title: The Tipping of the Big Stone-And Life itself. Obesity, Moral Work and Responsive Selves Over Time.
abstract: Why is "everything I know is the right thing to do a million miles removed from what I do in reality?" This question posed by Rita, my main interlocutor and friend in a fieldwork that started in 2001-2003 and was taken up again in 2014-2015, opens up an exploration of moral work and moral selves in the context of the obesity epidemic and weight loss processes. I address these questions through the notion of "moral laboratories" taking up Mattingly's argument that moral cultivation over time cannot be disconnected from a notion of self. Mattingly has consistently argued for a biographical and narrative self, which is processual and created in community. Along these lines, and by recourse to the German philosopher Bernhard Waldenfels' phenomenology, I will propose the notion of a responsive self. The responsive self highlights the eventness of ongoing experimentation against the odds and captures equally pathic and agentive dimensions of a self that both persists and is transformed over time.
authors.affiliation: KORA, Danish Institute for Local and Regional Government Research, Copenhagen, Denmark. logr@kora.dk.|Center for Cultural Epidemics, EPICENTER, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark. logr@kora.dk.
authors.forename: Lone
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8461-9235
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Grøn
mesh_terms: D003718:Denmark; D006801:Humans; D009014:Morals; D009765:Obesity / Q000523:psychology*; D015431:Weight Loss
keywords: Denmark; Moral anthropology; Obesity; Phenomenology; Self