Television,Disordered Eating,and Young Women in Fiji: Negotiating Body Image and Identity during Rapid Social Change

Although the relationship between media exposure and risk behavior among youth is established at a population level, the specific psychological and social mechanisms mediating the adverse effects of media on youth remain poorly understood. This study reports on an investigation of the impact of the introduction of television to a rural community in Western Fiji on adolescent ethnic Fijian girls in a setting of rapid social and economic change. Narrative data were collected from 30 purposively selected ethnic Fijian secondary school girls via semi-structured, open-ended interviews. Interviews were conducted in 1998, 3 years after television was first broadcast to this region of Fiji. Narrative data were analyzed for content relating to response to television and mechanisms that mediate self and body image in Fijian adolescents. Data in this sample suggest that media imagery is used in both creative and destructive ways by adolescent Fijian girls to navigate opportunities and conflicts posed by the rapidly changing social environment. Study respondents indicated their explicit modeling of the perceived positive attributes of characters presented in television dramas, but also the beginnings of weight and body shape preoccupation, purging behavior to control weight, and body disparagement. Response to television appeared to be shaped by a desire for competitive social positioning during a period of rapid social transition. Understanding vulnerability to images and values imported with media will be critical to preventing disordered eating and, potentially, other youth risk behaviors in this population, as well as other populations at risk.     

The Social Self,Body Dissatisfaction,and Binge Eating in Obese Females

We examined the relationship of the social self to body dissatisfaction and to binge eating in two clinical samples of obese females. In the first study, with 32 nonbingeing obese females, social self measures of Public Self-Consciousness and Social Anxiety were positively correlated with body dissatisfaction. Self-esteem was negatively correlated with body dissatisfaction. In the second study, 11 obese binge eaters were compared with 11 matched nonbingeing obese females. Binge eaters were characterized by significantly higher levels of social anxiety and body dissatisfaction than the obese nonbingeing controls. These findings support the hypothesized links of social self concerns to body dissatisfaction and to binge eating in obese females .     

Health Perceptions,Self and Body Image,Physical Activity and Nutrition among Undergraduate Students in Israel

Purpose

This study examines health perceptions, self and body image, physical exercise and nutrition among undergraduate students.

Methods

A structured, self-reported questionnaire was administered to more than 1500 students at a large academic institute in Israel. The study population was heterogenic in both gender and fields of academic study.

Results

High correlations between health perceptions, appropriate nutrition, and positive self and body image were found. The relationships between these variables differed between the subpopulation in the sample and the different genders. Engagement in physical exercise contributed to positive body image and positive health perceptions more than engagement in healthy nutrition. Nutrition students reported higher frequencies of positive health perceptions, positive self and body image and higher engagement in physical exercise in comparison to all other students in the sample.

Conclusions

This study suggests, as have many before, that successful health promotion policy should reflect a collectivist rather than an individualist ethos by providing health prerequisites through a public policy of health-promotion, where the academic settings support a healthy lifestyle policy, by increasing availability of a healthy, nutritious and varied menu in the cafeterias, and offering students various activities that enhance healthy eating and exercise.

Implications and contribution

This study examined health perceptions, self-image, physical exercise and nutrition among undergraduate students and found high correlations between these topics. Nutrition students reported higher frequencies of positive health perceptions, and positive self and body image and engaged more in physical exercise when compared with all other students in the sample.     

The Carotid Body: A Pathologist's View

A review of the literature on the histogenesis and function of the carotid body suggests that the results and the original interpretations of embryological, histological and histochemical investigations have not provided a convincing explanation of the origin of this structure. That the carotid body is developed from mesoderm and is a sensory organ (chemoreceptor) seems unlikely because of: morphological similarities between some of the carotid body tumours and certain tumours of peripheral nerves; certain electron microscopic similarities between the cells of carotid body and adrenal medulla; chromatographic demonstration of catecholamines in the human carotid bodies; and contradictory results of both animal experiments and clinical observations concerning function of this structure.It is concluded that the carotid body arises from ectoderm and should probably be classified as a gland of internal secretion, related to the adrenal medulla and other paraganglia.     

The Australian Dominative Medical System: A Reflection of Social Relations in the Larger Society

This paper posits a working or tentative model of medical pluralism, a pattern in which multiple medical sub‐systems co‐exist, or what I term the Australian dominative medical system. I argue that whereas the Australian medical system with its various medical sub‐systems was pluralistic, that is more or less on an equal footing, in the nineteenth century, by the early twentieth century it became a plural or dominative one in the sense that biomedicine came to clearly dominate other medical sub‐systems. This paper also explores the growing interest of biomedicine and the Australian Government in complementary medicine to which Australians have increasingly turned over the course of the past three decades or so.     

Gnathostomulida from Fiji, Tonga and New Zealand

Of 54 species of Gnathostomulida known to date, only six have been reported from the Pacific Ocean. This paper describes 18 species of Gnathostomulida from the Pacific islands of Fiji. Tonga and northern New Zealand. Of these, three are species previously described from the northeastern Atlantic and Mediterranean: Haplognathia ruberrima (Sterrer 1966), or the northwestern Atlantic: Haplognathia rosacea (Sterrer 1970) and Pterognathia ctenifera (Sterrer 1970). Fifteen species are new to science, including three that represent two new genera: Cosmognathia arcus gen. et sp.n., Cosmognathia bastillae sp.n., Pterognathia crocodilus sp.n., Pterognathia vilii sp.n., Agnathiella sp., Tenuignathia vitiensis sp.n., Ratugnathia mukuluvae gen . et sp.n., Gnathostomula salotae sp.n., Gnathostomula raji sp.n., Gnathostomula maorica sp.n., Austrognathia singatokae sp.n., Austrognathia nannulifera sp.n., Austrognathia novaezelandiae sp.n., Austrognatharia homunculus sp.n., and Austrognatharia pecten sp.n.     

The Self as Social Artifice: Some Consequences of Stanislavski

Practice commonly develops independent of theory: only rarely does some heritable informational structure knowingly emerge. With this in mind, Biosemiotic theory is well served by an informed synthesis with Constantin Stanislavski’s theatrical technique. For it is not enough merely to catalog signage by studying the consequence of its function, we also seek to generate signs with knowing intent. This implies more than the strategic use of signs, which all complex living things do, and of which our many subjective selves emerge. It calls for an objective artifice of signs, that is, some set of techniques competent to produce subjectivity, and capable of being objectified such that it can become a knowable standard. This is precisely what Stanislavski offers, ways of knowingly creating novel, actual, believably generative, signs. Within the realm of human action and in terms of human knowing, he positively exemplifies applied semiotic theory: his approach to dramatizing fictional characters also expresses how self-consciousness comes to be. What Stanislavski implies, Charles Tilly presumes and this essay asserts: our own biotic evolution has been influenced by post-biotic or metaphoric evolution, which results from the ‘living’ interaction of certain classes of non-living things. These derive from the pragmatic a priori made implicit by Chauncey Wright, which is the motivation of living things to act on specific needs within specific situations. The need to breathe is one example; the need to make competent use of existing epistemic structures is another. But such structures have their own needs, and ‘act’ to fill them. When this is compounded culturally, it may result in self-consciousness – a self-constructed artifice of semiosis with great consequence to biotic processes. Tilly supplies evidence that such compounding happens within human society, as well as a theoretical basis for its expression as a semiotic sociology. This essay uses pragmatic semiotics to explore the strong parallels that exist between the deliberately objective motivations upon which science, sanity and self-consciousness all depend, Stanislavski’s practicable artifice of signaling pathways and social emergence, and Tilly’s approach to society as ongoing performance.     

The Hall of Mirrors: Orientalism, Anthropology, and the Other

Anthropologists specialize in human difference and thus cannot escape the dialectics of sameness and difference. Yet studying Others has been the object of attack in recent years, most notably by Edward Said, who sees the mere postulation of difference as dangerous, as a dehumanizing activity that valorizes Self and vilifies Other. In fact the situation is not so simple: the Other may be a model to be emulated or a mirror of the shadow side of the Self. Selfhood and Otherness, virtue and vice, are subject to ceaseless negotiation and reinterpretation. In this hall of mirrors, the Self and the Other cannot be neatly distinguished.     

Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self/Body Thoughts

Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Thomas J. Csordas. ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 (cloth and paper), xi. 294 pp.
Body Thoughts. Andrew J. Strathern. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. vii. 222 pp.     

Having and Holding: Storage, Memory, Knowledge, and Social Relations

Starting from Giddens's concept of mutual knowledge, in this article I argue for an expanded definition of storage as a situated practice through which groups construct identity, remember, and control knowledge as part of a moral economy. Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological examples from a range of societies, including those of the Trobriand Islands, Neolithic Europe, and Mesoamerica, I consider the spatial and social meaning of utilitarian, household storage. Many of the social meanings embodied in utilitarian storage are found to also inform other kinds of storage, especially those categorized as burials and votive offerings, or caches, [storage, mutual knowledge, social memory, inalienable wealth, Mesoamerica]     

Bodytime: On the Interaction of Body, Identity, and Society

Bodytime: On the Interaction of Body, Identity, and Society. Susanne Lundin and Lynn Åkesson. eds. Lund, Sweden: Lund University Press, 1996. 196 pp.     

Toward an Ensemble View of Chromatosome Structure: A Paradigm Shift from One to Many

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Image Makers: Advertising, Public Relations and the Ethos of Advocacy

Image Makers: Advertising, Public Relations and the Ethos of Advocacy. Robert Jackall and Janice M. Hirota. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 333 pp.