Sobo

There is amassing wealth and keeping slim have that have antisocial connotations in rural Jamaica. The negative ideas about thinness are linked with their ideas about health. Notions about healthy are notions about body ideals and they all have important social meaning. For rural Jamaicans, the ideal body is plump with vital fluids, and maintaining the flow of substances through the body is essential for good health. Both vital bodily fluids and foods fatten the body, making plumpness an index of the quality and extent of one’s social relations as well as an index of good physical health. The concept of the body-in-relation tends to view the body like they view the self as autonomous, individual, and independent. Due to the influenced by British interests, much of the anthropological literature on Jamaica deals with kinship and social structure. Jamaican villages typically consist of people brought together by ancestry, or by proximity to a shop or postal agency. Jamaican builds the body by eating to value a large size. Blood is the most vital and most meaning invested bodily component. Therefore, Sinews, another type of blood comes form okra, fish eyes, and other pale slimy foods. Belly is the most important part of the inner body where blood is made. In Jamaica, the respected adult is called a bog man or a big woman because the sound relationships are usually large. Good relationships and good eating go hand in hand, but plumpness depends on more than mere food. Therefore, “people with worries can’t fat.” Fatness as its best associated with moistness, fertility, and kindness as well as happiness, vitality, and bodily health in general. Jamaicans call pleasing things sweet. Ideas about decay give expletives power and fuel subversive banter. All that gets taken into the body, whether to build or fill belly, must get used or expelled because unincorporated excess begins to swell and decay. On the other hand, thinness is associated with ideas antithetical to those that “good” fat connotes; Thinness and fatness are to each other as the lean, dry, white meat of a chicken is to its fatty, moist, dark parts. A sense of interdependence and obligation are involved as the ideal of Jamaican kinship which ensues from shared bodily substance. The people who do not reproduce only serve to work, their blood disappears from the social circles that individuals, joining together in the culturally recommended fashion, create and re-create. The thin body lacks vital fluids, which can cause embarrassment and shame because this means a person can be cast as infertile and antisocial. Sexual fluid, like fatness itself, is good, but here again too much can be harmful and balance must be maintained. After woman has had children or after a miscarriage or abortion, sags flat and low this is most noticeable in the bosom by women lost fluid. Thus, the body shape associated with a separation between sex and reproduction, and with aging and death, is thin and flaccid, not firmly plump like the sociable one. Therefore, Thinness is ultimately linked with death, but the fat person’s body is richly fertile, and the fat person is judged a nurturant and constructive member of a thriving network of interdependent kin.