The Weight of the Family: Communicability as Alien Affection in Danish Family Histories and Experiences of Obesity

Abstract

AbstractCan we think of something like communicability or contagion in relation to diseases and conditions that have hitherto been categorized as noncommunicable? In this article, I take my ethnographic point of departure in the lifelong—and transgenerational—experiences of obesity, weight gain, and weight loss of four Danish families in order to show how kinship, relatedness, and dwellings emerge as simultaneously homey and alien contagious connections, when exploring communicability in the context of what is often referred to as “the obesity epidemic.” Analytically, I am inspired by the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels’ (2007, 2011a) phenomenology of the alien, and through an analysis of the tracing of the spread of obesity to kinship ties, Danish hygge and the places and times in which we live, I propose the notion of affection as a phenomenologically grounded theory of social contagion.