Working the Dead in Cuban Palo

lying structural inequalities that place minorities at greater risk. Brewis suggests using conceptual models such as risk focusing and environmental justice, both of which provide methods and rationales for linking variation in obesity risk to broader social, economic, and political structures. The book’s final chapters explore cross-cultural differences in how people understand body size and present methodological approaches for studying that variation. Brewis first examines gender and ethnic variation, reiterating the importance of interpreting ethnic differences within the context of related covariants, such as socioeconomic status, education, and social networks. Drawing on Human Relations Area Files research, Brewis illustrates that the view of large bodies as unhealthy, unattractive, and morally inferior is historically recent and culturally specific. She provides multiple examples of non-Western societies that prefer large bodies and associate fatness with positive attributes, such as being powerful, sexually attractive, generous, and virtuous. She discusses the contrasting slim body ideal of the industrialized West and explores the global spread of the fat stigma, showing that as people move into more ecologically and economically modern environments they increasingly value thinner body sizes. Brewis underscores the complex nature of this process, arguing that researchers do not yet understand the underlying factors causing this cultural shift. She discusses multiple approaches to studying the relationship between culture, body image ideology, and obesity, including social constructionist, cognitive, comparative, and evolutionary approaches. Brewis concludes with a discussion of what we can learn from failed obesity intervention efforts and provides suggestions for improving such interventions. A distinct strength of this book is Brewis’s problematization of common assumptions underlying much of obesity research to date, such as the causal link between BMI and individual health risks, the conceptualization of ethnicity as a predictor of obesity, and overly simplistic ideas about what culture means and its relationship to body image and obesity. Brewis adds a critical, nuanced perspective to current discourses that tend to characterize obesity as either a health crisis or a socially constructed moral panic. She complicates this dichotomous obesity framework by unpacking the complex interrelationships between biological, cultural, and environmental domains. The scope of Brewis’s book is ambitious and at times threatens to overwhelm the reader. However, Brewis successfully strikes a balance between breadth and depth and clearly demonstrates the value of examining obesity by using multiple theoretical lenses and methodologies. Overall, Brewis’s conceptualization of obesity as a social justice issue and her emphasis on the importance of critically examining dynamic interrelationships between culture, biology, ecology, and history provides a refreshing and powerful counterbalance to public health and Western medical models on the one hand and social constructivist positions on the other. Working the Dead in Cuban Palo