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4. I Exists
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
A few years ago a chance professional encounter led me to work with a group of French diabetes specialists on the difficulties involved in treating patients of Maghrebi origin, who account for a significant proportion of diabetics in France. This led me to study their relation with time—time spent on culture, time spent on religion, personal time—and on the possibilities of enabling doctors to persuade them to adopt another temporal mode, a form of temporal regularity for taking medicine, giving blood samples, dieting in particular ways, etc. It seemed clear to me that the challenge was trying to get Maghrebi patients to take personal responsibility for treating their condition. Their nurses and hospital caregivers made the point that,in the families of these patients,the individual was dispossessed of his or her illness, which was treated 4 I Exists 55 56 i exists as a matter to be handled by the whole community. It is the same with death. When someone dies in the hood, the body no longer belongs to the family alone; it belongs to the community of believers, neighbors, and cousins. Death can never be a private matter in Islam. It is the same with happy events such as births. The problems arising from this are obvious when you see the endless family visits to which mothers and neighbors are subjected after a birth. Cultural shocks of this kind arise from the different ways in which private space is understood in Maghrebi and French cultures. The frontiers between the private and the public are not the same. In Mediterranean families neither joy nor sadness is to be lived alone. The community naturally takes over the emotions of the individual . For example, anyone who has been invited to stay with a friend in the Maghreb knows how suffocating the host’s hospitality can be. It’s as if leaving the guest alone were an insult, a form of abandonment.“You want to be alone? But why? Don’t you feel comfortable with me?” This type of social relationship shows that it’s impossible for the host to imagine that his guest might want to go for a walk alone while “the family” is looking after him. Neither solitude nor the individual has any place in the social imagination of Maghrebis. Similarly, when you are invited to share in a meal, there is a virtual obligation to eat—and to eat a further helping when you’ve finished what’s on your plate! Even if you’re not hungry, even at the height of the summer heat, you have to capitulate and eat. This widespread social practice shows that the personal well-being of the individual (who might, e.g., want to eat lightly) makes no sense in the cultural context of a family meal (where [3.238.235.181] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 07:18 GMT) i exi sts 57 you must eat as expected). And you must eat a lot! For quantity is valorized in this culture, so much so that it will be said of a man (or a woman) who is slightly fat that he (or she) is in good health, whereas a slim or slender person will be judged to be sick. The more food, sugar, honey, semolina, he is offered, the more a guest knows he is being honored. Hence the enormous bottles of CocaCola and Fanta, full of fluorescent chemicals, served by Maghrebis with couscous and various meat dishes. It’s as if it would be an insult to serve a couscous simply with water, which might be exactly what the guest is longing for! In an excellent sketch the French comedian Gad El Maleh asks with a deep Maghrebi accent: “What do you call someone who doesn’t eat meat?” The answer is: “A pauper!” This joke gets everyone laughing because it is so solidly anchored in Maghrebi culture. You honor a guest with meat. The word vegetarian doesn’t exist. Neither does the word individual. That is why it is so difficult to administer a dietary regime based on clinical criteria to people molded in this type of culture, for their relationship to food is fundamentally shaped by social and cultural factors that set a primary value on hospitality. For Maghrebis, grand meals are part and parcel of public festivals, which are fundamental to the identity of the community. By the same token asking an individual to follow a special diet amounts to excluding...