Beyond physical metrics: a cultural approach of the biomedical categories of Child Growth Standards

The Child Growth Standards (CGSs) of the World Health Organization are tools for measuring child development via a biological gaze. They give biomedical evidence that children from diverse locations develop, on average, similar growth patterns when their nutritional needs are met. In Indigenous communities in Guatemala, the concept of the body is influenced by the cultural values and the context in which children are born and grow. This suggests that the bodies of children cannot be exclusively contained and understood in terms of the biomedical categories used to measure growth and nutritional status. In this article, drawing on research with a particular Maya group in Guatemala, I compare, contrast, and discuss the biomedical and cultural conceptualizations of the bodies of children. Through an ethnographic case study that investigates the K'iche' Maya group, I argue that the bodies of Maya children are based on cultural concepts and pragmatic language that do not align with a nutrition-centered biomedical gaze. I seek to understand how cultural values shape concepts of children's bodies and describe how the biomedical gaze of CGSs neither sufficiently nor accurately accounts for the range of culture-oriented concepts of children's bodies.