Thoughts and hunger: nutrition in two rural Malay kampungs

Abstract

Anthropological theory has long attempted to balance a concern for larger structural forces with attention to personal agency-to acknowledge individual choice and acts of resistance within the context of socioeconomic restraints. Likewise, this presentation combines cognitive anthropology techniques (i.e. free-listing , pile- sorting) with ethnographic data and standards anthropometric measures to describe the interactions of

personal experience, social relations and economic resources and the effect of these interactions on (1) the classification of common food items and (2) child nutritional status. Multidimensional scaling (MOS) is used to visually present cultural models for categorizing local foods employed by four distinct groups: ( 1) impoverished families with healthy children, (2) impoverished families with undernourished children, (3) income-stable families with healthy children, and (4) income-stable families with undernourished children. Each model is firmly grounded in an ethnographic context and the implications of these findings for the Malaysian national food supplementation program for children are discussed.