如何确切地谴责过度围开始。虽然较早的史学通常认为，在近代早期到世纪晚期之间的某个时期，肥胖是一种根本性的贬低，但最近的学术研究表明，在前现代欧洲，肥胖的性质是模糊的。克里斯托弗·E.这一时期，他从古代到当代的脂肪文化史试图为何时，尤其是为什么和如何的问题提供新的答案。出于这个原因，他将重点从传统的营养或美学问题转移到物质性问题。这本书从探索古代文献中赋予脂肪的物质性质开始。在对自然的反思中，土壤或牲畜脂肪代表了对立的东西，比如生命和腐烂，或者肥沃和浪费。第四章展示了非人类领域中的这种概念模糊性是如何发展出一套丰富的对脂肪体的描述和评估的，积极和消极的形象并存。他对古代世界脂肪材料的文化史超越了文本分析，包括实践和对象。然而，随着它向中世纪的发展，这项研究采取了一种相当传统的思想史方法，专注于在艺术和文学，医学和礼仪，神学和旅行等不同领域对脂肪和肥胖的概念化。相反，经验维度则被排除在外，它涵盖了过去对脂肪具体表现的处理，例如世纪教会神父约翰·金口（John Chrysostom）对肥胖身体的强烈情感和感官反应。这是否是一种有意识的选择的结果仍然有些不清楚，因为导言既没有描述选择来源的标准，也没有提出明确的审查方法。此外，作者的早期系统和分析方法让位后，最初的章节，以更天气处理相关的知识分子的作品。尽管有这样的局限性，这本书还是令人信服地说明了从古代到文艺复兴时期脂肪意象的持续模糊性。这项研究到了近代早期，又恢复了它的争论形式，它表明了传统上广泛的脂肪图像最终是如何开始缩小的。这里福斯的方法来改变历史的物质性。他现在不再探索身体内外脂肪概念化之间的相似之处，而是将脂肪身体的图像解释为对它们假定的物质品质的反应。作为理想的越来越凝聚的身体和相应的价值的克制（诺伯特埃利亚斯）获得动力-作者的立场-他们边缘化所有积极的内涵肥胖。结果，到了世纪，肥胖在国内被认为是不卫生的，在国外被认为是种族劣等的，在一般情况下被认为是女性。在20世纪，人体脂肪的耻辱性不断增加，因为它的物质存在让人不禁想起，任何试图建立一个不受生物学约束的身体乌托邦的努力都是有局限性的。福斯用他清晰的“历史反思”（第14页）描绘了一幅有趣的画面，它扩展了对这一时期的现有解释，在历史编纂中，
During the last two decades, the history of fatness has attracted growing attention among scholars. Most studies have attempted to answer the questions when, why and how exactly the condemnation of excessive girth began. While older historiography often assumed a fundamental devaluation of corpulence somewhere between the early modern period and the late twentieth century, more recent scholarship shows that ambiguous qualities were assigned to fatness in premodern Europe. Christopher E. Forth follows this periodisation. His cultural history of fat from antiquity to the contemporary era attempts to provide new answers to the when and especially to the why and the how questions. For this reason, he shifts the focus from traditional issues of nutrition or aesthetics to issues of materiality. The book begins with an exploration of the material qualities assigned to fat in ancient texts. In reflections about nature, soil or livestock fat represented opposites, such as life and decay, or fertility and waste. Forth shows how this conceptual ambiguity in the realm of the nonhuman served to develop an ample set of descriptions and assessments of fat bodies as well, with positive and negative images coexisting. His cultural history of the material of fat in the ancient world goes beyond textual analysis, to include practices and objects. As it progresses toward the Middle Ages, however, the study takes a rather traditional history of ideas approach, focusing on learned conceptualisations of fat and fatness in areas as diverse as art and literature, medicine and manners, theology and travel. The experiential dimension, in contrast, which covers past dealings with concrete manifestations of fat, exemplified in the intensely emotionally and sensually charged response of the fourth century Church Father John Chrysostom to fat bodies, is sidelined. Whether this results from a conscious choice remains somewhat unclear as the introduction neither delineates criteria for the selection of sources nor sets forth clear methods for their examination. Moreover, the author’s earlier systematic and analytical approach gives way, after the initial chapters, to a more synoptic treatment of relevant intellectual works. The resulting limitations notwithstanding, the book convincingly illustrates the continued ambiguity of fat imagery from antiquity to the Renaissance era. Regaining its argumentative form as it reaches the Early Modern period, the study shows how the traditionally wide spectrum of images of fat (ness) finally began to narrow. Here Forth’s approach to the history of materiality changes. Rather than exploring parallels between the conceptualisation of fat without and within the body, he now interprets images of fat bodies as reactions to their presumed material qualities. As the ideal of the ever more condensed body and the corresponding value of restraint (Norbert Elias) gained momentum—the author posits—they marginalised all positive connotations of fatness. As a result, by the nineteenth century, being fat was predominantly identified with the unhygienic at home, the racially inferior abroad and the female in general. During the twentieth century, the stigmatizing qualities of corporeal fat continued to increase because its very material existence annoyingly recalled the limits of any attempt to erect a bodily utopia free from all constraints of the biological. With his lucid ‘historical reflections’(p. 14), Forth thus paints an intriguing picture, which expands the existing interpretations of this period of time, well laboured-upon in the historiography on