Dancing Skeletons by Katherine A. Dettwyler

Dettwyler, however, tried to explain that children should be the ones to receive the better food because they need the protein to fuel their growth. One man explained that good food should not be wasted on the young, because they have their whole lives to eat, while the old should be honored because they will soon die. When the two were eating with some of the villagers and Dettwyler gave her piece of chicken to her daughter, she was immediately questioned. She begged Dettwyler for medicine to cure her daughter despite Dettwyler’s assurance that all her daughter needed was to have a higher quantity of protein slowly introduced to her diet.ĭettwyler also offers an anecdote regarding misconceptions about nutrition that occurred when she brought her young daughter Miranda to Mali. The mother who summoned Dettwyler called the disease “funu bana,” meaning “swelling sickness,” and believed her daughter caught it from another child. The disease is a result of protein deficiency combined with a high caloric intake and often appears when the child cannot sustain the same level of protein intake after being weaned. On one of her visits to Mali, Dettwyler examined a little girl with kwashiorkor, of which the primary symptom is swelling all over the body and particularly in the abdomen. It is the mothers’ misunderstanding that it is not simply enough to give children food, but in the early stages of development, it is crucial to distribute the right kinds of food. Katherine Dettwyler suggests that rather than poverty, a lack of education surrounding nutrition is the main root of malnutrition in infants and young children. In her intensive ethnographic study of Magnambougou, Mali, “Dancing Skeletons: Life and Death in West Africa,” however, Dr.

While malnutrition in Mali afflicts the entire population, it is the second largest killer of children under the age of 5. This landlocked country is often afflicted by droughts and insect infestations, which deplete the crops upon which they often rely on for food. As a study from 2014 indicates, over 1.5 million people are not sustained by a regular supply of food. About four in 10 children under the age of 5 are underweight, and one in four people are as well. Ranking 182nd on the Human Development Index (the 6th lowest ranking on the planet,) Mali is recognized as one of the most nutritionally unstable and under developed countries in the world.

Dancing Skeletons by Katherine A. Dettwyler