BRINGING EVERYDAY LIFE INTO THE STUDY OF ‘LIFESTYLE DISEASES:

The framing of obesity as a lifestyle disease invites anthropological attention. While lifestyle is widely applied to obesity both academically and in everyday language, no single discipline appears to have clearly defined the term. I begin by reviewing the theoretical development of the concept of ‘lifestyle’. I then consider how lifestyle is understood in research relating to the high levels of obesity in Nauru, showing that the concept is widely used but poorly defined. I draw on ethnographic findings from Nauru to illustrate how a sociocultural understanding of lifestyle – or everyday ways of life – captures details that are overlooked in epidemiological or public health constructs of lifestyle. In Nauru, for example, good health or the good life (mo tsimorum) is a feeling that can be derived from both good social relationships and the absence of biomedical disease. In this case, human health as it relates to obesity is dynamic and relational rather than mechanistic or deterministic. I argue for the re-appropriation of lifestyle as a sociocultural concept underpinned by modes of production, relations of power, social exchanges, social values, education and status-seeking. If it is carefully defined and accurately applied, the concept of lifestyle has the potential to conceptually unify and contextualize existing disparate aspects of obesity-related research (or research on ‘lifestyle factors’), as well as the potential to bring new sociocultural perspectives to such research