Welcome to the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity
We are an interdisciplinary research unit based at the University of Oxford, dedicated to understanding the complex and interwoven causes of obesity in populations across the world.
Currently featured...
...is a piece by Jake and Dinos Chapman. This sculpture has particular resonance with the work of the UBVO, which considers, among other things, the ways in which branding, authenticity and market liberal political systems are implicated in the production of obesity as societal disorder.
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Jake and Dinos Chapman |
The Chapman Family Collection (2002) is a collection of sculptures that mimic the types of sculpture found in ethnographic collections from the past two centuries. But embedded within them are symbols associated with the McDonalds fast-food chain. As ambiguous objects, they interrogate the cultural trespass of transnational corporations that has grown under the market liberal ideology that has dominated world economics since the 1980s. At Oxford, the Unit for Biocultural Variation and Obesity has demonstrated links between the adoption of market liberal systems and the development of obesity, through the penetration of cheap fast food, increased personal insecurity and societal inequality. In this context, obesity represents a societal disorder, although it also leads to disordered health. For the Chapman brothers, reference to McDonalds in their work is shorthand for the pernicious excesses of capitalism. The Chapman Family Collection highlights the fact that modernism has involved the consumption of foreign cultures, as well as production and consumption of goods. That the works are clearly fakes makes transparent the systems of appropriation, consumption and assimilation that modernism involves.
But authenticity is hard to locate, as many of the original ethnographic objects were themselves fakes. Many of them, particularly in Papua New Guinea, were made for expressly for sale to the earliest of ethnographic collectors. Material culture, dressed up in the symbolic language developed by transnational corporations, give readings that maintain dominant ideologies. Such symbols are also ambiguous when introduced into different societies, as they become assimilated and indigenised. Globally, we are fed corporate brands through marketing logos, which through symbolic language and systems of meaning create symbolic capital which is avidly collected and displayed, whether it be through eating, the wearing of clothes, driving cars, or in other ways. The fact that these global brands become local makes them difficult to question, and where they are complicit in the production of societal disorder, difficult to change. By making these processes of modernization and globalization transparent, the Chapman brothers destabilize these forms of symbolic capital.
The first of the UBVO's new series of Opinion Papers is inspired by this sculpture. You can read the paper here.