Ebook Attitudes and Representations of Dietician: A Comprehensive Approach of the Contemporary Diet Logic
This subject matter is at the confluence of social representations of health and the image of the body. It seems to us that the notion which relates most to it is what Michel Foucault refers to as “self-preoccupation”: “A reasonable existence cannot follow its normal course without ‘health practice... which forms... the permanent frame of daily life, making it possible at every moment to know what to do and how to do it” (Foucault 1984: 138). Through this explanation, the author wishes to underscore the important role that the body and health played in the Old World. Such relation from self to self was brought up to date in a certain number of prescriptions relating to daily life nutrition, sporting activities, sexuality, sleep, vomiting... (Mazzini, 1996). It was a matter of being “the skilful and careful guide of oneself” in like manner as “politics with regard to the city”. Therefore, the attention given to bodily practices, far from being only purely egoistic personal worship focussed on the individual, was considered as a preparation for the role of citizen and had a cultural and political ideal as target.
It seems pertinent to construe the massive publication of a new reports on the body around the 1960s to 1970s (practice of diet, success of fitness and jogging, expansion of alternative diets and unprecedented development of cosmetics) as Foucault illustrates in respect to “self-preoccupation” in the Old World. An analysis of such new “daily health practices” affecting the management of its form(s) enables us to enlighten the socio-cultural prospects in which the latter are involved, in particular to what concept of the individual/subject they refer. If this hypothesis is right, by studying all or part of logics circumscribing “self-preoccupation”, we should succeed in rebuilding the normative environment which explains the attitude of the actor with regard to his/her body.
However, we must note the differences existing between “self-preoccupation” as described by Foucault and its interpretation today. Indeed, if we have ventured to use that notion, which in our opinion involve similar practices, we can draw three major characteristics which make it different from Michel Foucault’s analysis. First of all, self-preoccupation is no longer involved in a cosmogony relating the management of one’s body to the political role that we play in the city but in what Charles Taylor (1998) refers to as “self improvement”. Further, “self preoccupation” does not concern only a tiny elite but is submitted to a true democratisation process (the management of the body is accessible to all or in any case claimed as such). Lastly, if in the Old World self preoccupation could not be considered as a problem depending on gender (it concerns only men), the latter structures modern relationship with the body (in particular because of the tendency to feminize bodily practices).
Here, we will not try to globally analyse such a phenomenon, as our empirical material is inadequate for that purpose; but through the study of remarks by a category of experts (dieticians), we will get a glance into an aspect of mechanisms implemented in such daily self-relationship. Although the analysed corpus is reduced, it has three characteristics which are important for us. On the one hand, resorting to professionals for the purpose of regulating one’s diet is a massively female practice (if male customers exist, they are largely a minority). It is therefore not out of one’s interest to study a behaviour which is in majority exhibited by one of the genders. On the other hand, in line with what Anthony Giddens (1991) wrote in respect of therapies, an actor calls for a specialist at crucial moments and may re-orient his life projections and his identity.
However, the image of the corps and its relative control play an important role in our self-relationship; it is often at the end of a “weight skid” that we need to look for an expert. Lastly, our specific interest in nutrition (rather than in another bodily practice) is related to its importance in our day-to-day life. More than all others, food habits daily involve our self to self relationship, hence the need for understanding them.
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