What keeps Maya from eating? A case study of disordered eating from North India

Abstract

Anthropologists have paid much attention to food and eating practices in India, but surprisingly few scholars in any discipline have examined eating disorders. This article presents an ethnographic case study of disordered eating, based on a story of a young female pharmacist from one of the Northern Indian states. Advocating ethnography as an essential method to uncovering the multiple facets of “not eating,” I first show how this phenomenon may reflect resistance to Brahmanical patriarchy, especially the institution of arranged marriage. Secondly, I illustrate how “not eating” may be an embodied expression of distress, in this case related to the inability to fulfil filial obligations of reciprocity. Finally, I argue that “not eating” in India may be associated with the ways in which personhood, as locally understood, is influenced by regional socioeconomic development. Thus, while young, unmarried, and highly educated women have increasingly better opportunities for formal employment, they may find themselves at the crossroads of conflicting social expectations, and “not eating” may arise as an after-effect. While making large-scale generalizations of these findings across India would be inappropriate, this case study sheds light on the complexity of disordered eating in this country and calls for further ethnographic studies, sensitive to local meanings of (not) eating.