Beyond Anorexia by Catherine Garrett

Beyond Anorexia by Catherine Garrett

Beyond Anorexia is a sociological exploration of how people recover from what medicine labels 'eating disorders', and the first book to focus exclusively on recovery. Beginning with her own autobiography, and drawing on conversations with over thirty other former sufferers, Catherine Garrett demonstrates that narrative is fundamental to social theory and to healing. Her central claim is that recovery is a 'spiritual' experience reconnecting the self with body, nature and society. She analyses spirituality and its relationship with formal religion along with its association with the ascetic rituals of eating disorders. Recovery is shown to be key to full understanding of anorexia, and the processes associated with recovery are explored in terms of embodied spirituality. Using the anthropological theories of Durkheim and van Gennep and contemporary theories of the body, Catherine Garrett reveals some of the social sources of recovery - the solution - which exist alongside the causes of the problem.

"Catherine Garrett has made a bold new departure in the approach to anorexia, strikingly original in its interweaving of psychological insight, narrative skill and theoretical depthBeyond Anorexia is genuinely inspiring, because by displacing the center of the problem from the clinical to the spiritual, and from illness to recovery, it gives hope as well as instruction." Joel Kovel, Alger Hiss Professor of Social Science, Bard College, New York
"In this unconventional look at eating disorders, Garrett addresses the existential and spiritual questions surrounding anorexia nervosa." Choice

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780521629836
ISBN 10	0521629837
Title	Beyond Anorexia
Author	Catherine Garrett
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Cambridge University Press
Year published	1998-10-13
Number of pages	260
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.