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Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterised by self-starvation. Accounts of AN typically frame the disorder in individualistic terms: e.g., genetic predisposition, perceptual disturbances of body size and shape, experiential bodily disturbances. Without disputing the role these factors may play in developing AN, we instead draw attention to the way disordered eating practices in AN are actively supported by others. Specifically, we consider how Pro-Anorexia (ProAna) websites—which provide support and solidarity, tips, motivational content, a sense of community, and understanding to individuals with AN—help drive and maintain AN practices. We use C. Thi Nguyen's work on epistemic "echo chambers", along with Maria Lugones' work on "worlds" and "ease", to explore the dynamics of these processes. Adopting this broader temporal and intersubjective perspective, we argue, not only helps to further illuminate the experiential character of AN but also has important clinical and therapeutic significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viet Thanh Nguyen's novel, The Sympathizer, depicts the experience of the Vietnam War and Vietnamese immigrants' diaspora in the United States from the perspective of a Viet Cong double agent, and represents Vietnamese immigrants' effort to reconstruct their identity by jogging their memories for an ethical scrutiny. The way in which Vietnamese immigrants execute their self-scrutiny through selective memory and establish their own identity embodies the operating mechanism of the ethics of memory. By restoring whatever has been forgotten in memory based on their ethical choices of memory, they manage to regenerate their self-identity through the ethics of memory. In accordance with their ethical choices, they rebuild their memories of the Vietnam War by textualizing what they have remembered and recall the Vietnamese who were perceived as the other in the discourse of the war, hence recognizing them as such. What is reflected here is the ethics of narrative and the function of the ethics of memory as well. Through The Sympathizer, Nguyen not only breaks the manipulation of Vietnamese immigrants' individual and collective memories by the American national discourse of war recollections since the war ended, but also presents his reconsideration of and deep insights into the Vietnam war and refugee policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study, building upon earlier works published from 2011 to the present, focuses on sixteenth through eighteenth century Cochinchina's upstream-downstream networked relations and how they contributed to the re-development of the region's economy and consequently its political and social development, with particular emphasis on its coastal ports and related trade under the Nguy.n. These relations revolve around tightly connected interactions among diverse groups including long-term resident diasporic Fujian merchant communities, newly introduced Chan Buddhist monks, maritime-based Chinese pro-Ming piratical syndicates, local Cham raiding cohorts, and the alien Nguy.n clan who in 1600 claimed political authority over the Vietnamese littoral's central coastal region (Trung B.) and extended central lands (Mi.n Trung). The partnerships the Nguy.n established with each of these groups (merchants, monks, pirates, upstream and downstream multiethnic communities) enabled the major ports of Ðà Nãng, and particularly, of H.i An, to thrive and produce the income needed to support both the Nguy.n bureaucracy and its military conquest of the southern third of the littoral. Over the course of the seventeenth and into the eighteenth centuries, the Nguy.n co-opted the cultural, spiritual, and maritime-based power and influence exercised by each of each these groups in an initial effort to fulfill its dynastic ambitions that remained unfulfilled until 1802. This work moves beyond other regional studies by using the approach proposed in Michael Pearson's writings regarding the Indian Ocean ports-of-trade littoral and extending them eastward, to the further edges of the Indian Ocean borderless world, and applying them to the complex interactions of the Vietnamese littoral populationscoastal urban and hinterland - as they contributed to the development of the central Vietnamese littoral's ports-of-trade and of Nguyễn authority and power in this era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Way, Please! Review of Edgar Morin’s book La Voie. Pour l’avenir de l’humanité. (2011)