Beyond the clinic? Eluding a medical diagnosis of anorexia through narrative

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.First author draf

Two deaths and a funeral: ritual inscriptions' affordances for mourning and moral personhood in Vietnam

Mortuary rituals constitute the social nature of death and mourning, often working to ease painful transitions for the deceased and bereaved. In Vietnam, such rituals involve objects, including commodified yet personalized text‐artifacts like banners and placards bearing inscriptions in various scripts that are associated with various affects and different political‐economic regimes. The material, orthographic, semantic, spatial, and temporal organization of these text‐artifacts mobilize sentiments and structure ethical relations at a funeral. Together, they act as prescriptive affordances intended to discipline mourners’ grief. Yet while these objects reflect how subjects valorize “tradition,” their affective force exceeds the bounded subjunctive world fostered by ritual, and it may retrospectively limit possibilities for moral personhood.My research was generously supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Research Program, the UC Pacific-Rim Research Program, the UCLA Graduate Division and Asia Institute Wagatsuma Fellowships, and institutional grants from the Centre for Ethnography and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council at the University of Toronto. I am also indebted to many colleagues who over years helped me develop earlier versions for invited lectures at the University of Toronto, the College of the Holy Cross, and the University of Michigan's Center for Southeast Asian Studies, and presentations at meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the Association for Asian Studies, the Harvard East Asia Society, and the Society for Psychological Anthropology. I further benefited from extremely helpful comments from multiple American Ethnologist reviewers and editor-in-chief Niko Besnier. The tragedies that this article describes continue to leave me painfully grateful to the families in whose sorrows I share, and I remain committed, but struggling, to honor their loved ones. (Social Science Research Council; Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Abroad Research Program; UC Pacific-Rim Research Program; UCLA Graduate Division; Asia Institute Wagatsuma Fellowships; Centre for Ethnography; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council at the University of Toronto)https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/amet.12599Accepted manuscriptPublished versio

“I Shall Watch Their Progress”: The Observer Effect and Information Theory in Literary Systems

This treatise will fully embrace the interdisciplinary approach and will attempt to apply theoretical physics to works of literature. There is no escape from the search for an ultimate connection between all disciplines of human thought. Culture, progress, their relationships with material things are all inevitably connected, even if this connection is its all-prevalent absence. Recent developments in quantum physics and post-human philosophy have provided the key to the intimate substance of all things – information. Although, the numerous branches of information structures are to be studied separately to grasp, appreciate and use their manifestations, to truly understand reality it is necessary to understand the nature of information itself. The two works of literature examined here are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick or, The Whale (1851). In the first part, Frankenstein will be subdivided into homeostatic informational systems and the observer effect will be examined with respect to each system. Then the information theory will be applied to the character of Ahab in an examination that will focus on the nature of a willful observer and how it operates in the realm of literature

A strategic integrated healthcare facility management model

The requirement to reduce expenditure on “non‐core” activities, along with building's owners’ expectations for improved performance, are the main dilemmas with which a facility manager deals on a regular basis. The primary objective of this research was to identify the effect of defined parameters, such as the actual age of a building and its level of occupancy, on the performance of facilities and their systems. This study contributed to the development of a model capable of integrating these parameters into a Facility Management (FM) tactical and strategic decision‐making process, referred to as the Integrated Healthcare Facility Management Model (IHFMM). The model's guidelines may be outlined for the methodological design and operation of facilities from a life cycle perspective. The paper presents the architecture of the developed model, and four of the 15 procedures that comprise the heart of this model. Strateginis integruotas sveikatos priežiūros pastatų ūkio valdymo modelis Santrauka Reikalavimas mažinti „neesmines“ veiklos išlaidas bei pastato savininkų lūkesčiai dėl geresnių rezultatų – su tokiomis pagrindinėmis dilemomis reguliariai susiduriapastatų ūkio valdymo vadybininkas. Šio tiriamojo darbo pagrindinis uždavinys yra nustatyti, koks yra apibrėžtaparametrų, tokių kaip realus pastato amžius ir jo užimtumolygis, poveikis pastatų ir jų sistemų rezultatyvumui. Šistyrimas prisidėjo kuriant modelį, kuris leidžia šiuosparametrus integruoti į taktinių ir strateginių pastatų ūkiovaldymo sprendimų priėmimo procesą ir yra vadinamas integruotu sveikatos priežiūros pastatų ūkio valdymo modeliu. Modelio rekomendacijas galima taikyti vykdantmetodologinį pastatų projektavimą ir eksploatavimą išgyvavimo ciklo perspektyvos. Šiame darbe pristatoma sukurto modelio architektūra ir keturios iš penkiolikos procedūrų, sudarančių šio modelio šerdį. First published online: 18 Oct 201