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The qualities of fat: Bodies, history, and materiality

Christopher E Forth Journal of Material Culture 2013 18: 135 DOI: 10.1177/1359183513489496 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/18/2/135

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MATERIAL CULTURE
Journal of Material Culture 18(2) 135154 The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1359183513489496 mcu.sagepub.com

The qualities of fat: Bodies, history, and materiality

Christopher E Forth

University of Kansas, Lawrence, USA

Abstract
This article proposes that, at various historical moments, stereotypes about fat people as being corrupt, weak, and stupid have been complemented and perhaps even informed by perceptions of fat as a material substance with definite properties and qualities. In an effort to understand the formation and longevity of these three longstanding stereotypes this article submits that the material properties of fat particularly its unctuousness, softness, and insensateness have played important roles in motivating some of the responses this substance has generated both with reference to human bodies and their material worlds. Due to the conceptual slipperiness of fat in its various forms (whether frozen as a solid or liquefied as oil or grease), this analysis uses examples from ancient Greek, Roman and Hebrew texts to track the ways in which this substance has been perceived across these registers, revealing the surprisingly mercurial and ambiguous ways in which fat has been understood culturally.

Keywords
corpulence, fat, materiality, oil, qualisigns

In the humanities today the cultural study of fat bodies is often structured by a series of useful yet somewhat overdrawn oppositions. One that often gets drawn is between the sexes: women are identified as the principal targets of anti-fat stereotyping while male bodies are assumed to go largely unmarked and free from scrutiny (Chernin, 1981; Hartley, 2001). A second posits a global division between Western contempt and nonWestern admiration, where the celebration of fat in traditional societies and developing countries is favourably contrasted to an often destructive obsession with slenderness in the West (Janeja, 2002; Kulick and Meneley, 2005). This geographic division is cross-cut by a temporal one within the West itself between a premodern acceptance of fat as a sign of health, fertility, and beauty and a modern rejection of obesity as unhealthy, disgusting,
Corresponding author: Christopher E Forth, University of Kansas, Humanities & Western Civilization Program, Bailey Hall, 1440 Jayhawk Blvd, Lawrence, KS 66045-7574, USA. Email: cforth@ku.edu

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and connected to the poor (Farrell, 2011; Fraser, 2009; Rogers, 2010). One scholar (LevyNavarro, 2008: 37) even describes the entire premodern world as a time before fat, that is, before a new bodily aesthetic emerging in the 16th century altered accepted ideas about physical shape, size, and appearance. Due to the modernity of fat stereotyping, she claims, fat does not signify in the Middle Ages and, presumably, earlier periods. While such oppositions have some broad explanatory value, there are also enough exceptions to warrant caution about making overly categorical declarations about fat, gender, culture, and history. For instance, while women have indeed been the target of much anti-fat rhetoric and discrimination, there is compelling historical and contemporary evidence that males have also been affected by negative ideas about fat (Bell and McNaughton, 2007; Gilman, 2004; Hill, 2011; Monaghan, 2008). Moreover, while many non-Western cultures do evince an appreciation for corpulence, this tendency is neither universal nor uncomplicated, especially when viewed in terms of gender (Munn, 1986; Popenoe, 2004) or the sometimes complex responses to fat as a foodstuff (Janowski, 2002). This article, however, is mainly concerned with the premodern/modern temporal division posited within the West. Demonstrating that the bodily ideals of the past were nowhere near as slender as they are today does not mean that earlier societies acknowledged no limits to acceptable bodily expansion and contraction or that fatness was without significance in earlier times. As Claude Fischler (1987) observed decades ago, and which historical scholarship continues to reveal (Stearns, 1997; Vigarello, 2010), the claim that the past was a time that unequivocally revered fat bodies does not stand up to scrutiny. The excessively fat and the excessively thin have always generated reservations in Western society, even if those misgivings have clearly accelerated in recent times (Gilman, 2004). Not even the often rotund Venus figurines of the Upper Paleolithic era, which have been viewed as symbols of the mystical connection between the fertility of the soil and the creative force of woman (Gimbutas, 1989: 141), offer straightforward evidence of a prehistoric admiration for fat (Bailey, 2005; Joyce, 2008). It is thus problematic to depict the history of fat simply as the story of how something that was once good and beautiful came to be considered bad and ugly, especially because, at least in the West, this perspective bears little resemblance to reality past or present (Brumley, 2010: 112). Thus we may agree with Levy-Navarro (2010: 5) that Further exploration of our classical and medieval past is needed to understand the multiple ways in which fat and thin bodies have been understood and experienced. This article is an attempt to do just that, but it begins with a perhaps counterintuitive question: why should historical reflections on something as complex as fat be narrowed to fit our contemporary preoccupations with fat and thin bodies? In addition to functioning as an adjective used to describe corpulent physiques, the word fat is also a noun denoting a substance located within bodies as well as outside of them. While various kinds of fat have numerous practical applications in everyday life for example, in nutrition, cooking, heating, healing, sealing and preserving fats protean characteristics, notably its ability to readily change from solid to liquid and even vapour (Meneley, 2008), have excited the human imagination, often mobilizing other, more intense, symbolic and metaphoric associations across time and space. Linked in various contexts to ideas about fertility, vitality, increase, or transformation, fats and oils participate in the ambivalence that often attends such concepts. They are thus ambiguous substances

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capable of eliciting reactions of pleasure and fascination as well as fear and disgust (Connor, 2004; Miller, 1997). The fact that, historically speaking, excessive amounts of fat in the body have also occasioned ambivalence invites us to investigate the ways in which the materiality of fats and oils has at times inflected cultural perceptions of corpulence. Rather than beginning with the historical question of when fat started to signify, we might also consider what this stuff we call fat actually is. What has counted as fat at various times and places, where have such things been located, and what qualities have been attributed to fat substances? Most importantly, how did these qualities become extended to the physical, mental and moral characteristics of fat people? While acknowledging the growing centrality of vision in the formation of physical ideals since the 16th century, this article proposes that neither visuality nor aesthetics fully account for some of the negative images of fat people that have circulated in one form or another in the West. This is not to suggest that matters of morphology and proportion were irrelevant in antiquity or that fats capacity to enhance or deform bodies went without comment. Among the ancient Hebrews, corpulence could be a source of humour and self-parody, as in the case of the Talmudic fat rabbis analysed by Boyarin (2009), while depending on circumstance and time period the Greeks and Romans were capable of aligning corpulence with the monumental physiques of the wealthy and powerful (Smith, 1997; Varner, 2004), the grotesque bodies and characters of slaves (Fehr, 1990; Weiler, 2002), the softness and moistness of women (Soranus, 1991), or the corruption and effeminacy of Asiatic tyrants (Athenaeus, 1933; Dalby, 2000). Susan E Hill (2011) has recently analysed perceptions of fatness in the ancient world, but restricts her discussion to body size and gluttony while disregarding the other qualities that could be attached to fat people. Rather than discount this scholarship, the present article suggests that, at various historical moments, many negative stereotypes about the corpulent were complemented and perhaps even informed by perceptions of fat as a material substance with definite properties and qualities. Consider, for instance, how often the corpulent have been described as sweaty, smelly or greasy, as if their very flesh is rotten or corrupt; or perhaps how often the weakness of will and muscle of fat people is attributed to their soft minds and bodies. One may also reflect upon the foolishness or stupidity that has for centuries been attached to the corpulent, as if the workings of their minds are somehow dulled by the supposed insensibility of their flesh. While stereotypes of corrupt, weak, and stupid fat people have been reinforced by proverbs that have circulated since the early modern era, their ideational roots also extend to classical antiquity and to the Hebrew bible. We need to look beyond appearances if we are to make sense of such vivid images. In an effort to understand these three longstanding stereotypes about corpulent people this article submits that the material properties of fat particularly its unctuousness, softness, and insensateness have since classical antiquity played important roles in motivating some of the responses this substance has generated in the West both with reference to human bodies and their material worlds. The latitude with which fat is analysed here seeks to capture some of the many levels on which the substance has been perceived historically, even if our understanding of the term today is considerably circumscribed by aesthetic and medical concerns. Thus we will find fat residing in (or extracted from) animals as well as deposited beneath the human skin, and will even encounter it lurking

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within the soil and its products, suggesting a once common holistic relationship between humans, animals, plants, and the body of the earth itself. Due to the conceptual slipperiness of fat in its various forms (whether frozen as a solid or liquefied as oil or grease), this analysis uses a range of Greek, Roman and Hebrew texts to track the ways in which this substance has been perceived across these registers, revealing the surprisingly mercurial and ambiguous ways in which fat has been understood. To be sure, many perceptions of fat and corpulence have clearly positive connotations; yet as the focus of this piece is on the material formation of three rather basic stereotypes, its analysis foregrounds ambiguity and negativity. Fat is far too rich a substance to be fully savoured in the space of an article, and this analysis skims the surface of a much more complex phenomenon. Approaching the qualities of fat in this way entails a rapprochement between constructivist theories of the body and recent scholarship on materiality. In agreement with the growing number of anthropologists and archaeologists who argue that the physicality of the material world is not simply a text to be interpreted, Nicole Boivin (2008) has eloquently written of the need to overcome the rigid social constructionism that depicts material things as mere props for culture and language. Without discounting the importance of representation in the formation of ideas, Boivin proposes that in many cases, ideas and cultural understandings do not precede, but rather are helped into becoming, by the material world and human engagement with it (p. 47). Material symbols are therefore not completely arbitrary in relation to the concepts they signify, but also refer to a physicality which resists and enables (Boivin, 2004: 64) and which plays an active role in the construction of meaning (Strang, 2005). Of particular relevance to the present analysis is the way in which certain sensuous qualities of substances may be bundled together and mobilized within systems of value that privilege certain qualities over others (Keane, 2005). Rather than determining culture in any direct way, these material qualities remain available, ready to emerge as real factors in various contexts and at different times (p. 194). Ian Hodder (2012) uses the term resonance to describe the process by which at a non-discursive level coherence occurs across domains in historically specific contexts (p. 126). By examining the ways in which unctuousness, softness, and insensateness have historically moved back and forth between the material and social worlds, as well as across the human and agricultural realms, this article explores the ways in which the qualities of fat may offer a series of potentialities for signs (Meneley, 2008: 305) that resonate in various ways to the present day. However it has been perceived, the qualities of fat seem to motivate, without determining, some of the ambivalence with which corpulent people have been perceived at various historical moments. Finally, in seeking to expand the ways in which the historical study of fat is usually approached, this article makes a somewhat unique contribution to material culture studies, a field that tends to focus more often on objects than on (living) bodies (Sofaer, 2006) or substances (Hahn and Soentgen, 2010), and to the critical study of the body, where scholars in a range of fields generally prefer to view flesh and bone through its representation in culture (Cheah, 1996). Agreeing with Daniel Miller (2010: 6) that we too are stuff, I also take Jean-Pierre Warniers (2001: 10) point that since there is hardly any technique of the body that does not incorporate a given materiality, there are no reasonable grounds to divorce material culture studies from the study of the body, and

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vice versa, as is largely the case at present. By approaching fat as a substance that is neither neutral nor passive in relation to culture, this article explores ways of approaching living bodies as both engaging with, and as forms of, material culture.

Unctuousness
The greasy qualities of fat open up a range of potential meanings that may shed light on the ambiguous responses this substance has elicited in the West, although space limitations prevent a fuller analysis of these qualities. After all, substances may display a wide range of manifest and hidden or unexpected properties and tendencies, opening up a world of nearly infinite richness that cannot be fully grasped (Hahn and Soentgen, 2010: 27). Thus I will not examine fats immiscible properties, nor will I consider its buoyancy and, in certain quantities, heaviness, or its capacity to be viewed as contaminating. During the Neolithic period, the unctuous qualities of fats derived from plant and animal sources were used for a variety of artistic, culinary, and ritual purposes. In addition to being used as food and in religious rituals and burial practices, they were employed as illuminants, sealants, lubricants, polishes, binders and varnishes, as bases for perfumes, medicinal and cosmetic ointments (Evershed etal., 1997). Earlier uses of fats relate to their ability to furnish light when burned, rather than be reduced to ash like flesh and bones (Connor, 2004; Onians, 1951), and to be applied to the body or other objects to make them shine (Meneley, 2008). The stone lamps used in Palaeolithic times employed animal fats as fuel, thereby allowing humans to remain active at night and thus facilitating cave painting, tool-making, and other cultural advances (De Beaune, 2000). This burning of fat for illumination reveals another quality: through the process of combustion, fat can dematerialize into smoke and light (Meneley, 2008). In a process strikingly similar to alchemy, fat may be transformed from a state of gross or dull materiality which is how it has often been described (see below) into something subtle and even transcendent. Aristotle (1953) not only insisted that the moisture of living things was in fact unctuous rather than aqueous, but even likened the life of the body to a lamp in which the flame slowly consumes its oil. While the simile of life as an oil lamp recurs in several cultures and would endure in the West for nearly 2000 years, Aristotle also contended that unctuous moisture was in fact present in all matter, organic and inorganic, and that it was responsible for lending objects and substances their specific shape or consistency as well as whatever inflammable capacities they might have. In this very broad sense, fatty matter was the stuff of the entire world. Based on age-old observations about how the two substances interact, the proverb oil and water dont mix is generally accepted to be true. But despite being immiscible, fat shares certain qualities with water. Both are intrinsically mutable and ambiguous substances, capable of switching between solid and liquid states as well as between matter and spirit, and both are intimately bound up with concepts of life (Strang, 2005). Yet, as Aristotle (1953) suggested, fat manifests an apparent permanence that water does not. This may be one reason why fats and oils could be viewed as almost magical. Some believed they could divine the future by watching how oil interacted with water through the practices of lecanomancy, or by gazing for long periods at the lustre produced by oil rubbed on a smooth surface, a practice known as scrying (Bilu, 1981; Daiches, 1913).

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The Hebrews usually used the word emen to refer to oil, almost always that pressed from the olive, which was a dietary staple and considered a blessing from God. As such, it served as a metaphor for life, fertility, and purity. This kind of fat played an important role in cultic rituals (Hebrew kings and priests would be anointed with oil) and was applied to the hair and skin. When rubbed on the face, oils luminosity could make it shine, but it was also thought capable of transforming the status of an object or person: to become a high priest or king, one had first to be anointed with oil (Ringgren, 2006; Sommer, 2009). Moreover, if fat seemed to symbolize light and life, it was because such qualities were considered intrinsic to the oily substance itself. Unlike water, which merely reflects light (Strang, 2005), fat seemed to contain rather than represent luminosity (Bille and Srensen, 2007). As an oily liquid or liquefiable element in the body that was widely perceived as the very stuff of vitality and strength, fat seemed to embody the essential life of a creature (Onians, 1951). In this respect a vital substance like fat was not only closely related to blood (Carsten, 2011) but was perceived by the Greeks as having been concocted from blood and from the nutriments that helped to create blood (Aristotle, 1943). Such vital properties were also observed in animal and vegetable fats that were rubbed on the skin: they too seemed to impart some of their power to the body. Olive oil was used to anoint the bodies of Greek athletes because it might give them greater strength while also tanning and softening the skin, causing it to shine with a luminosity that made the body seem divine (Lee, 2009; Sansone, 1992: 102; Vernant, 1991). There was also an implied connection between the oil that one applied externally and the fat and sweat of the body itself. The healthy functioning of the body required one to replenish oil that was secreted and washed away from the skin to scrape the skin without reapplying oil was to rob the body of something essential. This is why the Greeks considered it bad luck to dream about a bathing scraper without an accompanying oil flask since such a device would scrape off ones sweat and add nothing to the body (Artemidorus, 1990: 67). Oils capacity to revive flagging vitality was based on personal experience: even non-athletes reported feelings of rejuvenation when oil and water were rubbed on their bodies after a period of fatigue (Aristotle, 1953; Theophrastus, 2003). This tacit link between oil and sweat led Richard B Onians (1951) to propose that the main function of anointing the body with oil after a bath was to feed, to introduce into the body through the pores, the stuff of life and strength, which appears to come out through the pores in the form of sweat (p. 210). If fat could be extracted from plant and animal sources, it was also observed in the land itself. Aristotles successor at the Lyceum, Theophrastus (1916: VIII, 6.4: 179), was just one among many Greeks who drew distinctions between fat and lean soil, applying a taxonomy that was shared by the Romans and which would persist in the Western imagination well into the 19th century. According to Roman writer Varro (1978: 32), the first thing a farmer must determine is whether a given soil is thin or fat or moderate (macra an pinguis an mediocris) because that will indicate which sort of farming should be attempted. One could determine this through touch because fat soil had a distinctive texture and consistency that experienced farmers recognized. Virgil (1978: 132133) maintained that one could always tell which soil was fat (pinguis) because never does it crumble when worked in the hands, but like pitch grows sticky in the fingers when held.

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Since the tactile attributes of such soil called to mind the viscous and pliable qualities of oil or grease, describing a field as fat was no simple metaphor. Rather there was something palpably unctuous about fertile soil, as well as a kind of swelling tendency that could be discerned through other means. After removing a handful of soil to test for unctuousness, one had to pay close attention to what happened when reinserting the sample into the hole one had made in the ground: if there is an excess as by some sort of leavening, it will be a sure sign that the soil is fat; if it is insufficient, that it is poor; if it makes an even fill, that it is ordinary (Columella, 1968: 121). The increase made possible by fertile soil did not refer solely to agricultural yield but to the intrinsic swelling tendencies of the very stuff that made such bounty possible.1 Similar observations about the oleaginous qualities of soil were registered among the Hebrews, for whom abundant crops and livestock were examples of the fat (hlebh) of the land (see Genesis 45:18).2 In Hebrew culture, fat was used metaphorically to refer to the best part of something, especially the choicest fruits of the harvest as well as the fertile land that produced them (Mnderlein, 1980: 396397). Yet this metaphor seems to have been also connected to the physical properties of fertile soil. It has even been argued that the oft-repeated biblical reference to a land flowing with milk (hlb) and honey may, when read in consonantal Hebrew (hlb), be more correctly rendered a land flowing with fat (hlebh) and honey (Dershowitz, 2010). If we are to believe Isaiah (34: 67) the fertility of soil could even be enhanced through the introduction of animal fat. In one of his righteous fits of violence, Yahweh declares his sword to be gorged with fat and dripping with blood from the slaughter of countless animals, so that when the gore drops on the ground the soil [shall be] made rich with fat. The fat that so abundantly and poetically gushed from the soil infused everything with its richness, from crops and animals to humans fortunate enough to revel in its flow. One of the Dead Sea Scrolls foretold a time when bodies would luxuriantly swell in tandem with the land: all who shall po[sse]ss the land will enjoy and grow fat with everything enjoya[ble to] the flesh (Martnez and Tigchelaar, 1999: 4Q171: 343). Unctuous richness thus provided quite tangible ways of thinking about increase, both in terms of agricultural yield and the growth of the body. Of course, among the Hebrews, not all fat was permitted for human consumption, not least because in sacrificial rites in which substances symbolizing life were circulated between the divine and human realms the best part of the animal (hlebh) was reserved for Yahweh just as Yahweh had given humans the fat of animals and vegetables (Marx, 2005: 87). Hence the injunction All Fat is the Lords (Leviticus 3:16), which chiefly referred to the layer of suet that wrapped the kidneys, organs long thought to be connected to the genitals and therefore to reproduction and sexual desire (Kellermann, 1995). Perhaps because this suet was considered especially tasty and thus could propel people to excess (Hill, 2011) this substance was forbidden to the Hebrews: It shall be a perpetual statute throughout your generations, in all your settlements: you must not eat any fat or any blood (Leviticus 3:17). So imaginatively interwoven were the respective fats of lands, animals and people that, centuries later, the Babylonian Talmud would tell of a certain Rabbi Sheshet who believed he could, through the act of fasting, offer his own body fat as a proxy for the more traditional animal sacrifice:
Now I have sat in a fast, and so my fat and blood have become less. May it be pleasing before you that my fat and blood that have become less be received as if I had offered them

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up before you on the altar and so be reconciled with me. (Neusner etal., 2005: Chapter One, 1:2, II.4.P.)

The Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews thus shared an admiration for greasy richness, but this should not distract us from the other potentialities of fat, not all of which were positive. While generally praising fat fields, Columella (1968) warned that extremes in soil types could lead to problems. While very lean soil tends to become barren, the fattest and most fertile soil suffers from rankness of growth (pinguissimam et laetissimam luxuria). He also drew an important analogy between fields and bodies:
There is need . . . of much intermixture among these so different extremes, as is requisite also in our own bodies, whose well-being depends on a fixed and, so to speak, balanced proportion of the hot and the cold, the moist and the dry, the compact and the loose. (III: xii.3: 306307)

Through such distinctions, especially the one separating hot from cold soil qualities, Columella revealed his reliance on the humoral model of the body that, based on Hippocratic precedents, would structure European medical thinking through the 17th century (Winiwarter, 2000). Indeed, the Hippocratic authors derived a great deal of their knowledge of human nutrition by observing what took place in plants (Schiefsky, 2005), which is one reason why analogies between fat soil and fat bodies made considerable sense. The great Roman compiler of ancient knowledge Pliny the Elder (1971) contended that plants and animals both suffer from
hunger and from indigestion, maladies due to the amount of moisture in them, and some even from obesity [obesitate], for instance all which produce resin owing to excessive fatness [pinguitudine] are converted into torch-wood, and when the roots also have begun to get fat, die like animals from excessive adipose deposit. (Book XVII, XXXVII. 219: 153)

Just as overly fat fields generated surfeit and decay, in animal bodies fats connection to fertility could be disrupted if it was present in large quantities. Fat was indeed viewed as having been concocted from blood, but insofar as the normal itinerary of blood was to be turned into sperm in the male and milk in the female, the presence of large amounts of fat in the body could militate against fertility (Aristotle, 1943). As a residue of other vital bodily substances, fat enjoyed a double status as both vehicle of vitality and a form of surplus that could be viewed as literally excremental in that it is secreted from the body and may represent a form a waste. As Pliny (1983) noted, All fat animals are more liable to barrenness, in the case of both males and females; also excessively fat ones get old more quickly (Book XI, LXXXV.212: 567). Obviously such ideas are culturally specific. As opposed to African cultures, where fatness can be deliberately cultivated as a means of storing up the forces of life and reproduction (Popenoe, 2004; Warnier, 2007), Western societies have tended to emphasize the idea that the production of fat and the production of sperm are in a state of tension. This has prompted Franoise Hretier-Aug (1991: 507) to assert that: In our cultures fat is considered as a deviation of that which should be devoted to sexual activity. Analogies between crops and minds had been the stock in trade of educational theory since 5th-century Athens (Kronenberg, 2009), and when extended to bodies they formed

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the basis for a set of tropes that would proliferate in the West well into the modern era. The luxuria or rankness of growth that Columella (1968) said was a consequence of overly fat soil referred to excessive organic increase that must be cleared away lest the land become unproductive. Originally denoting a form of organic excess that threatened to result in loss, luxuria was also the term that Romans used to describe the cause of most personal and social corruption in Rome (Gowers, 1996). The greasy qualities that helped to explain agricultural abundance were also capable of giving rise to more negative consequences: overgrowth, rottenness, and barrenness instead of moderation and fertility. Whether occurring in fields or bodies, corruption and decay represented the furthest reaches of abundance, a way of thinking about fat and flesh that would remain operative for centuries (Bynum, 1995). This may be one reason that the grease and sweat that collected in Roman gymnasia and baths could be described as filth even as it was being gathered and sold as a revitalizing medicine (Aurelius, 1916: VIII.24; Dioscorides, 2005; Miller, 2004). The ambivalence of many responses to fat may stem from the ambiguity of the substance itself. By the Middle Ages, fat remained an ambiguous material that was at once necessary and degraded (Vigarello, 2010: 31): it was central to life as well as a bodily secretion that was literally excremental. The fattest is the first to rot (Le plus gras est le premier pourri) was a medieval French proverb that described the potential corruption of the habitually well-fed (quoted in Hassell, 1982: 129). Ancient claims about the sterility of fat people found a conduit into the Middle Ages where they were picked up by the likes of Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, among many others (Lindgren, 2005). They even made their way into the pool of proverbs that began to be collected in Europe from the 16th century onward, one of which bluntly declared that: Fat flesh is flesh of ice (Chair graisse, chair de glace) (quoted in Loux, 1978: 75). The modern West thus inherited from antiquity a view of fat as a sign of vitality and fertility that, when present in excessive quantities or in certain forms, was also capable of generating disgust (Forth, 2012). Fat represents increase while remaining a material instance of that increase; yet when increase extends beyond ripeness it easily transforms into waste and decay. Based as they are on what we might see as agricultural common sense, ideas like this may be found outside the West as well. Elisa Sobos (1997) nuanced study of rural Jamaica reveals a community for whom fat bodies represent health, vitality and beauty and are imagined with analogies drawn from agricultural experience. Thus the fattening of bodies is correlated with the swelling of fruits and vegetables. Jamaicans too acknowledge boundaries beyond which corpulent bodies shift from signifying healthy abundance to become evidence of superfluity and decay. Fatness connotes fullness and juicy ripeness, like that of ripe fruit well sweet and soon to burst, Sobo observes, but this state of ultimate ripeness is also unstable and, when certain limits are exceeded, fully capable of eliciting opposite responses. Jamaicans recognize that overripe fruit rots and its sweetness sours. After it swells and ripens it declines, coming to resemble feces soft, dark, fetid, and sometimes maggot infected. The line between acceptable and excessive increase is located somewhere in that twilight zone where ripeness and decay imperceptibly connect and begin to swap places. The ambiguities of organic process are thus bound up with complex perceptions of the body and the foods that sustain it and make it grow. Since unincorporated excess begins to swell and decay, Jamaicans tend to link

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superfluous or unutilized food, fat, health, and such with filth and the inevitable process of decomposition that accompanies death. Thus Jamaicans draw distinctions between good and bad fat, the good being firm like a mango and the bad being spongy, soft, hanging slack, and denoting declining fitness as if a person was an overripe fruit, beginning to break down and rot (Sobo, 1997: 260261).

Softness
Depending upon context and circumstance, then, the positive connotations of fat and oily things were capable of being reversed. This seems to have been especially so among the Romans, who, despite adopting the Greek custom of rubbing themselves with oil, retained a certain distrust of a practice they often associated with luxury and effeminacy (Bowie, 1993). Yet unctuousness is not the only culturally relevant quality that fat possesses. When contained within the bodily envelope greasy and sticky fat enhances the softness of soft tissues, fills in potentially unsightly concavities, and blunts the hard edges of bones. This erasure of the most telling signs of the skeleton an unpleasant reminder of human mortality may be one reason why varying degrees of plumpness have functioned in many cultures as evidence of health, youth and vitality.3 As we will see, however, the yielding capacity of fat did not remain a simple tactile impression, but was analogically related to other forms of softness that were seen as being in some respects the cause or effect of corpulence. While some of this softness pertained to qualities attached to females, who were typically seen as being colder, fatter, and moister than males (DeanJones, 1994), it also denoted organic decay as well as corruption in general. This slippage between the feminine and the rotten is a common feature of the softness that fat has manifested in Western culture (Bynum, 1995), and here too agricultural images are inextricably bound up with perceptions of fat in the human body. As was the case with the unctuousness of fat, some of this softness was explained with reference to different physical environments where climate and terrain were thought to mould bodies and characters in definite ways. While space limitations do not permit me to expand upon the ancient associations between corpulence and moisture, the Hippocratic authors (1957) maintained that people residing in fat and moist lands were more likely to have similar features in their bodies and characters. This cluster of tactile qualities was freighted with moral significance. For where the land is rich, soft, and well-watered . . . there the inhabitants are fleshy, ill-articulated, moist, lazy, and generally cowardly in character. This more or less geomorphic perspective facilitated a mesh of mutually supporting qualities within which fatness was entangled with physical and cognitive traits. In addition to being prone to slackness and sleepiness, such people would lack the hard and taut articulation of joints that distinguished men from women, warriors from farmers, and Greeks from Asiatics (Kuriyama, 1999). Instead they would manifest an overall laxness in their lifestyles and characters that aligned them with effeminacy and corruption. This was the kind of softness implicit in the Greek word for luxury (tryph), which has origins in the idea of receptiveness that is at odds with the hard virile ideal publicly celebrated in Hellenic and Roman culture (Dench, 1998). Thus Herodotus (1969, 9.122: 301) could declare that Soft lands breed soft men; wondrous fruits of the

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earth and valiant warriors grow not from the same soil. Commentaries on very corpulent rulers in Egypt and Asia Minor (Athenaeus, 1933) provided strategies for moralizing about the effeminate luxury that seemed to categorize Asiatic societies, the moral and physical softness of which were presented as a sharp contrast to the imagined virtue and hardness of Rome (Dalby, 2000). The tactile properties of fat thus played an important role in constructing the moral category of the soft as well as the gendered distinctions that it enabled. The discourse of muscularity that arose at some point between the Hippocratic and Galenic periods reinforced this cultural validation of the hard and taut, establishing a connection between muscles and volition that, according to Kuriyama (1999), has shaped our Western sense of the self ever since. As a substance whose properties include the soft and flabby, fat has functioned since antiquity as the moral and physical other of muscle and sinew, whether this tension has been manifested literally in the validation of hard and taut bodies over soft ones, or figuratively through references to a softness of character and a lack of willpower. Of course there was an important visual dimension to such ideals. According to the ancient art of physiognomy, excess flesh, especially if it was soft and flabby, could speak volumes about the character of a person. Appropriated by sculptors as a way of representing how inner ideas of human excellence were popularly believed to be manifested in the external traits of the male body, physiognomical wisdom cast in bronze its assumptions about fat, muscularity and proportion (Stewart, 1990). It was also used to interpret the bodies of ordinary people. The influential Roman physiognomist Polemo sketched a garish portrait of a certain man from Lydia who, in addition to having angry eyes, and effeminate, fastidious facial features, was also very fat, with a short, thick neck, a very large stomach, fat legs and fleshy hands. Given these tell-tale signs, Polemo concluded, I knew he was full of evil (quoted in Barton, 1994: 111). Yet fat was never simply a matter of aesthetics and appearances in classical antiquity. The same logic that compelled Greco-Roman observers to link fat lands to soft characters and to compare animal and human physiques and characters offered a potent way of combining these qualities with reference to fat people. This was often accomplished through pointed comparisons of such persons to large and/or docile domestic animals whose soft dispositions rendered them more like slaves than masters. Plato (1980) wondered what people would be like in society that freely provided basic necessities and eliminated the need for effort to obtain them: is each of them to live out his life getting fattened up, like a cow? In his view such people had become fit for the slaughter by stronger and harder types: its appropriate that an idle, soft-spirited, and fattened animal usually is ravaged by one of those other animals who have been worn very hard with courage and labors (pp. 196197). The Stoics extended these ideas in their sharp criticisms of luxuries that threatened to reduce men to the level of the most ignoble of beasts. Seneca (1979: 412413) described how dissolute men who keep late hours and get no exercise are like birds being fattened for the slaughter: their idle bodies are overwhelmed with flesh. To grow fat through good living could signify agency, status and enjoyment. It could even indicate a predatory role in which one figuratively or literally devoured others in a manner commensurate with ones social status. But to be fattened suggested an abdication of mastery and a corresponding drift into base animality, effeminacy and servility.

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All of this relates to the instability of eating and feeding as culturally significant acts. To eat may indicate enjoyment and mastery over what is consumed and, insofar as it involved others, the act of feeding may imply love, care, and charity (though the fact that one can feed others may still indicate magnanimity and thus an elevated status). Yet since eating and being fed are traits that humans share with other animals, one encounters numerous slippages from properly human behaviours into a range of worryingly bestial ones. Ideas about mastery and subjection are inevitably complicated through such slippages. When not guided by self-control what might have been measured and refined dining could easily turn into an act of devouring that reduced the eater to the level of a ravenous beast. None of these qualitative associations remained confined to classical antiquity, but continued to be cited, extended and reworked in the medieval world and beyond. Building upon the late antique work of Vegetius (1993) on the proper physiques of would-be soldiers, chivalry manuals expected knights to be moderately shaped rather than fat, a bodily condition they likened to the pulpy softness of organic decay. The troubadour Bertran de Born expressed this fear of fat corruption in the 12th century:
War is no noble word, when its waged without fire and blood for a king or great potentate whom anyone can scorn and call a liar, and he just relaxes and fattens up [sengrais]! A young man who doesnt feed on war soon becomes fat and rotten [gras e savais]. (quoted in Pfeffer, 1997: 56)

The 13th-century troubadour Raoul de Houdenc caught a whiff of this decay when he encountered a once noble and active knight who had degenerated into a miserly fat man: I feel that he is mouldering with idleness and has sprung from badness, is soft in arms and fat from sojourning (mol darmes et cras de sejor), thick with shame and devoid of honour, sharp with trickery, vain in prowess, so that the stink of idleness he has in his heart must come out (De Houdenc, 1983: 33). Engaging the tactile and olfactory as well as the visual registers, this reaction to a soldiers physical and moral decline revealed the disgust that such softness might elicit. The contempt that was sometimes heaped on very corpulent monarchs such as Charles III (839888) and Louis VI (10781137) of France as well as Sancho I of Leon (d. 966) and William the Conqueror (10281087) reveals that not even medieval kings were exempt from the negative connotations of a softness that challenged their virility (Bradbury, 2007; Gilman, 2004; Maclean, 2003).

Insensateness
In addition to its connections to greasiness and softness, fat was viewed by the Greeks, Romans, and Hebrews as a dull and insensate material capable of disrupting perception and cogitation. Arguing that blood itself lacks perception as does anything (like fat) concocted from blood, Aristotle (2001: 26) speculated that if the entire body were to become fat, it would lack perception entirely. The Romans adopted a similar perspective. Explaining that greasy fat has no sensation (adips cunctis sine sensu), because it does not possess arteries or veins, Pliny (1983) declared that most fat animals are more or less insensitive: it is recorded [by Varro] that because of this pigs have been gnawed by mice

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while still alive. It was due to this insensateness that the son of the consular Lucius Apronius had his fat removed by an operation and relieved his body of unmanageable weight (Book XI, 212, LXXXV). The third-century writer Aelian (1997) tells the story of the tyrant Dionysius of Heraclea, whose habitual gluttony and luxury caused him to gain so much weight that he found it difficult to breathe. Out of shame, Dionysius held audiences while seated behind a chest that concealed all but his face. His physicians recommended passing long needles into his ribs and stomach while he was in a deep sleep so that, by passing through his fat which, because it was insensitive, and in a sense not part of him they could discover where his fat ended and his flesh began. The idea was that the slumbering tyrant would awaken only when the needles hit something not transformed by the excess of fat (pp. 29123l). Dionysiuss fat could be cut away because, strictly speaking, it was a form of surplus that was not bound up with his body in the same way as a limb or internal organ. Along with the related qualities of unctuousness and softness, the insensateness of fat was readily extended to the characters of individuals burdened with such dull materiality. If the softness of fat denoted potentially excessive yielding, its insensate thickness suggested the presence of a barrier through which things pass only with difficulty. In the 4th-century BCE Physiognomics, which was erroneously attributed to Aristotle (1936), insensitivity was closely bound up with bodies in which the distance from the navel to the chest is greater than the distance from the chest to the neck. People with such physiques are gluttonous and insensitive (anaisthetoi: insensate); gluttonous because the receptacle into which they admit their food is large, and insensitive because the senses have a more cramped space, corresponding to the size of the food receptacle, so that the senses are oppressed owing to the excess or defect of the food supply (pp. 118119). In such persons, the capacity for emotions and even perception itself is diminished through the constriction of those regions of the body in which the senses are located (Martin, 1995). Insensateness was also coupled with the qualities attributed to animals domesticated for human consumption and thus deliberately fattened through restrictions on diet and movement. Thickness and sluggishness of bodily movement thus found parallels in the torpor and clumsiness of the mind: animals with very large abdomens also happen to be less clever than those with smaller ones (Pliny, 1942, Book XI, LXXIX: 559). The insensateness of fat thus seemed to enable perceptual insensitivity as well as motoric sluggishness, all of which formed durable stereotypes about corpulent people that would be transmitted through jokes and proverbs. While sometimes admiring fat bodies as evidence of wealth and status (Smith, 1997; Varner, 2004) the Romans also suggested that intelligence and corpulence were mutually exclusive. As a joking reference to the goddess of intellect, a popular means of denoting dim-wittedness was to say that such a person had a fat Minerva (crassa or pingui Minerva), thus suggesting an unbridgeable gulf between corpulence and wisdom (Plaza, 2006). The physician Galen even claimed that the dullness and slowness of the very fat were common knowledge, citing a popular saying to back up his claim: And this is chanted by almost everyone, for it is one of the truest of all things, that a fat stomach does not bear a subtle mind (quoted in Drysdall, 2005: 133). If insensateness could move from the literal to the figurative as well as between the animal and human, it was equally capable of being bundled together with the other qualities of fat. This is how all of those

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soft and cowardly inhabitants of fat lands be relied upon to be thick-witted, and neither subtle nor sharp (Hippocrates, 1957: xxiv, 4060: 137). The high living that may contribute to corpulence and therefore moral and physical softness could just as easily bring insensateness with it. Railing against the ruinous luxury he saw all around him, the 1st-century Roman poet Persius described a particularly villainous man as being numb with vice because prime fat has overgrown his heart (fibris increvit opimum pingue), as if the substance had worked its way into his very innards (quoted in Plaza, 2006: 94). None of this was exclusive to the Hellenistic tradition, for the Hebrews too registered concern about fats desensitizing effects on the person. In biblical texts, words like hlebh take on negative implications when observed in the human body, especially for the wellto-do whose enjoyment of fat things could lead to arrogance, selfishness, or financial ruin (Berquist, 2002; Kottek, 1996; Ringgren, 2006). Insensibility was a primary trait of wealthy people who showed no compassion for the needy: they have been rendered insensate and dull by their own prosperity and suffer the ill effects of fat regardless of their actual corpulence: They close their hearts to pity [literally: they are enclosed in their own fat (hlebh)]; / with their mouths they speak / arrogantly (Psalms 17:10). In a number of biblical passages, fat is synonymous with being mentally slow or thick, and is manifested most often among the prosperous: Their hearts are fat [taphash: unreceptive or stupid] and gross [hlebh] (Brown etal., 1974; Psalms 119:70). Such people become obdurate, suffering from a hardening of the heart, which was also the seat of the mind. In Deuteronomy (32:15) Moses recites the words of God to the Israelites, explaining how, after being provided with the bounty of the land, Jacob became complacent and turned his back on God. Jacob ate his fill; / Jeshuran [i.e. the people of Israel] grew fat [emen], and kicked. You grew fat [emen], bloated, and gorged! Even if abundance and good living had caused these bodies to become grotesque to the eye, the Hebrew tradition was more concerned with the spiritual and cognitive effects of this fattening. Once incorporated into early Christianity, the Hebrew concept of the fat heart and the Greco-Roman alignment of softness with corruption and effeminacy were reiterated and extended in European culture (Forth, 2012), as were variations on the ancient theme of the insensate, decadent, uncaring, and/or stupid fat person. First recorded in 1250, the English epithet fathead (fetthed) captured the gist of this idea, and the proverbs that have circulated since then have further propagated this stereotype: a belly full of gluttony will never study willingly; a gross belly does not produce a refined mind; fat bellies make empty skulls; fat bodies, lean brains, and so on (Strauss, 1994: 1:18). Here as elsewhere characterological claims about corpulent individuals seem intimately linked to the properties of fat itself.

Conclusion
What is striking about the qualities of fat is the extent to which they are cited in a range of stereotypes throughout Western history. Lets consider one example from physiognomy, a genre that, while discredited by medical specialists, remained quite popular among Americans into the 20th century (Griffith, 2004). In a work which appeared in new editions through the 1920s, Mary Olmsted Stanton (1890) drew direct parallels between the

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properties of fatty tissue and the character of fat individuals. Muscle and fat are two classes of tissues [that] create and exhibit two distinct and opposite kinds of character (p. 75). Whereas muscle reveals the power of the will, Fat is yielding, without the ability either to withstand or to overcome. It is negative in its nature, utterly unreliable, except where we find it in combination with a good bony structure and considerable muscular development (p. 93). From the properties of fatty tissue, Stanton inferred a range of personal characteristics, notably selfishness and a lack of empathy. While warning readers against looking for any single sign of such traits, Stanton declared that: The excessively fat are usually quite selfish, for fat is a tissue which is negative in its nature and is not endowed with feeling or sensitiveness. A fat person is simply too busy looking after his own comfort to think of others, and too weighty and bulky to move actively in those acts of friendship and benevolence which require personal effort (p. 262, original emphases in all quotes). Here, then, on the cusp of our modern obsessions with slenderness (Stearns, 1997), we find the qualities of fat being once again translated into distinct character traits. This article suggests that the unctuous, soft, and insensate qualities of fat have been bundled together in Western culture through centuries of semiotic regimentation and stabilization (Keane, 2005: 195). Part of this regimentation revolves around an unstable yet resilient hierarchy of substances, textures and consistencies that tacitly mobilizes methods of characterizing the social world and the people who inhabit it. The qualities of fat thus resonate with various abstract and durable cultural ideas to create coherence across a number of domains (Hodder 2012). Yet by unpacking the various levels on which fat has been and in many respects continues to be understood, I am not proposing that all of these meanings are mobilized whenever the term is used. Insofar as the material properties of substances offer potentialities for signs (Meneley, 2008: 302) rather than a universal or unchanging meaning, attention to context remains crucial for understanding what is intended when the term is employed at any given time. Thus, despite its focus on the ambiguity of fat, none of the preceding discussion indicates a deep-seated cultural repugnance for fat bodies that somehow explains or validates our contemporary misgivings. The will to see in classical antiquity pre-echoes of our own modern obsessions is as problematic as the desire to completely divorce our current concerns from the distant past, as if prejudices against fat are either distinctly modern or purely visual. Rather there is an ongoing dialectic between past models and present applications, between those elements of the past that fall into oblivion and those that are resurrected and reimagined to serve novel agendas. If our contemporary anxieties about corpulence reflect more modern changes in our society, they may also be viewed as being inflected by a cluster of much older ideas that circulate in the present in subtle ways. Further research is needed to uncover the complicated networks through which ancient ideas are transmitted and transformed in modern times. Yet to the extent that such modern assertions are permeated by premodern ideational content, it seems likely that the qualities of fat have continued to impress themselves on our language and culture well into the present. Brumley (2010: 126) may well be right when she notes that the potential for fatphobia is entrenched firmly, and often invisibly, in every English speakers heritage. Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Anthony Corbeill and John Younger for fielding my queries on ancient bodies and texts, to Pilar Galiana y Abal for her insights into concepts of fertility and decay, to Verena

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Winiwarter for her ideas about fat and soil, to Cara Polsley for her translation assistance, and to Alison Leitch, Damon Talbott and the anonymous reader for the Journal of Material Culture for their comments on early versions of this text.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. This fact that becomes more evident when we consider that biogeochemical analyses of medieval soil composition often reveal the biomarkers of fatty acids or lipids contained in the manure used to fertilize arable land (Bull etal., 1999; Simpson etal., 1999). 2. All subsequent in-text Bible quotations refer to Coogan (2007). 3. This is relevant today among anorectics, whose quest for thinness may produce skeletal physiques, as well as HIV-positive individuals who may experience disrupted fat distribution (lipodystrophy) due to certain drugs used to fight HIV. As Graham (2005) shows, in such cases persons may become so gaunt that they appear as if they are in the last stages of AIDS without actually having the disease and are often stigmatized accordingly.

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Author biography
Christopher E Forth is the Howard Chair of Humanities & Western Civilization and Professor of History at the University of Kansas. His research and teaching interests revolve around the cultural history of gender, sexuality, the body, and the senses (with an emphasis on modern France, Britain and America) as well as European intellectual and cultural history. His current project is a cultural history of fat in the West, conceptualized in terms of visuality, tactility as well as materiality.

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