Feeding Desire: Fatness, Beauty and Sexuality Among a Saharan People

by Rebecca Popenoe

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 meanings of women's fatness as constituted by desire, kinship, concepts of health, Islam, and the crucial social need to manage sexuality. By demonstrating how a particular beauty ideal can only be understood within wider social structures and cultural logics, the book also implicitly provides a new way of thinking about the ideal of slimness in late Western capitalism. Offering a reminder that an estimated eighty per cent of the world's societies prefer plump women, this gracefully written book is both a fascinating exploration of the nature of bodily ideals and a highly readable ethnography of a Saharan people.

Genres: Anthropology, Nonfiction, School, Read For School, Sociology

252 pages, Paperback

First published October 29, 2003

Reviews

[Jonathon M · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this for an anthropology class.

"The significance of outer appearance is anything but superficial."

[Demetri · Rating 1 out of 5]

The fattening practice consists of the Arabs making their women move as little as possible and requiring them to move as little as possible in order to get as fat as possible. They consume milky porridge flavored with honey.
The way you raise livestock is by making them move as little as possible and require them to consume as much slop as possible in order to gain as much weight as possible.
So the fattening practice (which the author loves btw) is not too different from how you raise live stock. In fact in the US it is illegal to raise livestock that way, but do to the FDA's poor funding the law is not enforced.
BTW they refer to their servants as slaves in a part of the book and they are run by a theocracy independent of the Niger government.
I was suppose to read this for a Sociocultural Anthropology class.

[Khadija Afandi · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really liked this book, i liked the perspectives she explored i was also quite surprised how balenced the author was in her approach especially in concerns of Islam which most non muslims writers in this feild tend to write bias adaptations. I found that she was fair in writing about her experiences. Also i really loved how easy the book was to read and the structure. Would definitely recommend this.

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read for my cultural anthro class. let’s pretend that i actually finished the whole thing.

[Lucie Kovarik · Rating 3 out of 5]

read for food studies class and it definitely provided a very cultural perspective but some of it struck a nerve with me

[Kayla Dillie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty interesting to see a culture complete opposite of the western culture we live in

[hanabliss · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had to read this for a class (a surefire way to douse interest in a book) but it was still really interesting. With the mainstream media, so many cultures have the thin ideal. It's interesting to read about one that still has a pyramid as the perfect feminine shape, and its still heart wrenching to read about little girls being force fed and pinched or hit to make them eat their porridge. The concept of warm and cold foods was somewhat lost on me, Mainstream American culture doesn't have much to correspond to that so it was hard to understand.

[Elliot de Vries · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short ethnography of the Azawagh "Arab" people of Niger, who are noteworthy for expressing a beauty ideal that includes significant fatness and stretch marks.

The descriptive work was quite interesting, though (as she notes) the perspective from which she wrote was necessarily limited insofar as she had restricted access to male spaces. Her interpretive work leaves much to be desired, unfortunately.

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read it for my Cultural Anthropology class! It really enjoyed it!

[Amanda]

Professor Maggie Cummings class. Had to do two reports on this book. Good book and great prof.