Health promotion, fitness and bodies in a postcolonial context: the case of Trinidad

Abstract

There has been little exploration in medical sociology literature of health promotion and the body in Third World contexts. This paper addresses ways in which practices of the body relating to health contest colonizing forms of social control by examining representations and practices of the body in Trinidad, West Indies. It reviews recent sociological work relating to health promotion. It is argued that while the literature is increasingly concerned with the links between health promotion and social identity, it has not utilized the observation from postcolonial theory that western identities have been crucially affected by the colonial experience which involved the othering of people outside the West through a process of racialization. This paper examines ways in which health-promoting selves in a non-western setting are formed through a critical negotiation of western categories of difference. Through the study of fitness culture in Trinidad, and particularly the phenomenon of getting in shape for Carnival, various instances of ambivalence and resistance towards constructions of colonized bodies are shown. Medical sociology literature furthermore does not acknowledge the role of non-western ‘others’ in contesting universalizing western master narratives and thus in leading to the fragmentations of identity thought to be associated with a new, more advanced stage of history, called postmodernism. The paper examines African and Indian health beliefs and practices in Trinidad and how they have responded to western medicine ever since colonization over 200 years ago, sometimes defying, sometimes incorporating elements of it into practices of the body to create hybrid and syncretic forms. By showing that challenges to western medicine as a master narrative have existed in a colonized country for over two centuries, the paper questions the idea that such challenges are a recent phenomenon signifying a more advanced stage of history.