| Abstract: | This article explores the complexities of disseminating ethnographic research within a field that is already saturated by pervasive cultural systems of representation. People with anorexia are inescapably enmeshed in a whole range of fields that define and represent them, including academic writings, psychiatry and popular imaginings. Although these fields are wide (ranging from discursive constructions and to a much lesser extent ethnography), this analysis argues that there is one dominant trope that underpins popular representations of anorexia. It is through the detailed analysis of the public dissemination of this research, of the meeting between ethnography and the print media, that I demonstrate how people with anorexia come to be known through images and words associated with primitivism. Such a reductionist account reproduces the visual spectacle associated with emaciation, and ignores the profound embodied sensations of power and suffering that are central to experiences of anorexia. |
