Dissertation Research: Remaking Indonesian Bodies: The Origins and Implications of the Nutritionalization of Food Intervention in Developing Countries

University Of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison WI

Investigators

Abstract

This Science and Technology Studies Dissertation Improvement Grant will provide funds to the doctoral student to collect needed data in order to better enable completion of the dissertation. The NSF fund will support fieldwork in Indonesia in order to conduct interviews with key players in food policies in addition to some archival research. This project will examine the increasing "nutritionalization" of food policies in Indonesia and its impacts. The research will utilize ethnographic investigation of science and commodity analysis on wheat, chicken and rice. "Nutritionalization" refers to the shift of policies from increasing food production towards enhancing the micronutrient status in developing countries. This change in focus from hunger to "hidden hunger" has occurred since the 1990s. Scholarly contribution will be made in three areas. (1) Firstly, this research addresses the neglected role of nutritional science in food politics in developing countries. Existing literature on science in food has focused on green revolution technology. Given its historical importance in colonial and development practices, not enough attention has been paid to nutritional science. Rather than taking the ascendance of nutritional science for granted, however, the present project asks how nutritional science has attained a privileged status. The researcher will investigate the process in which nutritionalization has taken place by taking Indonesia as an example. (2) The detailed investigation of the localized workings of science is the second contribution of this research. This is contrasted with two dominant perspectives on science's role in developing countries. The literature was dominated by simple diffusion perspective. More recently, this diffusionist view has been critiqued by postmodern critics of development. However, these recent studies have paradoxically overlooked the contradictions in the increasing techno-science in developing countries, because these studies have focused on the larger project of unveiling the hegemony of development discourse. The present research address what these existing studies have largely remained silent - the complex history of disciplines and actors. divergent viewpoints. By conducting in-depth interviews and analysis of history of the scholarly debates, the present research seeks to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of how scientization take place in a particular place and time. (3) Third contribution is to concretely analyze the impacts of nutritionalization. The present study also works as a useful corrective to science and technology studies which have explained the impact of scientization in abstract terms. By examining the impact of nutritionalization on different commodities (chicken, rice and wheat), the study addresses the material impact of the global circulation of knowledge. Nutritionalization characterizes many food politics in developing countries. Yet the paucity of empirical information on such food policies prevents an adequate assessment of their soundness. The proposed study will in all likelihood be the first to measure the process and the consequences of latest phase of food politics in Indonesia, and perhaps in the global South as a whole. Particularly by examining the material impacts of nutritionalization, this research will help critique the dominant food policies and suggest the potential of alternatives to improve the social and ecological sustainability of food systems in developing countries.