Rebecca J Lester
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 147925 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Rebecca J Lester |
| NOMBRES | Rebecca J |
| APELLIDO | Lester |
| FIRMA | LESTER R J |
| AFILIACIONES | Washington University in St. Louis |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3267-087X |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 275 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 33 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1995 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 10 |
Anxious Intimacies
Polyamory is a lifestyle politics that makes visible key features of the affective milieu of late modernity in the United States. In particular, the practice of polyamory highlights the importance of anxiety as a mediator of physiological, psychological, social, and political phenomena, and the kinds of strategies people can employ to alter these associations. The provocation and subsequent management of anxiety in polyamory creates everyday micr…
Examining the Etiology and Treatment of Mental Illness Among Vodou Priests in Northern Haiti
Inner worlds as social systems
Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) is characterized by severe disconnection among parts of the personality to the extent that they are experienced as separate identities or selves. A primary clinical goal is often the reintegration of these parts into a singular. core self. Through the case study of one young-adult client with DID, an anthropologist-clinician challenges this imperative for a unitary self and builds on anthropological insights t…
Mental health in academia
Mental health concerns among university populations are on the rise. Faculty and students report increasing levels of depression, stress, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. These mental health crises reduce overall wellness and inhibit the educational process. We identify uncertainty, financial stress, disruptions to social networks, burnout, and the contemporary social/political climate as key triggers for mental health crises for faculty and stude…
Greetings from the New Editor-in-Chief
Anorexia
Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder identified in current Western biomedical psychiatry that is characterized by prolonged self‐starvation coupled with the fear of gaining weight or becoming fat. It was once thought to be a culture‐bound syndrome of white upper‐ to upper‐middle‐class girls in Western postindustrial societies, but phenomena that closely resemble anorexia have been identified in the historical record stretching back as far as th…
Ground zero
This paper reflects upon questions of ontological contingency when the stark, visceral reality of a person's relentless self-destruction unfolds within institutional mechanisms that systematically withhold certain kinds of care. I consider these issues through the lens of "manipulation" as it is elaborated within an American eating disorders treatment center, where the notion of manipulation does particular kinds of affective and pragmatic work. …
Self-governance, psychotherapy, and the subject of managed care
The self" has seen a surprising resurgence in recent anthropological theorizing, revitalizing interest in whether and how it can be studied ethnographically. These issues are brought to the fore by a newly popular psychotherapy technique, Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS), as practiced in a US eating-disorders clinic. There, clinicians and clients negotiate tensions between this model's understanding of a multiple, refracted self and managed-…
Reflections on the anthropology of public psychiatry
Eating Disorders
From Virtue to Vice
Health as moral failing
Individuals with eating disorders often exhibit profound ambivalence towards taking prescribed medications. They may actively restrict their intake of medications, take them and then purge them, or hoard them and 'binge' on them. Such behaviors are often labeled clinically as 'treatment resistance,' and power struggles over medication adherence between clinicians and clients often ensue. This paper advances an alternative perspective. Based on ex…
Joyce L. Ma
Lessons from the borderline
Back from the edge of existence
How do local responses to trauma articulate with understandings of subjectivity, personhood, and meaning making? What therapeutic mechanisms seem to be at play? And how can the analytic lenses of anthropology help us understand-and maybe even facilitate-processes of recovery? In engaging these questions, the papers in this Special Issue lay the groundwork for what we might call a critical anthropology of trauma that bridges the divide between mic…
Greetings from the New Editors
Healing the Body Politic
Abject Relations
How Do I Code for Black Fingernail Polish? Finding the Missing Adolescent in Managed Mental Health Care
In this article, I examine clinical dilemmas in treating adolescents with eating disorders under theU.S. managed healthcare system. Managed care is built on a rational choice model of human behavior with little room for considering developmental processes. In this model, adolescents figure as little more than failed adults. This poses significant problems: if treatment providers prioritize developmental issues over quantifiable behavioral milesto…
Brokering Authenticity
This paper examines the moral work of a controversial psychiatric diagnosis--Borderline Personality Disorder--in an American eating disorder treatment center in the era of managed mental health care. Based on fieldwork at this clinic spanning more than 6 years, I consider how clinicians invoke aspects of Borderline Personality Disorder in everyday conversation, in a practice I call "borderline talk." I argue that borderline talk emerges in respon…
Anxious Bliss
This is a case study of Celeste, postulant in a Roman Catholic convent in Mexico who experienced frequent episodes of leaving her body to commune with God. During these experiences, Celeste felt immersed in an `incredibly beautiful profound silence' where `time and space were broken.' But as much as Celeste craved these experiences, they also alarmed her; she was acutely aware that they might be indicative of psychological or neurological dysfunc…
Critical Therapeutics
Recent studies suggest that eating disorders are increasing in Mexico and that this seems to correspond with Mexico's push to modernization. In this respect, Mexico exemplifies the acculturation hypothesis of eating disorders, namely, that anorexia and bulimia are culture-bound syndromes tied to postindustrial capitalist development and neoliberalist values, and that their appearance elsewhere is indicative of acculturation to those values. Avail…
It’s Like Being in a Labyrinth
Jesus in Our Wombs
In Jesus in Our Wombs, Rebecca J. Lester takes us behind the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the lives, training, and experiences of a group of postulants—young women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. Lester, who conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in the convent, provides a rich ethnography of these young women's journeys as they wrestle with doubts, fears, ambitions, and setbacks in their strugg…
Why Do So Many Latina Teens Attempt Suicide? A Conceptual Model for Research
Rates of suicide attempts among adolescent Latinas have been reported to be higher than for their non-Hispanic counterparts. Yet researchers know very little about the attempts, their antecedents, and why the girls attempt suicide. Latina girls have been included in research on suicidal adolescents and typically show higher rates of attempts relative to similar psychopathology when compared with other young women. A few small studies have focused…
Brokering Authenticity
This paper examines the moral work of a controversial psychiatric diagnosis--Borderline Personality Disorder--in an American eating disorder treatment center in the era of managed mental health care. Based on fieldwork at this clinic spanning more than 6 years, I consider how clinicians invoke aspects of Borderline Personality Disorder in everyday conversation, in a practice I call "borderline talk." I argue that borderline talk emerges in respon…
The (dis)embodied self in anorexia nervosa
Critical Therapeutics
Recent studies suggest that eating disorders are increasing in Mexico and that this seems to correspond with Mexico's push to modernization. In this respect, Mexico exemplifies the acculturation hypothesis of eating disorders, namely, that anorexia and bulimia are culture-bound syndromes tied to postindustrial capitalist development and neoliberalist values, and that their appearance elsewhere is indicative of acculturation to those values. Avail…
Back from the edge of existence
How do local responses to trauma articulate with understandings of subjectivity, personhood, and meaning making? What therapeutic mechanisms seem to be at play? And how can the analytic lenses of anthropology help us understand-and maybe even facilitate-processes of recovery? In engaging these questions, the papers in this Special Issue lay the groundwork for what we might call a critical anthropology of trauma that bridges the divide between mic…
It’s Like Being in a Labyrinth
Self-governance, psychotherapy, and the subject of managed care
The self" has seen a surprising resurgence in recent anthropological theorizing, revitalizing interest in whether and how it can be studied ethnographically. These issues are brought to the fore by a newly popular psychotherapy technique, Internal Family Systems therapy (IFS), as practiced in a US eating-disorders clinic. There, clinicians and clients negotiate tensions between this model's understanding of a multiple, refracted self and managed-…
Embodied Voices
Health as moral failing
Individuals with eating disorders often exhibit profound ambivalence towards taking prescribed medications. They may actively restrict their intake of medications, take them and then purge them, or hoard them and 'binge' on them. Such behaviors are often labeled clinically as 'treatment resistance,' and power struggles over medication adherence between clinicians and clients often ensue. This paper advances an alternative perspective. Based on ex…
Jesus in Our Wombs
In Jesus in Our Wombs, Rebecca J. Lester takes us behind the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the lives, training, and experiences of a group of postulants—young women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. Lester, who conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in the convent, provides a rich ethnography of these young women's journeys as they wrestle with doubts, fears, ambitions, and setbacks in their strugg…
How Do I Code for Black Fingernail Polish? Finding the Missing Adolescent in Managed Mental Health Care
In this article, I examine clinical dilemmas in treating adolescents with eating disorders under theU.S. managed healthcare system. Managed care is built on a rational choice model of human behavior with little room for considering developmental processes. In this model, adolescents figure as little more than failed adults. This poses significant problems: if treatment providers prioritize developmental issues over quantifiable behavioral milesto…
The immediacy of eternity
(2003). The immediacy of eternity: Time and transformation in a Roman Catholic convent. Religion: Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 201-219
Lessons from the borderline
Ground zero
This paper reflects upon questions of ontological contingency when the stark, visceral reality of a person's relentless self-destruction unfolds within institutional mechanisms that systematically withhold certain kinds of care. I consider these issues through the lens of "manipulation" as it is elaborated within an American eating disorders treatment center, where the notion of manipulation does particular kinds of affective and pragmatic work. …
Reflections on the anthropology of public psychiatry
Greetings from the New Editors
Abject Relations
Anxious Bliss
This is a case study of Celeste, postulant in a Roman Catholic convent in Mexico who experienced frequent episodes of leaving her body to commune with God. During these experiences, Celeste felt immersed in an `incredibly beautiful profound silence' where `time and space were broken.' But as much as Celeste craved these experiences, they also alarmed her; she was acutely aware that they might be indicative of psychological or neurological dysfunc…
Embodied Voices
The (dis)embodied self in anorexia nervosa
Eccentric and bizarre behaviors
Culture
Culture:. Problem that Cannot Be Solved. Charles W. Nuckolls. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998. ix. 301 pp., figures, tables, bibliography, index. Culture in Mind: Cognition, Culture, and the Problem of Meaning. Bradd Shore. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. xii. 428 pp., figures, bibliography, index
Society for Psychological Anthropology
Society for Psychological Anthropology
The immediacy of eternity
(2003). The immediacy of eternity: Time and transformation in a Roman Catholic convent. Religion: Vol. 33, No. 3, pp. 201-219
Material Bodies and the Transformation of the Social
In 1992, Emily Martin pronounced ‘the end of the body’ as we know it. In considering why and how ‘the body’ has come to resume center stage as a site of theoretical analysis in social scientific and humanistic inquiry, Martin suggested that we are undergoing fundamental changes in how our bodies are organized and experienced. As a result, the ‘problem’ of the body has been thrown into relief. Ian Burkitt’s Bodies of Thought: Embodiment, Identity …
Society for Psychological Anthropology
Jesus in Our Wombs
In Jesus in Our Wombs, Rebecca J. Lester takes us behind the walls of a Roman Catholic convent in central Mexico to explore the lives, training, and experiences of a group of postulants—young women in the first stage of religious training as nuns. Lester, who conducted eighteen months of fieldwork in the convent, provides a rich ethnography of these young women's journeys as they wrestle with doubts, fears, ambitions, and setbacks in their strugg…
Why Do So Many Latina Teens Attempt Suicide? A Conceptual Model for Research
Rates of suicide attempts among adolescent Latinas have been reported to be higher than for their non-Hispanic counterparts. Yet researchers know very little about the attempts, their antecedents, and why the girls attempt suicide. Latina girls have been included in research on suicidal adolescents and typically show higher rates of attempts relative to similar psychopathology when compared with other young women. A few small studies have focused…
It’s Like Being in a Labyrinth
Critical Therapeutics
Recent studies suggest that eating disorders are increasing in Mexico and that this seems to correspond with Mexico's push to modernization. In this respect, Mexico exemplifies the acculturation hypothesis of eating disorders, namely, that anorexia and bulimia are culture-bound syndromes tied to postindustrial capitalist development and neoliberalist values, and that their appearance elsewhere is indicative of acculturation to those values. Avail…
Anxious Bliss
This is a case study of Celeste, postulant in a Roman Catholic convent in Mexico who experienced frequent episodes of leaving her body to commune with God. During these experiences, Celeste felt immersed in an `incredibly beautiful profound silence' where `time and space were broken.' But as much as Celeste craved these experiences, they also alarmed her; she was acutely aware that they might be indicative of psychological or neurological dysfunc…
Brokering Authenticity
This paper examines the moral work of a controversial psychiatric diagnosis--Borderline Personality Disorder--in an American eating disorder treatment center in the era of managed mental health care. Based on fieldwork at this clinic spanning more than 6 years, I consider how clinicians invoke aspects of Borderline Personality Disorder in everyday conversation, in a practice I call "borderline talk." I argue that borderline talk emerges in respon…
Healing the Body Politic
Abject Relations
How Do I Code for Black Fingernail Polish? Finding the Missing Adolescent in Managed Mental Health Care
In this article, I examine clinical dilemmas in treating adolescents with eating disorders under theU.S. managed healthcare system. Managed care is built on a rational choice model of human behavior with little room for considering developmental processes. In this model, adolescents figure as little more than failed adults. This poses significant problems: if treatment providers prioritize developmental issues over quantifiable behavioral milesto…
Joyce L. Ma
Lessons from the borderline
Back from the edge of existence
How do local responses to trauma articulate with understandings of subjectivity, personhood, and meaning making? What therapeutic mechanisms seem to be at play? And how can the analytic lenses of anthropology help us understand-and maybe even facilitate-processes of recovery? In engaging these questions, the papers in this Special Issue lay the groundwork for what we might call a critical anthropology of trauma that bridges the divide between mic…
Greetings from the New Editors
Health as moral failing
Individuals with eating disorders often exhibit profound ambivalence towards taking prescribed medications. They may actively restrict their intake of medications, take them and then purge them, or hoard them and 'binge' on them. Such behaviors are often labeled clinically as 'treatment resistance,' and power struggles over medication adherence between clinicians and clients often ensue. This paper advances an alternative perspective. Based on ex…
Eating Disorders
From Virtue to Vice
Psychology (22 obras) · Sociology (21 obras) · Medicine (12 obras) · Psychiatry (12 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras) · Anthropology (10 obras) · Epistemology (10 obras) · Psychotherapist (10 obras) · Citation (8 obras) · Computer Science (8 obras)