ABSTRACT
This work looks at the Italian situation concerning the science of nutrition. After having explained the methodology, I explore the Italian political situation and how the founding values of Italian culture are becoming more and more attentive to the physical aspect, especially the female one. In this context, the nutrition specialist has been affirmed: s/he aims to help patients to reach the standards proposed by the community by relying on a scientific approach considered “objective”. Through a participant observation of patient-specialist meetings and interviews with patients, my work emphasizes how the intervention of the specialist reproduces a symbolic cultural violence that wants to frame the bodies in normality grids, while enjoying all the confidence that is given to the scientific world in Italy, and sheds light on an institutionalized symbolic and invisible violence. In a second study, I analyse how the patients take control of the injunctions proposed by nutritionists by making them their own. During meetings, I witnessed negotiations between the specialist and patient, noticing different kinds of micro-resistance techniques implemented by the patient. These resistance techniques show the patients’ agency and the reversal, partial and momentary, of the dynamics of power. Inside the nutritionists’ clinic, sentences, gestures, and jokes allow for patients to take control of the conversation. My research therefore revolves around the binomial violence/agency and injunction/appropriation by taking into account a fundamental anthropological theme.
