Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I argue for a critical anthropology of eating disorders. Through attending to social suffering and health inequalities, this critical approach can elucidate the societal and medical structures in which eating disorders are experienced, expressed, and given voice in research.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropologists who study eating disorders often face questions about what it is that they (uniquely) research. In many cases, the response is culture - the specificities of how participants relate to their bodies, selves, relationships, practices, and materialities. In this paper, I suggest that culture-centric framings of anthropological research on eating disorders run the risk of reducing our mission to the exoticization of already-othered people - and to the placing of social ills within the supposed pathology of people who 'succumb' to cultural messages. I argue that, although we should continue to highlight and problematize the cultural, it is equally important to attend to what participants can tell us about the societal and medical structures in which eating disorders are experienced, expressed, and given voice in research. Using examples from my work in Israel and in the UK, I discuss how participant interviews reveal overarching similarities in the embodied experiences of eating disorders, while highlighting the roles of social suffering and health inequalities in the different trajectories that eating disorders take. Attending to these differences allows us to question who is allowed to claim an eating disordered identity, whose voices are heard in research, and what structural barriers, which may otherwise be taken for granted, affect people's access to diagnosis and appropriate care. Through focusing on the structural, I argue, we can use anthropological perspectives for a critical discussion of the macro-level conditions that manifest in individual eating disordered bodies.