Bringing everyday life into the study of ‘lifestyle diseases’: lessons from an ethnographic investigation of obesity emergence in Nauru

摘要

My undergraduate studies were in the biomedical sciences. I came to medical anthropology in Oxford on the basis of two separate recommendations. My late mentor, Adam Locket, had studied in Oxford and knew how much I would love the inspirational learning environment and interdisciplinary nature of college life. My supervisor, Maciej Henneberg, saw my curiosity about questions relating to health that were difficult to address using the scientific method and encouraged me to speak to his colleague, Stanley Ulijaszek, about medical anthropology. I completed the MPhil in Medical Anthropology in 2007-09 and commenced my DPhil immediately thereafter, initially under the supervision of Stanley Ulijaszek with a focus on political ecological and biocultural approaches to obesity in Nauru, and later under the co-supervision of Elisabeth Hsu, who encouraged a critical-interpretive and sociocultural perspective.