| Vol.
7 No. 2
October/November 2004
Upon
Reflection
University leadership
urges a new "discipline" of planning
My
job is to make sure that the academic focus of the institution is
always front and center.
Earl
Lewis, Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs
If
we’re going to be rigid, operating in the nineteenth century
and resisting change, then we’ll go the way of the Light Brigade.
Kenneth
Thorpe, Woodruff Professor of Health Policy and Management
Phase
to phase
Strategic
Planning Steering Committee
To
learn more
Scholarship
in Time
Or, Sipping champagne from a fire hydrant
Bruce
Knauft, Samuel C. Dobbs Professor of Anthropology
and Executive Director,
The Institute for Comparative and International Studies
Is
the Bible Green?
Ancient
Israelite and early Christian perspectives
on the natural world
Carol
A. Newsom, Professor of Old Testament
Further
reading
The
Mind and the Machine
A
Review of Digital People by Sidney Perkowitz
Darryl
Neill, Professor of Psychology
Endnotes
Return
to Contents
|
Obesity:
body or psyche?
[German-born psychoanalyst Hilde Bruch] was the most important psychoanalytic
and medical commentator on body identity in the first half of the
twentieth century. [Historian] Joan Jacobs Brumberg argues, and
I agree with her completely, that Hilde Bruch’s writing in
women’s magazines created the explosion of cases of anorexia
nervosa in the 1970s. Yet Bruch begins with an interest not in the
thin body, but in the fat body. Let me lay out the problem in the
end of the nineteenth century. Was obesity clearly understood to
be of the body—inherited, transmitted? Or was it to be understood
as of the psyche? The endocrinologists argued clearly that it is
of the body. There is a whole literature that basically says if
you give two people an identical diet and one has a metabolic problem,
one will get fat and the other one will not. Along comes psychoanalysis,
which as a group wrestles with medicine for its patrons. And psychoanalysis
with Hilde Bruch will begin to look at obesity as a major issue.
In her first book she says that when she arrived in the United States,
she was immediately aware of the huge number of fat, truly corpulent
children, not only in the clinics, but on the streets, in the subway,
and in the schools. When Bruch turns to obesity, she discovers that
all these fat children have mothers who do not love them.
—Sander Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal
Arts and Medicine, University of Illinois at Chicago, speaking on
“Obesity, the Jews, and Psychoanalysis: On the Creation and
Perpetuation of Stereotypes of Physical Difference,” on September
13, 2004, sponsored by the Center for Health, Culture and Society
A greater search for freedom
“They hate our freedom.” That is what we’ve been
told is the motivation for the animosity and resistance to our presence
in Iraq. Don’t believe the hype. This is a ridiculous explanation
for a very complex reality. The people who are resisting our presence
are in a greater search for freedom, and they see the U.S. presence
and occupation as an impediment. That is the root of much of the
animosity that we are experiencing. It’s important that we
realize that the U.S. and other Western powers have a long and particularly
shameful history throughout the Middle East, the Islamic world,
and much of the globe. It’s important that we as Americans
know that history and that in our relations with other countries
it’s always an underlying issue. Establishing democracy can
never be done with the barrel of a gun.
—Deanna West, Program Manager for the National Center
for Human Rights Education’s Peace, Security, and U.S. Foreign
Policy program, at an Emory Town Hall Meeting on U.S.-Islamic World
Relations, September 13, 2004 |