Transcultural Perspectives on Eating Disorders

I t is commonplace that one man's meat is another man's poison. Since the fact of cultural variability is well known, this paper will not attempt to catalogue the range of eating phenomena that illustrate the diversity of human experience. Rather, we will focus on three seemingly bizarre and to us almost unthinkable phenomena and attempt to illuminate the human function of each. We will consider a practice of forcing preadolescent boys to orally ingest the semen of older youths on a regular basis over a period of years, the eating of portions of the bodies of one's dead relatives, and a conviction that one's dead relative is likely to return as a ghost and attempt to eat you. The three examples lead to very different sequelae in terms of eating and emotional disorders. For the past 25 years cultural anthropologists and psychoanalysts have been fruitfully collaborating in interdisciplinary colloquia at American Psychoanalytic Association conventions. The examples are drawn from this collaboration and material presented at these colloquia in 1971, 1982, and 1983. The data for the first two examples were gathered by anthropologists Gilbert H. Herdt and Fitz J.P. Poole, and the data for the third by my wife and I, an anthropologist and child psychoanalyst husband-and-wife team.