|
Showing 1 - 3 of
3 matches in All Departments
When Rebecca Lester was eleven years old-and again when she was
eighteen-she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured
professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns
her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating
disorders-their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and
place in the American cultural imagination. Famished, the
culmination of over two decades of anthropological and clinical
work, as well as a lifetime of lived experience, presents a
profound rethinking of eating disorders and how to treat them.
Through a mix of rich cultural analysis, detailed therapeutic
accounts, and raw autobiographical reflections, Famished helps make
sense of why people develop eating disorders, what the process of
recovery is like, and why treatments so often fail. It's also an
unsparing condemnation of the tension between profit and care in
American healthcare, demonstrating how a system set up to treat a
disease may, in fact, perpetuate it. Fierce and vulnerable,
critical and hopeful, Famished will forever change the way you
understand eating disorders and the people who suffer with them.
When Rebecca Lester was eleven years old-and again when she was
eighteen-she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured
professor in anthropology and a licensed social worker, she turns
her ethnographic and clinical gaze to the world of eating
disorders-their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and
place in the American cultural imagination. Famished, the
culmination of over two decades of anthropological and clinical
work, as well as a lifetime of lived experience, presents a
profound rethinking of eating disorders and how to treat them.
Through a mix of rich cultural analysis, detailed therapeutic
accounts, and raw autobiographical reflections, Famished helps make
sense of why people develop eating disorders, what the process of
recovery is like, and why treatments so often fail. It's also an
unsparing condemnation of the tension between profit and care in
American healthcare, demonstrating how a system set up to treat a
disease may, in fact, perpetuate it. Fierce and vulnerable,
critical and hopeful, Famished will forever change the way you
understand eating disorders and the people who suffer with them.
In "Jesus in Our Wombs", Rebecca J. Lester takes us behind the
walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the
lives, training, and experiences of a group of postulants - young
women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. Lester, who
conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in the convent, provides a
rich ethnography of these young women's journeys as they wrestle
with doubts, fears, ambitions, and setbacks in their struggle to
follow what they believe to be the will of God. Gracefully written,
finely textured, and theoretically rigorous, this book considers
how these aspiring nuns learn to experience God by cultivating an
altered experience of their own female bodies, a transformation
they view as a political stance against modernity. Lester explains
that the Postulants work toward what they see as an 'authentic'
femininity - one that has been eclipsed by the values of modern
society. The outcome of this process has political as well as
personal consequences. The Sisters learn to understand their very
intimate experiences of 'the Call' - and their choices in answering
it - as politically relevant declarations of self. Readers become
intimately acquainted with the personalities, family backgrounds,
friendships, and aspirations of the Postulants as Lester relates
the practices and experiences of their daily lives. Combining
compassionate, engaged ethnography with an incisive and provocative
theoretical analysis of embodied selves, "Jesus in Our Wombs"
delivers a profound analysis of what Lester calls the convent's
'technology of embodiment' on multiple levels - from the
phenomenological to the political.
|
You may like...
The Creator
John David Washington, Gemma Chan, …
DVD
R325
Discovery Miles 3 250
|