Swimming with crocodiles vs Culture and weight consciousness

Swimming with crocodiles

Marjana Martinic, Fiona Measham

2008

Will Chaffey was 18 when he boarded a plane in New York bound for Australia. Though he had recently graduated from one of Boston's most prestigious private schools, a disastrous senior year meant that he hadn't been accepted into college. Instead, he took what the college counsellors grimly called "time off". Despite having no idea what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, Will had a plan for the next six months: to get as far away as possible from the dark New England winter and the stifling expectations of college and career. In Australia, Will met an enigmatic herpetologist and wanderer called Geoff. Together they formulated a plan to walk from the headwaters of the Prince Regent River to the falls of the King Cascade on the north-west coast of Western Australia – a hazardous journey never before attempted by white men. Trekking through a harsh and seductive landscape, their expedition turned into a life-and-death struggle when the boat they expected to collect them at King Cascade never arrived. Stranded in the wildest of places and running out of supplies, Will was transformed in ways he could never have anticipated.

Culture and weight consciousness

Mervat Nasser

1997

Anorexia nervosa and bulimia are among the few psychiatric syndromes with a plausible socio-cultural model of causation. Issues of culture and slimness are usually considered in terms of the experience of the western world, but there is a growing body of research suggesting that concern with slimness is becoming more prevalent in non-western cultures. In Culture and Weight Consciousness, Mervat Nasser brings together this research and looks at the recent emergence of eating disorders in cultures that were previously free of such problems. She relates the feminist theories that have been put forward to explain the phenomenon of eating disorders in the west to the condition of modern women in many non-western cultures and concludes that their position is not at all that different from that of their western counterparts. This leads her to address the current limitations of the concept of culture and draw out the implications for future research.