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Southern Anthropologist

Abstract

Anorexia nervosa (AN) has reached alarming levels in much of North America and Europe. In the United States alone, approximately seven million women and adolescent girls, and perhaps as many as one million men and adolescent boys, suffer from this debilitating and sometimes fatal condition. Moreover, a growing body of evidence suggests that areas once considered to be immune to AN have not, in fact, been spared. Although the prominence of this illness has many sociocultural implications, anthropologists have been strikingly slow to engage in discussions on the issue. Except for a few very notable exceptions (e.g., Becker 1995), we have left that to the psychologists and medical experts. The purpose of this paper is not to ask why so few anthropologists have dealt with the fact that millions of women and men across the globe are starving to death. My aim, rather, is to present an argument for increased anthropological attention to AN. I begin with a brief description of prominent scholarly understandings of AN, then detail a number of ways in which anthropologists are particularly well equipped to confront and correct some of the gaps and biases that plague those understandings.

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