Quand le corps dénutri devient problème. Savoirs médicaux, discours politiques et transition nutritionnelle à La Réunion, de l’après-guerre aux années 1970

This paper examines representations of the nutritional health attributed to the Reunionese population during the first decades of the island’s “departmentalization”, initiated in 1946 with the end of its colonial status. The analysis is based on archival ethnography that brings together medical dissertations, anticolonial press sources, and historical scholarship.Two dynamics are investigated: on the one hand, the progressive medicalization of malnutrition through the lens of new scientific knowledge; and on the other hand, the symbolic reconfiguration of Réunionese bodies within the framework of the island’s new political status.The results show that widespread undernutrition was gradually reframed as a public health issue requiring an institutional response.This work sheds light on how medical knowledge and political mobilizations jointly transformed representations of the bodies of the Réunionese population.