"En kropp det är... Du ska ta hand om kroppen"
En etnologisk studie om barns syn på kropp och hälsa
The body that is? You have to take care of the body is an ethnological study of how children look at body and health from their own perspective. During five weeks I did a field work in a school in Uppsala, Sweden. Ten fifth grade students and two teachers were interviewed. They were also participants in observations and did paintings. The theories used in this essay are a mix of phenomenology and feminist theories of western culture and the body. This study focuses on four different areas in which the body is important: Looks (clothes and make up), Food (what you eat, when, and why), Exercise (what you exercise, when, and why, and other leisure activity) and finally the Body and Health. Children are a part of society and the purpose of this essay is to see how they think and discuss around this questions. The children look at their own bodies with different eyes than they see others. The looks were important for some of these children; their clothes, their make up and their hair were important parts of how they wanted to be understood. The bodies of other people on, particular if they were related or friends in the closest surrounding, were not a problem but bodies of celebrities or people on tele-vision and magazines could be to fat, to thin, ugly or beautiful. People they knew personally could look how they wanted but the other ones could be valuated. They made a difference between female and male bodies when it came to clothes and make up. The children was aware of the connection between exercise and good health and many of them was part of physical activity on their leisure time, as well as they spent many hours with the com-puter at home, playing games or chatting on the Internet. They were well aware of what kind of food that is considered healthy and good, and what kind of food that makes you fat. Finally, they were well educated in the body ideals of today, and their reflections of the body were that a thin body is healthy and a fat one is unhealthy. They also considered it your task to take care of the body yourself even if many of the children said that how you look is nothing you could do something about.