PETER BENSONWashington University in St. Louis

Commentary:Biopolitical injustice and contemporary capitalism

A B S T R A C THow is big industry linked to rising obesity in theUnited States? This issue is tangentially explored inthe article that I consider. My commentary expandson this point to apprehend the role of corporationsand industries in producing and profiting frompopulation health problems. Taking the cases ofobesity and cigarette smoking together, I examinehow corporations claim social-responsibility valuesas a strategic means of forestalling criticism andprotecting their markets while shiftingaccountability for the risks and harms that arerelated to consumption onto consumers themselves.These dynamics reveal the centrality of biopoliticalinjustice to the workings of contemporarycapitalism. [biopolitics, capitalism, corporate socialresponsibility, obesity, tobacco]

Susan Greenhalgh’s incisive study of the biopolitics of fat and thepublic-health response to obesity in the United States represents,to my mind, the emergence of an anthropological literature thattakes a critical look at the underbelly of the industries that areharming humans and the planet (e.g., Benson 2012; Fortun 2001;

Kirsch 2007; Singer and Baer 2008). In looking at individuals’ experiencesof being labeled fat or obese, the article touches only tangentially on thefood and beverage industry as a field site requiring further investigation.This touch point is useful, nonetheless, in allowing Greenhalgh to impli-cate macroforces of political economy and public-health governance in thelives of the men and women whose stories she relates while maintaininga grounded sense of their ethnological worlds, where complex matters ofpsychology, identity, and embodiment define the social course of how fat-ness is negotiated in thought and in practice.

Big industries like the food and beverage industry are destroying humanbodies and plundering the planet. To acknowledge this fact is not neces-sarily to step into the prudish realm of wanting to banish all gustatory plea-sure. Rather, it is to recognize that this industry, with its packaging and pro-cessing of food and drink for mass consumption, is the main culprit behindthe spread of a particularly dangerous kind of diet around the world, thehomogenization of human eating and drinking customs, and the diminu-tion of aesthetic and substantive diversity in alimentary and culinary life.

Nor is acknowledging the baldness of the plundering that goes onin the contemporary economy necessarily a call for the imposition ofsome austere public-health regimen that would control habits and cus-toms to manage the size of bodies. As Greenhalgh’s study powerfullydemonstrates, the discourse on fat, largely constructed in the field ofpublic health and now traversing the society at large, brings with itadded burdens for heavy people, including forms of psychosocial and so-ciomoral distress, such as the feeling of being isolated in responsibility.Rather than having the effect of containing fatness as a problem, “the

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 39, No. 3, pp. 488–490, ISSN 0094-0496, onlineISSN 1548-1425. C© 2012 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2012.01376.x

Biopolitical injustice and contemporary capitalism � American Ethnologist

war on fat,” Greenhalgh argues, working in a familiar Fou-cauldian vein, “is intensifying already-existing cultural anx-ieties about weight,” inciting “dangerous body practices,tormented selves, and socioemotional suffering on a vastscale.” Ultimately, then, her article is about the domain ofsubjectivity and the ways that people’s senses of self, citi-zenship, and body are being remade amid a “fat discourse,”as Greenhalgh calls it, “a complex, internally structured,historically specific body of knowledge that structures howweight and weight-related behavior can be talked about,and that does things, that produces effects.”

Anthropology since the 1990s has been noticeably in-fluenced by Michel Foucault, and in many ways. Oneway, reflected in Greenhalgh’s article, has to do with theconcept of “governmentality,” referring to both top-downinstitutional regulation of populations and individuals’internalization of disciplinary and controlling processes(Foucault 1991). Greenhalgh demonstrates how the stateagenda to regulate obesity, and attendant movements inscience, the civil society, and industry, motivates heavy peo-ple to willfully engage with a discourse of risk in ways thatmake them, as individuals, the arbiters of responsibility fortheir behavior, for their risk of disease, for their body shape,and for their self-esteem: essentially, for what the field ofpublic health ascribes to “lifestyle.”

The same corporate interests that have profited fromand contributed to escalating obesity levels, Greenhalghshows, are now working to capture new markets based onhealth concerns and fears. Wal-Mart has recently madepublic claims about its efforts to maintain consistentlylow prices while improving the nutritional quality of itsfood products by pressuring its suppliers to reduce lev-els of fat, sodium, and sweeteners, an act of corporate so-cial responsibility praised by the U.S. federal government(Stolberg 2011). Indeed, Wal-Mart claims that it shifted itspolicy in response to the First Lady’s “Let’s Move!” cam-paign, which Greenhalgh cites as an exemplary node in themounting war on obesity. However, this corporation’s shiftpresumably also arose in direct response to public-healthresearch that shows that Wal-Mart’s food sales alone ac-count for 10 percent of the increase in obesity prevalencein the United States (Courtemanche and Carden 2011).The retail giant’s adoption of health values may reflect apowerful economic strategy to foreshorten public criticismand further disadvantage competitor firms that will likelybe less capable of simultaneously changing product offer-ings and containing costs within their more limited supplychains.

To acknowledge the role of industry is to implicate thebig forces that benefit from the localization of accountabil-ity for risk and for harm in individuals or in subsets of thepopulation. It is a means of calling attention to the strate-gies that corporations and industries use to elide criticismor regulation and to maintain or expand consumer mar-kets increasingly predicated on problematized health risks

(Benson and Kirsch 2010). On these points, Greenhalgh’s ar-ticle begins to take the Foucauldian approach and the abid-ing anthropology of governmentality in a new direction,linking such studies of subjectivity and power to a fullerappreciation of the role of corporations and industries—not just the state and the public-health apparatus—in thedynamics of subject formation, the constitution of culturalhegemonies, and dominant framings of risk and account-ability, harm and agency. Greenhalgh gets at this aspect inher conclusion, when she writes of the “bio-political in-justice” that is “built into our system of corporate capi-talism and, indeed, the American way of life.” She com-ments briefly on the role of “big food” in making obesityand the ways that large food and other corporate entities arenow “trumpeting their social responsibility as producers of‘healthy’ ‘diet’ foods.”

There is, of course, also a growing literature—and cor-responding set of critiques and movements within civilsociety—around the notion of changing the food system,including an emphasis on community, place, and locality;the rights of farmworkers and better labor conditions; is-sues of the environment, pollution, and sustainability; andmatters of nutritional health in the production and market-ing of real food rather than processed food (e.g., Hesterman2011; Holthaus 2009; Nestle 2007). Where Greenhalgh’s ar-ticle also engages the Foucault scholarship is in providingan opening for us, as readers, to understand that in manyways the maintenance of the status quo in the food sys-tem depends on the individualization of risk at the sametime that a critique of the food system is being socializedand popularized. “Big food emerges as ‘part of the solu-tion,’” Greenhalgh writes, “as large-bodied Americans, whoare now deemed ‘the problem,’ suffer vicious bullying anddiminished lives.” For all its good intentions, the Obama ad-ministration’s entrance into the war on obesity, focused oneducation, health promotion, and decision making ratherthan industrial regulation, contributes to the cultural dy-namics that Greenhalgh documents.

There are several areas of overlap between Greenhalgh’sstudy and my primary area of study, the tobacco epidemicand the tobacco industry (see Benson 2012). Obesity andtobacco use are the two leading causes of mortality in theUnited States. Obesity rates are on the rise around theworld. Heart disease is the leading cause of mortality world-wide, and the rates of heart disease and diabetes are grow-ing. Perhaps because of the stigma related to both obesityand smoking—studies find that both heavyset people andsmokers face workplace discrimination and less adequatehealth care from providers because of suspicions of a lackof personal responsibility (Bell et al. 2010; Puhl and Heuer2009)—there is no massive social outpouring of rage againstthe industrial machines that produce and profit from theseepidemiological facts. Even though reducing the obesityrate (like the smoking rate) would massively reduce healthcare costs across the board and so entail a benefit to the

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society as a whole, the problem of obesity is being ad-dressed in a fashion reflective of a domestication of politicsin the United States. As literary critic Laurent Berlant (1997)has discussed, citizenship has been cast as a condition ofsocial membership predicated on personal acts and values,and this framing orients public policy decisions in ways thatcan benefit harmful industries and transmit the brunt of theburden for risk and harm and blame and stigma onto bio-logical citizens.

Philip Morris, the world’s largest cigarette manufac-turer, funds youth antismoking programs as part of itsstrategic corporate “makeover” and philanthropic efforts.This is part of the company’s effort to tilt the balanceof public-health critique and policy to focus on youthsmoking rather than more regulative approaches such astaxation and smoking bans. The company has sought toreconfigure the smoking problem as one of law enforce-ment related to age limits and youth access. The narrow-ing of tobacco governance to focus on adult choice, crimeprevention, and family matters is a choreographed effectof what appear on the surface simply to be noble invest-ments in public health on the part of a responsible corpo-rate citizen. Why should corporations be held accountablefor smoking disease when the task lies with law enforce-ment officers, convenience store clerks, high school educa-tors, and parents?

Obesity too is reckoned a private issue, addressed as afeat of individual overcoming on the television show TheBiggest Loser, tapped as a market opportunity by the mas-sive dieting industry, and ultimately constructed publiclyas a personal flaw, not the result of industrial calculation—sweetness and power. Quitting smoking and dieting andlosing weight are truly difficult feats, in many cases impossi-ble, but tobacco dependence and obesity are made to seemlike states that individuals choose to inhabit; indeed, this isthe heart of the problem—these states are publicly framedas problems of health promotion and behavior rather thanthe results of a certain kind of capitalism, a political econ-omy of massively profitable industries, harmful commoditychains, and the curiously active forms of benign neglect thatdefine the reach and force of governmentality.

What if the energy and resources that go into dietingand worrying about weight were routed upward at the foodand beverage industry as part of a social movement aim-ing to starve its profits and allay the stigma of obesity? Whatif the critical energies that all citizens direct at themselvesand at others within the webs of governmentality were redi-rected at industries that are trashing the planet and fillingit and human bodies with an endless flow of junk? This toowould be a biopolitics of fat, of the bloated and grotesqueand monstrous, in which the industrial powers, the biggestwinners, would all of a sudden seem like big fat losers, al-though it would be a biopolitics that is quite differently con-cerned with the population and its welfare than the onereflected in the market-oriented discourse about choice,

blame, and risk that these days dominates the conversationand incites reflection.

References cited

Bell, Kirsten, Amy Salmon, Michele Bowers, Jennifer Bell, and LucyMcFullough

2010 Smoking, Stigma, and Tobacco “Denormalization”: FurtherReflections on the Use of Stigma as a Public Health Tool. SocialScience and Medicine 70(6):795–799.

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and Health. Berkeley: University of California Press.Puhl, Rebecca M., and Chelsea A. Heuer

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Peter BensonDepartment of AnthropologyWashington University in St. LouisCampus Box 1114One Brookings DriveSt. Louis, MO 63130

pbenson@artsci.wustl.edu

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