Height Matters: The Making, Meanings, and Materialities of Human Stature in the Philippines

This book is about height: what it means and how it affects young people in the Philippines. What does being tall-or being short-signify in a country where the average height is s'4" (163 cm) for males and s' (151.4 cm) for females, and where over 30 percent of children under five years of age are stunted? Where do notions about height come from and how do they figure in various domains of Philippine society, from basketball games to beauty pageants, from education to employment, from public health to pop culture?

Height Matters attends to these questions by presenting an "ethnography of human stature" based on the author's fieldwork in Puerto Princesa, Palawan. Some economic historians have proposed the existence of a "height premium" or an inherent advantage to being tall, which draws parallels with popular understandings, as in the expression "lba na ang matangkad" (It's different if you're tall) in a 1970s TV commercial. The central proposition of this anthropological account, however, is that height is a relational attribute that can be best understood as a form of "body capital" that derives its value from the many figurations of height in everyday life in the country.