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1 1 bbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb The air of anticipation among the young women in this suburban Vancouver community house had been building all week, simmering in summer conversations on the veranda, then spilling over into therapy sessions with staff. As a group, the women told me about the nameless “underweight woman” who was coming to stay with them for a brief period. Her emaciated state was their central concern, for all the women in this program had gained weight through a recovery program and were still adjusting to their new embodied presence. A few days later this anonymous person had a name. “Josie will sabotage all our hard work just by being here,” Sophie complained to the nurses. Although she was expected to arrive in time for the evening dinner, Josie had been held up at the hospital by appointments with doctors. This delay only added to the suspense. She must be “really sick,” the residents said. Josie arrived just as the eight women on the recovery program were sitting down to debrief after their shared evening meal (her timing could not have been better). When everyone gathered in the lounge and took up their usual seats, Josie was already perched in the middle of a large sofa, the center of attention. The women sneaked glances to assess her diminutive frame, the large water bottle placed between her knees, the prominent veins in her arms and legs, her waxy skin and protruding cheekbones. Despite her cadaverlike appearance , Josie’s demeanor did not communicate sickness, weakness, or fatigue. She sat upright, her head high, her strong voice and direct eye contact reflecting the power of the unease she had created. She held center stage, and the other women (including me) were silent, drawn to her presence. This scene captures the central ethnographic and analytic themes that underpin this book: relatedness and abjection. Josie knew that she held a position of distinction in the group. She embodied what many longed to return to—pure anorexia, a clean state of being untainted by the polluting Introduction 2 ABJECT RELATIONS aspects of food, one’s body, and relationships. She firmly belonged to what some referred to as “the anorexia club,” an elite and secretive group that strategically mobilized the term “anorexia” for its own purposes. Josie was not disempowered by the label of disorder. On the contrary, it afforded her a symbolic power that the others had relinquished. Her level of sickness only served to heighten her position of power within the room. By entering into a contract of recovery, the eight women no longer belonged to anorexia; they had cut the cord and sullied themselves by imbibing food. Several told me afterward that returning to normal health disgusted them, and the desire to move back to anorexia—to be clean, empty, and pure—was something with which they constantly struggled. This book is an ethnographic study of people’s everyday experiences of anorexia. As a social anthropologist I am trained to question, unsettle, and find meaning in the ordinary and extraordinary practices of everyday lives, and then seek to make sense of these within broader sociocultural frameworks . In doing so, this work unpacks common understandings that have fixed anorexia as the epitome of a Western obsession with individualism, selfcontrol , and autonomy and offers an alternative understanding. Through intensive participant observation I came to know a different logic of anorexia, one that deals with the shifting (and contradictory) forces of power, disgust, and desire. These forces do not unfold along a linear trajectory but are in constant motion, reflecting the back-and-forth strategies of making and remaking , and of connecting and disconnecting with people. This motion is primarily concerned with relatedness—relating to oneself, to others, and to the world. This book is thus concerned with what happens to people when they have a diagnosis of anorexia, and how they get along in the world. In anthropology relatedness has traditionally been associated with kinship studies of family connections, arrangements, and obligations that were initially assumed to be grounded in the natural, biological facts of sexual procreation . A key figure in shifting these formalist traditions was Schneider (/, ), who in his first work argued that American kinship was a cultural system that operated through symbolic logic. Schneider suggested that sexual reproduction was a core symbol of a kinship system that comprised two distinct models of “relationship as natural substance [symbolized in idioms of blood] and relationship as code for conduct [what people do and say...

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