Sugar and Modernity in Latin America

Description

Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and other diseases related to modern lifestyles have spread with frightening speed all over the globe, a development that is often correlated with an increase in the consumption of sugar. Latin America - the cradle of the world's sugar production - is no exception; it has witnessed an explosion of cases of diabetes, especially in Brazil and Mexico. Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the problem, this book asks two questions. First, what are the relationships between diabetes, sugar intake, and 'dangerous' modern lifestyles? And second, how can research into the material, symbolic, and historical functions of sugar redefine the concept of modernity?
Experts in medical science, agriculture, sociology, food science and anthropology, as well as in Latin America, Brazilian, and literary studies use sugar as a prism for understanding the complicated relations between disease and cultural and social habits, between past and present, and between symbolic meanings and material effect. Through this truly interdisciplinary perspective, both traditional approaches to lifestyle diseases and current understandings of modernity are questioned.
Sugar and Modernity in Latin America serves as an example of and a call for interdisciplinary dialogue in response to the grand challenges of modern society.

Sujets

• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique

Informations

• Publié par: Aarhus University Press
• Date de parution: 31 décembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788771840261
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Edited by Vinicius de Carvalho, Susanne H jlund, Per Bendix Jeppesen, and Karen-Margrethe Simonsen
Sugar and Modernity in Latin America
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Foreword
In the last 15 years, type 2 diabetes has spread with frightening speed all over the globe. Latin America is no exception; it has witnessed an explosion of cases of diabetes, especially in Brazil and Mexico. An increase in diabetes is often accompanied by an increase in obesity in the population, and it seems to follow the spread of so-called modern lifestyles which include a relatively large sugar intake. However, the relationships between diabetes, sugar intake, and the significant factors of a modern lifestyle are rarely investigated and documented, and when they are, the cultural and historical contexts of particular lifestyles are often not considered. Likewise, the approach to sugar and health problems often represents a specific but unexamined approach to modernity.
The basic idea of this book is twofold and interdisciplinary: the first assumption is that it is impossible to understand the growth of diabetes without investigating and understanding modern lifestyle(s) in their cultural contexts. It is implied here that modernity, despite its proclaimed uniformity and global spread, acts in different ways, according to local traditions. Therefore it is not enough to diagnose the problem of diabetes and its possible relation to specific eating habits; we also have to understand the cultural contexts of these habits. Assuming that sugar plays a significant role in relation to modern lifestyle diseases, we have to ask ourselves how sugar intake occurs in different cultures, whether there is cultural diversity in the sensory perception of sweetness, and whether there are historical reasons why sugar plays such a huge role in certain cultures and not in others. In order to answer these questions, we have to use humanistic approaches to help clarify the importance of cultural contexts for the development of unhealthy lifestyles, and consequently, the development of conditions like diabetes.
The second assumption is that sugar production and sugar cultures are closely related to a specific historical period of modernity, and that studying sugar production and sugar cultures in a cultural context helps not only to qualify, but also to question and reflect critically on the concept of modernity. Understanding the concept of modernity requires us to look deeper into history and into cultural products such as religion and literature, as well as the popular conceptions reflected in advertising. In these cultural expressions, sugar s modern and anti-modern aspects are negotiated in the most dynamic and unforeseen ways, making it the ideal locus for a more nuanced approach to the understanding of modernity.
The aim of this book is thus to contribute both to the understanding of the cultural contexts for the development of dangerous lifestyles and to a critical understanding of the concept of modernity. In other words, the book analyzes the relation between diabetes and modern sugar cultures, as well as the ways in which specific sugar cultures and cultural expressions about sugar raise serious questions about our understanding of modernity.
Latin America is an especially interesting place for this investigation, since sugar as a product and sugar production have played a vital role in the modern development of many countries in the region, for instance Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, and Bolivia - all of which will be studied in specific detail in this volume. Sugar cane is not native to Latin America. It was imported to the continent after Columbus s conquest in 1492, but sugar production developed quickly with the help of European know-how and machinery and African slaves. The largest plantation areas of sugar cane today are still in Latin America; the region is the biggest producer of sugar in the world; its colonial and modern history can be read parallel to the history of the sugar (plantation, production, and consumption); and social and health problems associated with sugar are also bigger in Latin America. Yet Latin America is not one culture. As mentioned above, we will focus specifically on Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, and Bolivia, bringing together countries that are often studied separately in Spanish/Latin American studies, Brazilian studies, and Caribbean studies. Our objective is to allow for a comparative approach and a transnational Latin American understanding.
Sugar production in general is often seen as the catalyst of modernity, but because of the hierarchical, paternalistic power structure and the use of force on sugar plantations, it also came to represent the darker side of modernity. Many theorists have described Latin American development as uneven and contradictory. It is both modern and anti-modern, and it both renews and retrieves at the same time. Thus ancient and even pre-Columbian traditions live side by side with extreme technological modernization and many new cultural products mix old and new influences in unforeseen ways. As Fernando Ortiz pointed out in 1940 about the context of Cuba, it is a culture of simultaneity of cultures that derive from different historical origins and a mestizo culture that mixes different cultural and racial traditions. Despite national differences, Latin America is impregnated with such a mestizo culture. One is thus constantly forced to rethink current ideas about modernity. And as was argued by Ortiz and more recently by the anthropologist Peter Wade, we should understand not only that Latin America is a product of mixed heritage but also that European heritage is itself mixed and that Latin America has always been constitutive of European modernity. Latin America has functioned not only as a black mirror-image but as a real political and cultural influence. European economic and cultural development depends on the traditions and products of Latin America.
Sugar is an especially interesting product since it incarnates both tradition and modernity and shows many of the dynamic interactions between Europe and Latin America at political, economic, cultural, and medical levels. In the 21st century, this interaction has become even more visible, as Latin America slowly becomes a dominant world power in politics and economy, but it is also visible in medicine: one of the new plants that may help diminish rates of diabetes derives from Latin America, namely from Paraguay where it has been cultivated by the Indians for centuries. Stevia has turned out to be a miracle plant, in the sense that it produces sugar many times sweeter than normal sugar that does not cause the same health problems as normal sugar. Stevia has recently been used by Coca-Cola to produce a healthier version of the drink; some scientists are calling it the second sugar revolution.
In this book, modernity is thus not a set term. We hope to challenge and discuss what it means while focusing specifically on sugar in different contexts. A mixture of different cultures and social habits influence sugar cultures and specific understandings of sugar, including its cultural and symbolic value, its taste and its use in different cultural and religious contexts, and even its methods of production. Of course we are talking about the same sugar , that perhaps should be more properly called sucrose or sacharose , an organic compound extracted from the sugar cane (Saccharum officinarum L.) represented by the molecular form C12H22O11. However, every time we hear or use the word sugar we can realize the powerful polysemy of it. Thousands of associations are triggered by the word: health, nutrition, diet, poverty, sweetness, honey, good taste, slave labour, commodity, and money to name only a few. Sugar was once associated with social prestige, but today a large sugar intake is associated with underdevelopment and a lower social class. Changes in the symbolic value of sugar can be analyzed through literature or through anthropological or sociological fieldwork.
Throughout this book, sugar functions as a prism for understanding the complicated relations between disease and cultural and social habits, between past and present, and between symbolic meanings and material effects. Since the book s ambition is to connect the how and the why of diabetes, sugar culture, and modernity, we have chosen an interdisciplinary approach. It is not possible to answer our question about sugar cultures from a single perspective, of hard science or of anthropology, for example. In the book we have chosen a far wider interdisciplinary approach. Here you will find approaches by experts in medical science, agriculture, sociology, and anthropology, as well as Latin American, Brazilian, and literary studies. This scope is unusual but we believe that interdisciplinary dialogue is necessary to qualify questions about modernity in depth. Since modernity is not only a philosophical idea or a term for a period of technological or economic advance but also a concept that includes a complex understanding of cultural identity and symbolic value, it cannot be studied by one or two disciplines alone. Similarly, any attempt to understand the relation between a disease and its triggers in cultural patterns and historical traditions demands an interdisciplinary research method. Grand challenges need interdisciplinary approaches.
However, interdisciplinary work itself always comes with its own challenges, for instance in terms of methodology and consistency of vocabulary. Although concepts travel between disciplines, they often tend to mean different things in different disciplines - even within the humanities. There is thus an acute epistemological challenge in interdisciplinarity that cannot easily be done away with. In fact, according to our experience, good interdisciplinary collaboration acknowledges that this challenge cannot be eliminated and maybe also that it should