Learning to Eat: Establishing Dietetic Normality in the Treatment of Eating Disorders
Author: Gracia Arnaiz, Mabel
Source: Food, Culture and Society: An International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research, Volume 12, Number 2, June 2009 , pp. 191-215(25)
Publisher: Berg Publishers
Abstract:
This article argues that the biomedical logic behind the treatment of eating disorders attempts to substitute many of the economic, adaptative and symbolic reasons that have historically and ethnographically conditioned eating habits in all cultures for exclusively dietetic reasons. Thus, when nutritional rehabilitation is used as a therapeutic tool, rather than restoring food culture (i.e. the set of food representations and practices learned and shared by the members of a particular social group), it involves an enculturation in dietetic normalization largely devoid of the sociocultural functions attributed to food. Because of their normative parallelism with the following of any diet (e.g. the use of highly-specific competencies, mechanisms and protocols), these prescriptions hinder not only the therapeutic success of the treatment but also the social integration of the people undergoing treatment due to the partial interruption and routinization of daily life that they involve.Keywords: EATING DISORDERS; CULTURE; GENDER; FOOD SOCIALIZATION; DIETETIC NORMALIZATION
Document Type: Research article
DOI: 10.2752/175174409X400738
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