Toxic Beauties: Medicine, Information, and Body Consumption in Transnational Europe

Introduction

The diverse sites visited by this essay suggest that globalization has been overdiscussed in terms of sociopolitical and economic processes. In contrast, I propose that an anthropology of everyday life is required to excavate the quite unexpected niches where many profound effects of globalization can be accessed. Thus, in the Greek and wider European context, I examine food consumption, social aesthetics, disease imagery, and medical rationalities as diverse registers of and for viewing globalization. I propose that the social imaginary that has developed around the transformation and transubstantiation of national food supplies and palates is reflexive of the transformation of the nation-state in the face of globalization and of the crisis of nation-state identities. If, as Ernst Bloch once asserted in reference to German nationalism, the modern nation state is a medicalized "unit of blood," then a core notion of the nation-state, as composed of stable identifiable homogeneous bodies, is under challenge in Greece by the dissemination of new medical technologies, new transnational commodity/consumption networks, migrations of Balkan refugees, and Asian Pacific and African labor reserves. Thus I identify, contrast, compare, and montage a diversity of social discourses and practices that speak to the mutation of the body, the permeability of the body, the transformation and restabilization of embodiment as symbolic sites where the relationship between nation-state identities and globalized experience is being worked out, fantasized, contradicted, and occasionally reconciled.

Gioconda

An early glimpse of the increasing authority of medical discourse in Greece--its imperial expansion into the empirical structure of recent modernity--arrived in the form of a series of articles in the Greek media about Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting the Mona Lisa. The work of art was interrogated by medical forensics to get at historical truth; the acquisition of history entailed the opening, the vivisection of Gioconda. The medicalization of Mona Lisa moved her from the aesthetic into the historical. It constituted her secularization and repositioning into the everyday life that we all negotiate and traverse, a life that the medical discourse on Gioconda metaphorized and indexed as disease progression and diagnoses. To the degree that Gioconda is an icon of European humanistic civilization, this dissection had ramifications for the Greek public's sense of personhood, embodiment, social memory, and European identity.

Gioconda, "the eternal beauty" of Western civilization, ever-present for centuries, was subjected to multiple reexaminations, pushing the painting's aesthetic value back to what realists have termed "the Age of Innocence." Concretely, and as reported in the Greek Sunday paper To Vema (Caumer 1991), in 1990, Alain Rosse, professor at the School of Fine Arts in Lyon, was disturbed by the position of her hand. He contacted an authority in the microsurgery of hands and a physiotherapist specializing in ailments of the spinal cord to provide their expert testimony. Observing that her right hand did not rest on the left hand but lay "indolent, inactive, and flabby," they explained that she either "suffered from tetanus" or the right hand "was shorter than the other hand." They concluded that there is an atrophy of the right part of her body.

In other words, Gioconda was a paralytic. The right hemisphere of her brain was atrophic, and her smile is nothing but an expressive outburst that comes from a numbing of the face. To support their thesis, they observed an anomalous bump on her right hand, between thumb and forefinger. So how has the image of this woman stayed in fashion for four centuries? The physiotherapist explained: "She does not belong to her epoch, she is eternal. . . . People change morphologically but anomalies win over time." In other words, what was eternal and unchanging about Gioconda, once we medicalized her appearance, were her pathologies.

In 1975, a Danish doctor had supported a similar thesis, diagnosing a hereditary paralysis of the face. Gioconda was a cripple! From the right side she is smiling; from the...