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Two anthropologists treat mealtimes as cultural sites for socializing children into commensality, communicative expectations, and the symbolic, moral, and sentimental meanings of food and eating. Using ethnographic evidence, they indicate how mealtime comportment is embedded in practices and ideologies relevant to children's competent membership in their families and communities.

Pragmatic approaches can effectively address questions of cultural dynamics—how culture is renewed, contested, or changed in historical situations. The practice-oriented direction of much of contemporary cognitive science offers an emerging opportunity to more fully integrate thought and emotion into anthropological pragmatism. Here I urge attention to a realm of enacted culture that illustrates how certain interactive processes bring cultural conventions into a communicative environment where they are renewed, transformed, created. As an example, I discuss depictions, improvisational performances in which speakers use material resources such as their hands or voices to formulate and portray thoughts. In a close analysis of three short narratives, I show that depictions are used by speakers to help to create an affect-rich environment in which cultural conventions are introduced into interactional space, whence they become subject to negotiation. It is not only in these spontaneous and improvisational practices that cognition and culture unfold in time as a dialectical interplay of mind and environment; this also occurs in stylized formats such as public rituals and narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The persistence and recurrence of anorexia nervosa poses a clinical challenge, and provides support for critiques of oppressive and injurious facets of society inscribed on women’s bodies. This essay illustrates how a phenomenological, linguistic anthropological approach fruitfully traverses clinical and cultural perspectives by directing attention beyond the embodied experience of patients diagnosed with anorexia nervosa to those who are not clinically diagnosed. Extending a model of illness and recovery as entailing sufferers’ emplotting of past, present, and imagined future selves, I argue that women’s accounts of their experiences do not simply reflect lived reality, but actually propel health-relevant states of being by enlivening and creating these realities in the process of their telling. In indexical interaction with public and clinical discourses, narratives’ grammar, lexicon, and plot structures modify subjects’ experiences and interpretations of the events and feelings recounted. This article builds on the insight that linear narratives of “full recovery” that adopt a clinical and feminist voice can help tellers stay recovered, whereas for those “struggling to recover,” a genre of contingent, uncertain, sideshadowing narratives alternatively renders recovery an elusive and ambivalently desired object. This essay then identifies a third narrative genre, eluding a diagnosis, which combines elements of the first two genres to paradoxically keep its teller simultaneously sheltered from, and invisible to the well-meaning clutches of medical care, leaving her suffering, yet free, to starve. This focus on narrative genres illustrates the utility of linguistic analyses for discerning and interpreting distress in subclinical populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]