Anorexia nervosa is an eating disorder identified in current Western biomedical psychiatry that is characterized by prolonged self-starvation coupled with the fear of gaining weight or becoming fat. It was once thought to be a culture-bound syndrome of white upper- to upper-middle-class girls in Western postindustrial societies, but phenomena that closely resemble anorexia have been identified in the historical record stretching back as far as the fifth century bce and have been documented in various ethnic groups and in diverse social strata around the world. Anthropologists have become increasingly interested in anorexia as both a domain of phenomenological experience and a site of epistemological production related to cultural understandings of moral personhood, intersubjectivity, and agency.