Practices of Care in an Italian Eating Disorder Clinic

The complexities of the relationship between food and kinship are highlighted in eating disorders. This book is an in-depth ethnographic account of a public treatment centre for eating disorders in Italy. By examining the practices and ethics of care that attempt to reconcile the patients’, family carers’, and the professionals’ conflicting notions about eating disorders, this book explores how bodies are both material in their sociality and social in their materiality. Food and family emerge aligned in the production and treatment of these conditions, as healthcare professionals tackle the patient’s kinship relationships for intervention. Ultimately, kinship makes and unmakes people through food.