My work to date has taken the form of several intellectual projects, each of which grapples with different aspects of these core themes. 

 Eating Disorders and Asceticism

My earliest work examined disciplines of asceticism (fasting, celibacy, deprivation of comfort) as culturally elaborated practices for negotiating gendered conceptions of morality.  I focused on anorexia nervosa as a contemporary ascetic practice, interrogating the cultural dimensions of this condition as one in which particular moralized forms of body ritual assume center stage.

Gender, Nationalism and Embodiment in a Mexican Convent    

My dissertation research extended my work on gender, asceticism, and moral practice.  The project concerned young women in training to become nuns in a Roman Catholic convent in Mexico and their experiences of religious vocation.  I examined the ways these Sisters’ existential transformation proceeded in direct, everyday engagement with larger cultural concerns about Mexican nationalism and cultural identity in the face of an accelerated movement into the “first world.”  I argued that the nuns’ bodily experiences in religious training became avenues for cultivating a gendered religious subjectivity that afforded them a third way between more traditional gendered expectations and American-style feminism. This research is the basis for my first book Jesus in Our Wombs: Embodying Modernity in a Mexican Convent (The University of California Press, 2005).

Latina Teen Suicide Attempts and Acculturative Stress  

This work, which mobilizes my academic perspectives to address mental health issues,  was undertaken collaboratively with Dr. Luis Zayas and Dr. Leo Cabassa of the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University.  We wanted to better understand the phenomenon of Latina teen suicide attempts (more than three times the rates of other subgroups).  We proposed a conceptual model and mixed-methods approach grounded in existing knowledge about acculturaltive stress and the paucity of adequate mental health care services for immigrant populations in the U.S.  With Dr. Zayas as the Principal Investigator, this research was funded by an NIMH R01 grant.

Eating Disorders and Cultures of Recovery

Over the past 25 years I have been engaged in critical medical anthropological work on eating disorders as syndromes that both manifest and challenge dominant cultural notions of gender, agency, and moral personhood.  I have been particularly interested in how models of eating disorders enfold and prescribe certain kinds of gendered subjectivity as healthy, while excluding or pathologizing others.  My work in this area engages questions of how the body figures into (or disappears from) operating etiological explanations of these conditions (Lester 1997), how “healthy” agency is implicitly gendered in dominant models and techniques of recovery (Lester 1999), and how presumptions about the “correct” female sexual body informs understandings of eating disorders and the interventions used to treat them (Lester 2000).  I been especially interested in how the structures and practices of managed mental health care mirror and exacerbate the core dynamics of eating disorders themselves, making recovery within this system especially fraught.  This work culminated in my most recent book, Famished: Eating Disorders and Failed Care in America (The University of California Press, 2019).

Coming Undone: Dissociative Identity Disorder and the Politics of Truth in the Virtual Age

For over 4 years, I worked with a psychotherapy client who presented with 12 personalities and clearly met the diagnosis for Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Many people—even many clinisians—don’t believe in DID. They assume either the person is faking or the “personalities” have been coaxed into being by the therapist. I was agnostic about DID before meeting “Ella”—the jury was out for me. Not any more. At least in the case of Ella, DID is unquestionably a genuine condition.

What does taking DID seriously mean in terms of how we think about the self and identity? What does the firery controversy about it say about our cultural obsession with clinging to a model of the self that is over 100 years old? We need more dynamic models of the self that can accommodate not only DID but the fragemented experiences of self many of us live with as we navigate online spaces and “real life,.” Ella’s story illuminates new ways of thinking about who we are in our rapidly-evolving digital world.

This book is under contract with The University of California Press.

Love, American Style: Polyamory and the Affective Politics of Intimacy

Polyamory is by many reports the fastest growing sexual practice in the United States (Moors et al. 2021).  From dozens of articles on Medium (e.g., Hope 2019) and features in outlets ranging from Teen Vogue (Belle 2018) to The Atlantic (Bodenner 2016), to reality TV shows and plot lines in network dramas, polyamory is well on its way to becoming mainstream.  NPR (2019), Scientific American (Pappas 2013), and Newsweek (Bennett 2009) have all characterized the rise in polyamory as “the new sexual revolution.”   In a society built on a bedrock of heterosexual monogamous marriage and the centrality of the nuclear family, it seems that something tectonic is shifting in how many Americans think about, practice, and experience sexual and emotional intimacy.

But polyamory is more than simply a relationship structure; it is also a deeply political practice that self-consciously challenges the ownership ethos of monogamy and the cultural structures that support and are supported by it (Eda 2013; Deri 2015; Rosa 2022).  In this sense, polyamory is a lifestyle politics (de Moor 2017), where alternative intimate practices are tied to larger commitments about social transformation.  Many practitioners understand living a polyamorous lifestyle as a radical act, actively destabilizing the traditional economic and family structures that underpin contemporary American society and cultivating new forms of sociality. 

How do people who practice polyamory learn to retool their emotional and affective responses to embody this new vision of sociality? How do they manage feelings of jealousy, loss, anxiety, and betrayal, transforming them into not only productive personal feelings but motivated political action? And what can this tell us about intimacy and sociality as spaces of potential revolutionary change?

An article about this work is forthcoming in American Anthropologist.

Research on this project is ongoing. If you’d like to participate and share your own experiences, please email me at rjlester@wustl.edu.

Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies

The field of psychiatry is currently undergoing a radical transformation. The re-engagement with psychedelics after decades of suppression has opened up thrilling new possibilities for mental health treatment and for understanding the workings of the human brain. This psychedelic rennaissance is changing much of what we thought we knew about how people heal from such conditions as PTSD, depression, eating disorders, and chronic pain.

As part of the Center for the Holistic, Interdisciplinary Research on Psychedelics (CHIRP) at Wash U, I am working with an interdisciplinary team to explore how we can maximize the benefits of psychedelic therapies by incorporating anthropological perspectives along with cutting-edge psychiatric practice and the power of implementation science.

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Across these projects, three core questions frame my scholarly inquiry, corresponding to different, yet intersecting, levels of analysis. 

            On what might be called the level of the “subjective” or “individual,” I ask: How do people make sense of the world through their bodies, and how is this ongoing process of embodiment intimately and inextricably relational?  This entails understanding how bodily experiences are given meaning in local social worlds, how such meanings come to be experienced as part of one’s “self” or “identity” according to local models, and how one’s body can become a symbolic resource for communicating subjective experiences in culturally meaningful ways.  It involves questions of fundamental import to the project of anthropology more broadly, as it focuses on how “the outside” (e.g., culture) is thought to get “inside,” and, perhaps just as interesting, how “outsides” and “insides” are themselves culturally delineated.

            On what we might describe as the level of the “social,” I ask: How do people engage bodily practices to help them navigate misfits between their own experiences and cultural proscriptives?  This aspect of my work engages forms of symbolic communication (e.g., ritual, bodily modifications) and the ways bodies and bodily experiences become invested with multiple, sometimes competing, cultural meanings.  I am interested in how strategies of bodily management concretize “acceptable” and “unacceptable” selves and how these practices often become contested terrains of moral action for both individuals and institutions.

            On what might broadly be called the “cultural” level, I ask: How do institutional structures condition such bodily practices, either as technologies of those institutions or as domains of resistance (or, in some cases, both)?  Here, I consider models of human agency and propositions about the degree to which individual actors are capable of choice.  This aspect of my work engages questions of moral decision-making and ethical practice as locally constituted domains. As individuals creatively engage cultural languages (often non-verbal) and symbols to express their suffering and make inroads in healing, the contours and fissures of such cultural logics become manifest.

            Across these l levels, I am interested in how interpersonal, institutional, and social structures and dynamics of power and inequality inform the possibilities and limits of being.