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This article takes as a starting point a discussion of some theoretical and methodological issues that traverse Nancy Spalding's account of civil war in Nigeria (Spalding, 2000), providing an opportunity to reflect on the way in which military conflict is approached by social scientists. I take issue with the ways of understanding 'culture' and 'social order' in the interpretation of military conflicts. If we engage in cultural description (rather than imposing a cultural theory) and we keep our eyes open for all the ways in which members produce social order (rather than taking social order as an ideal state that might fall apart), then the historical institutions involved in war become visible as cultural phenomena. The resulting analysis of war is grounded in the evidence available, and enhances the reflexive and critical responsibilities of the social sciences. I illustrate these points with a brief analysis of the public discourse that preceded the NATO bombings of Yugoslavia in 1999.

Eating disorders (EDs) have become one of the biggest mental-health problems in the last decades, especially among youth and women. The present study aims to analyse the suitability of Prochaska and DiClemente's Transtheoretical Model of Change when applied to the living experiences of people diagnosed with ED and their carers. For this purpose, we applied a narrative biographic approach to the ways in which people face their problems and vital development in the ED domain. Through the narrative analysis of these autobiographies, we aimed to study the patients' own notions of 'change', 'problem' and 'vital trajectory'. We focused on five autobiographic interviews of persons diagnosed as ED (four women and a man). The analysis yields three discourses which organize and give sense to our participants' vital transitions: a discourse of functional adaptation to events and experiences; one that pays attention to random events and people entering your life; and one that has the personal initiative and agency of an individual agent at its core. It also illuminates particular ways of understanding determination, contemplation and pre-contemplation. These ways of understanding change are shown to extend the possible ways of thinking about people's lives and ED patients' perspectives.