Anthropological Perspectives on Eating Disorders: Deciphering Cultural Logics

Abstract

In the last three decades, anthropological analyses of eating disorders have peeled away layers of 'common sense' to reveal tacit and often contradictory forces that inhere in people's bodies, practices, and lives. From investigations of institutional practices to analyses of embodied experiences, anthropologists have developed insightful accounts of how local, shared worlds shape disordered eating, and of the grounding of disorder in social structures and relationships that tend to be obscured in clinical and popular interpretations. In this introductory essay, we offer a brief review of anthropological work on eating disorders, with particular emphasis on studies published in the last decade. Attending to person, structure, and bodily being-in-the-world, these anthropological studies reveal multiple cultural logics within which disordered eating practices are embedded. The deciphering of cultural logics forms the basis for this special issue, whose constituent papers interrogate recurring and ongoing eating disorders, with analyses that focus on relapse, ambivalence toward treatment, and the persistence of disordered eating practices. In their shared focus on long-term eating disorders, the papers offer anthropological responses to clinical questions about the low rates of treatment success. As such, the special issue conveys the potential for new productive collaborations between anthropology, policy, and clinical research and practice for the prevention of and effective intervention in eating disorders.

Keywords: anorexia nervosa; eating disorders; embodiment; ethnographic methods; lived experience; outcome.