Uma vis？o antropológica do prodigioso jejum de mulheres ocidentais

in prodigious fasting, sometimes to death, western women have expressed an extraordinary relationship to food for almost eight centuries. this essay attempts to explain such behavior by weaving together the fine-grained and fascinating historical data presented in the three books under review - holy anorexia (bell, 1985); fasting girls: the emergence of anorexia nervosa as a modern disease (brumberg, 1988) e holy feast and holy fast: the religious significance of food to medieval women (bynum, 1987) - and viewing them from the cross-cultural and holistic perspectives fundamental to anthropology. i aim to show that western female fasting differs radically from other kinds of fasting observed by anthropologists across the globe and that it involves a highly symbolic alteration of women's universal relationship to food. i argue that it is best understood as a multidetermined behavior, an interplay of ideological, economic, political, and social factors.