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Exploring narrative processes through which women treated for anorexia reframe their illness and recovery experiences, I identify features of two distinct genres, "full recovery" (FR) and "struggling to recover" (SR) that differently shape, while also being shaped by, women's lived senses of self. Analysis suggests that full recovery may entail a temporal disjuncture between past and present selves, and the construction of a coherent empowerment narrative with clear beginnings, turning points, and felicitous, institutionally condoned endings. Alternatively, the habitual telling of equivocal struggling to recover narratives, in which protagonists question received wisdom, ponder past and hypothetical life paths, and envision self‐starvation as both good and bad, may perpetuate a cyclical life course in which anorexia recurs and permanent recovery eludes narrators. Illuminating why complete recovery may remain ephemeral and, perhaps, not desirable, for some women, this article contributes to scholarship on the possible role (and limits) of narrative as a therapeutic medium and resource for confronting illness.

The Vietnamese ethic of hy sinh, typically translated as "sacrifice," involves moral conduct and dispositions that emphasize showing respect to sociocultural "superiors" and yielding to sociocultural "inferiors." Like "filial piety," which has been shown to permeate many aspects of life in contemporary Asia, hy sinh is a cultural virtue learned first in families' daily lives. In this article, I examine how participants' linguistic and corporeal practices in routine interactions with children relate to their engagements with ancestors. Focusing on video-recorded displays of respect, I argue that these cultivate elementary forms of hy sinh even in a toddler, thus initiating her into intergenerationally continuing moral lifeworlds. Further, I suggest that, like ritual and patriotic forms of "sacrifice" more common in anthropological accounts, hy sinh is an ethical practice that helps substantiate local sociomoral order. It underpins pervasive relationships of asymmetrical reciprocity both beyond and within the family, naturalizing inequality as ethical. [sacrifice in Vietnam, language socialization and interaction, children and intergenerational relations, morality and ethical practice, hierarchy and filial piety] TÓM TÁT BÀI BÁOD úc tính hy sinh c ua ng u òi Viê . t, th u òngd u o . c di . ch sang tiéng Anh là "sacrifice", là nh ũng hành vida . od úc và khuynh h u óng nhán ma . nh vào viê . c th ê hiê . n tháidô . kính trên nh u òng d u ói. Gióng nh u "lòng hiéu th ao", vón cho tháydã thâm nhâ . p vào các khía ca . nh c uad òi sóngd u ongda . i o ChâuÁ,d úc hy sinh là mô . td úc tínhdãd u o . c hình thành t ù các mói t u ong tác thông th u òng trong giadình. Phân tích c ua tôi sẽdánh giá nh ũng hoa . tdô . ng, thói quen cu . th ê vè mȃ . t ngôn ng ũ trongd òi sóng hàng ngày v ói tr e em liên quandén viê . c kính tro . ng t ô tiên. D u . a vào nh ũng hình anh ghi la . i trong bȃng ghi hình, tôi muón lâ . p luâ . n ràngdièu nàydã hình thành hình th úc c o b an c uad úc tính hy sinh cho tr e em ngay t ù lúc châ . p ch ũng tâ . pdi, và kh oi ta . o nh ũng b u óc phát tri ên t u cáchda . od úc trong cuô . c sóng sau này. H on n ũa, tôi cũngdè xuát ràng gióng nh ud úc tính hy sinh trong các hình th úc nghi lẽ gia s u . và lònǵ ai quóc ph ô bién h on trong các nghiên c úu vè nhân ho . c, hy sinh là mô . t hình th úc trau dòida . od úc giúp ch úng minh tàm quan tro . ng c ua trâ . t t u .d a . od úc xã hô . i odi . a ph u ong. Nó cũng nhán ma . nh mói quan hê . sâu rô . ng c ua s u .d`ê ndáp bátdói trong khuôn kh ô và c a khi v u o . t qua pha . m vi giadình, và nhán ma . nh viê . c bình th u òng hóa s u . bát bìnhd ȃng nh u mô . tda . o lý vè cách úng x u. [hy sinh o Viê . t Nam, quá trình xã hô . i hóa ngôn ng ũ và t u ong tác, tr e em và mói quan hê . gi ũa các thé hê . ,da . od úc và hành vida . od úc, th ú bâ . c và lòng hiéu th ao]RESUMEN Laética vietnamita de hy sinh, típicamente traducido como "sacrificio", envuelve conducta moral y disposiciones que enfatizan el mostrar respeto a "superiores" en lo socio cultural ...

The persistence and recurrence of anorexia nervosa poses a clinical challenge, and provides support for critiques of oppressive and injurious facets of society inscribed on women's bodies. This essay illustrates how a phenomenological, linguistic anthropological approach fruitfully traverses clinical and cultural perspectives by directing attention beyond the embodied experience of patients diagnosed with anorexia nervosa to those who are not clinically diagnosed. Extending a model of illness and recovery as entailing sufferers' emplotting of past, present, and imagined future selves, I argue that women's accounts of their experiences do not simply reflect lived reality, but actually propel health-relevant states of being by enlivening and creating these realities in the process of their telling. In indexical interaction with public and clinical discourses, narratives' grammar, lexicon, and plot structures modify subjects' experiences and interpretations of the events and feelings recounted. This article builds on the insight that linear narratives of "full recovery" that adopt a clinical and feminist voice can help tellers stay recovered, whereas for those "struggling to recover," a genre of contingent, uncertain, sideshadowing narratives alternatively renders recovery an elusive and ambivalently desired object. This essay then identifies a third narrative genre, eluding a diagnosis, which combines elements of the first two genres to paradoxically keep its teller simultaneously sheltered from, and invisible to the well-meaning clutches of medical care, leaving her suffering, yet free, to starve. This focus on narrative genres illustrates the utility of linguistic analyses for discerning and interpreting distress in subclinical populations.

Though socially and politically different, Vietnam's Confucian, colonial, socialist, and marketizing regimes share a common master narrative of ideal women as the moral bedrock of their nation: virtuous, self‐sacrificing mothers. Drawing on ethnographic material collected in Đà Nẵng, this essay examines how women deploy discourses about ethical sentiments and national development to make sense of their experiences of love. I focus on women's moral struggles with and reasoning about sacrifice and care to complicate understandings of romantic love as linked to capitalist individualism and modernity. Instead, I show how women subtly critique, yet remain committed to, forms of love that reinforce—through state policy and common practice—hierarchical gender, intergenerational, and class relations. This is achieved through the telling and living of sideshadowing narratives, that is, subjunctive tales that invite contingency and contradiction. This nonteleological narrative practice reveals the precarious nature of ethical life and the ways love entangles political economy, moral sentiments, and moral reasoning. [morality and ethics, love, class and gender, narrative practice, Vietnam]