A Rhetorical and Sociolinguistic Model for the Analysis of Narrative

In this paper, the rhetorical theory of Kenneth Burke and the sociolinguistic method of William Labov, are synthesized to derive a formal and functional analytical framework for the study of narrative. The resulting framework provides for the identification of narrative style and performance in any sub-genre of narrative.     

Trauma, dreaming, and psychological distress among Kurdish children.

The authors examined (a) how traumatic events are associated with children's dream structure and content and (b) which dream characteristics might moderate the negative impact of traumatic events on mental health. Participants were 122 Kurdish children (9-17 years old, M = 13.02, SD = 1.66). Their dreams were collected during 1 week using a semistructured dream diary and scored according to the dream atmosphere, the role of the dreamer, bizarreness, narrative quality, fragmentation and resolution, and content such as themes of death, persecution and rejection, hostility, and anxiety. The results substantiated the hypothesis that children exposed to a high level of traumatic events would report dreams characterized by unpleasant atmosphere, fragmented flow, and low levels of bizarre narrative quality. Pleasant dreams containing complete narratives and happy endings moderated the negative impact of traumatic events on children's mental health. The authors argue that dreaming allows cognitive-emotional processing of traumatic events and may thus enhance child well-being in war conditions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Once upon a time in the West? Stories of migration and modernity from Kerala, South India

This article explores how members of an ex-untouchable, 'backward' community of South India – the Izhavas of Kerala – represent and make sense of their entanglements within 'modernity'. Izhava narratives suggest ambivalence: while failure stories remain individualized, narrated in terms of bad luck or others' cheating, success stories are presented as exemplars of a twentieth-century global master narrative of progress. We note many correspondences between this ex-untouchable community's optimistic master narrative and another powerful and pervasive meta-narrative – the global story of modernity as development, promoted by state government, reform movements, and development theorists alike. Life-history narratives forcibly bring us – European interlocutors – into the same space as the tale-tellers, speak of encounters between Indians and Europeans, and urge us to recognize that we live in 'one world'. Malayalis stake claims for equal participation in modernity's projects even as they point out ways in which coevalness is denied. This prompts us to suggest that narratives of modernity in India and the UK should occupy the same analytical space, contrary to moves to theorize multiple modernities. With our Malayali respondents, we are participating in a confabulation/confabrication of a shared story which appears to be one about the nature of global capitalism. Modernity produces dream and disillusionment, promising progress to all while delivering to a few. In its seemingly endless capacity for self-regeneration and reinvention it is, as a phenomenon in global history, far from over. Even as theorists try to write it off as a moment past or a project failed, it still holds out its promises and provides a structuring framework for contemporary life-stories.     

Repairing Broken Rules: Care-Seeking Narratives for Menstrual Problems in Rural Mali

Narratives play an important role in the organization of therapeutic action in rural Mali. This article provides structural and interpretive analyses of a young, French-speaking Dogon woman's accounts of her efforts to manage her menstrual bleeding and threatened infertility. Through her personal narratives she creates social arenas to recruit support, negotiate changes in her family relationships, and enhance her standing as a member of the community. Beginning with the accounts of her fear and helplessness, the narrator integrates past events into her unfolding present and achieves a meaningful resolution of her problem. Her narratives weave together encounters with family members, friends, and healers to describe a therapeutic itinerary that acquires significance as a transformative experience, [narrative, therapeutic action, medical pluralism, menstruation, Dogon, Mali]     

Significant dreams: Repositioning the self narrative.

In this article the authors argue that the study of the ongoing significance of significant dreams necessarily goes beyond quantitative methods for analyzing dream content to a qualitative study of how the dream experience influences the dreamer's meaning-making processes. A set of concepts from narrative psychology is introduced as being potentially valuable in this regard. A case study is presented to illustrate how the significant dream may serve as a catalyst for repositioning the dreamer's self narrative relative to a cultural master narrative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Migration as Adventure: Narrative Self-representation among Caribbean Migrants in Denmark

Narratives of adventure constitute a well-established convention of describing travel experiences, yet the significance of this narrative genre in individuals’ accounts of their migration and life abroad has been little investigated. Drawing on Simmel and Bakhtin, among others, this article analyses how Caribbean immigrants in Denmark present themselves through narratives of adventure as travellers of the world eager to experience different cultures and societies. In this way they assert themselves as actors within a global arena in contrast to a Denmark that, like many other nations in the global north, presents itself today as increasingly inward oriented and anxious to protect the local culture and society against foreign intruders. It is suggested that ethnographic analysis of migrants’ narrative self-representation in receiving societies can offer new insights into migrants as acting and reflecting subjects at a time when many societies display growing scepticism towards people on the move.     

A Historical Loop of One Hundred Years: Similarities Between 19th Century and Contemporary Dream Research

Contemporary cognitive and neuropsychological approaches to dreaming show striking methodological and conceptual similarities with the scientific dream literature of the last century. The use of introspective dream reports and the emphasis on dream phenomenology are characteristic of both periods but were bannished during the first half of this century, the former by behaviorism, the latter by psychoanalysis. Three main common axioms of 19th century and contemporary dream research are described: (a) dream experience results from cognitive syntheses realized in the absence of external constraints; (b) dream narrative or dream coherency involves mental associative mechanisms; (c) dream bizarreness emerges from a cerebral state characterized by functional dissociation. According to these three axioms, the observation of dream phenomena reveals that distinct cognitive processes might function in a partly autonomous, automatic, and dissociated way, making dreaming a unique model of these cognitive processes.     

The Dream as Text, The Dream as Narrative

The concepts of text and narrative are reviewed in terms of their appropriate application to the study of dreams. It is proposed that, once experienced, all dreams are texts, but that not all of these texts are narratives. Blending Jung's proposal for the form of the average dream with basic terms from narratology, dream data are employed in order to examine the narrativity of dreams, and by way of inquiring into cognitive aspects of narrative structure. Questions about the relation between language and narrative structure on the one hand, and between dreaming and language on the other are also briefly taken up.     

Dream content: Reflections of the emotional and psychological states of earthquake survivors.

This study investigated dream narratives as reflections of the emotional and psychological states of earthquake survivors. Dreams and dreams imagery have reportedly been affected by the emotional and psychological trauma that the dreamer goes through. Dream narratives and dream content ratings used in earlier studies were utilized in this study. Narratives and content ratings were obtained from a sample of 27 volunteer survivors of the October 8, 2005 earthquake in Pakistan (Azad Kashmir area) and 27 volunteer controls from similar demographics. Three independent raters judged the dream narratives and dream content ratings. The judges rating were highly congruent (86.05). Findings revealed that the survivor group had more vivid, unpleasant, horrifying, and hostile dreams compared with the control group. However, there were no significant gender differences. The data suggest that a closer study of dreams can be used to understand the underlying trauma for effective interventions. In addition, interesting emergence of recurrent dreams was seen, which will be independently studied in future. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lucid Art and Hyperspace Lucidity

This article explores nonrepresentational, multidimensional lucid dreaming and its parallel imagery in modern art paintings. Developed from a series of successive qualitative experiments on art and lucid dreaming, the study brings together phenomenological and narrative approaches to reveal a relationship between imagery in a particular lucid dream experience (Hyperspace Lucidity) and a particular type of modern art painting (Lucid Art). This article attempts to open new dialogues for investigation of the interconnection between the dreaming mind and art.     

Content analysis of dreams and waking narratives.

This study investigated the specificity of dream content and its continuity with waking life. For each subject (125 men and 125 women, between the ages of 19 and 29 years), a dream and a waking episode were collected according to “the most recent dream” method (Hartmann, Elkin, & Garg, 1991), which was also applied to “a recent life episode.” Both kinds of narratives were analyzed through the application of the Hall–Van de Castle System (1966) and a typical content analysis (a compendium of the most important typical dream taxonomies). In dreams, typical situations involved the dreamer trying to perform some physical action, most frequently with difficulties in mastering the task. Affective relationships and hostile interactions with an enemy were shared by both narratives, but cognitive activities were uncommon in both cases. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Dumuzi's Dream: Dream Analysis in Ancient Mesopotamia.

Mesopotamian civilization was the first to develop writing and the first from which literary texts remain, dating back to the late 3rd millennium B.C. Some of these texts contain accounts of dreams, especially of royal figures. The earliest of these texts, evidently the earliest recorded dream in history, is the dream of Dumuzi of Uruk. This dream is embedded within the framework of the larger epic of the Descent of Inanna, and not only is the dream text itself included but also its interpretation, by Dumuzi's sister Geshtin-anna. She appears to have played the role of a professional dream interpretress. There are also several cylinder seals that appear to depict the motifs of Dumuzi's dream. This article examines this dream and its interpretation within the Mesopotamian cultural context. It also compares the dream with several other well-known dream texts from Mesopotamia. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The National Struggle Museums of a divided city

The article compares the two National Struggle Museums situated on either side of Nicosia, the divided capital of Cyprus. Their differences, it is suggested, reflect the differences of Greek and Turkish nationalism while their similarities are an outcome of their sharing the same form of historical representation: the past as a narrative of national struggle. The structural similarities of the two museums are thus utilized in order to highlight the specific ‘syntax’ of narratives of national struggle, as well as to discuss some of their implications for multi‐ethnic states in which the past is primarily conceptualized in this way. It is suggested that the notion of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ should be supplemented by a notion of the nation as the central actor and moral centre of a historical narrative that gives meaning to the past and indicates future orientations.     

Controlling death--compromising life: chronic disease, prognostication, and the new biotechnologies

Within the modern culture of control, patients and physicians seek to actively shape the uncertainty of prognostications concerning the course of disease and the anticipated effects of therapeutic and surgical interventions. This article discusses the results of a three-year ethnographic study of persons with cystic fibrosis (CF) who undergo double-lung transplant. It draws on interviews with a difficult-to-access patient group, adult CF sufferers, and investigates their dilemmas with regard to having or not having a double-lung transplant. It situates their decisions within a complex framework: the denial of death and disability in technological modernity, the consequent emphasis on cure and saving life at any cost, rather than the management of chronic illness, the extent to which health and illness constitute identity, and the problems of CF patients conceiving their life narrative when life will be short. This framework produces two key questions: Do patient beliefs in the progress narratives of medicine overshadow other considerations, and are biotechnologies such as organ transplant a calculated gamble on a better life or an uncertain reliance on biomedical expertise? I argue that risk interpretation is heavily influenced by the constant introduction of new therapeutics that intersect with social technologies of normalization to strongly influence patient decisions concerning the pursuit of high-risk surgeries such as organ transplant, surgeries that sometimes hasten a patient's decline and death.     

Children's Dreams and Nightmares: Emerging Trends in Research.

New manifest content analysis research on children's dreams and nightmares provides insights into how dreaming reveals developmental changes over time. Five culturally diverse research studies were conducted with varied methods for dream collection that included laboratory-collected dreams, as well as written journals, audiotaped dreams, and retrospectively recalled dreams. As children grow older, they are more able to recall dreams, dream narratives increase in length, and dreams are characterized by decreasing levels of passive victimization and have more elaborate character interactions. Age and gender differences in recall, interactions, and gender of dream characters indicate that dream research is a fertile area for studying child development and the changing function of dreams over time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Exploring the post-genomic world: differing explanatory and manipulatory functions of post-genomic sciences

Richard Lewontin proposed that the ability of a scientific field to create a narrative for public understanding garners it social relevance. This article applies Lewontin's conceptual framework of the functions of science (manipulatory and explanatory) to compare and explain the current differences in perceived societal relevance of genetics/genomics and proteomics. We provide three examples to illustrate the social relevance and strong cultural narrative of genetics/genomics for which no counterpart exists for proteomics. We argue that the major difference between genetics/genomics and proteomics is that genomics has a strong explanatory function, due to the strong cultural narrative of heredity. Based on qualitative interviews and observations of proteomics conferences, we suggest that the nature of proteins, lack of public understanding, and theoretical complexity exacerbates this difference for proteomics. Lewontin's framework suggests that social scientists may find that omics sciences affect social relations in different ways than past analyses of genetics.     

Active Memory

Collective memory is a phenomenon that receives a different interpretation depending on the discipline within which it is examined. In my research, I will employ ideas and concepts developed within the framework of a sociocultural approach (Wertsch, 2002; Cole, 1996). In particular, I will proceed from the definition of collective memory developed by James Wertsch (2002), who treats collective memory as textually mediated memory, conditioned by various—mainly historical—narratives. Historical narratives (annals, chronicles, history textbooks, etc.) are considered to be cultural instruments promoting collective remembrance. A category I borrow from Wertsch's work (2002) is the concept of the "schematic narrative template," which I will apply as analytic tool in my investigation of the phenomenon of collective memory phenomenon.     

Terror, corpse symbolism, and taboo violation: the 'Haredi Disaster Victim Identification Team in Israel' (Zaka)

Anthropologists dealing with death have pointed to a process of privatization, bureaucratization, and secularization of death in the age of 'high modernity'. In this article I argue that the exploration of death within the framework of modern terrorism, a form of death that is becoming increasingly common, reveals new expressions and interpretations of death that are public and are represented by a complex religious repertoire of images and practices. Based on a field study that combines in-depth interviews, observations, films, and textual analyses, this article examines how volunteers from the ' Zaka ' organization (the Jewish ultra-Orthodox team for identification of victims of disaster in Israel) explain their deathwork during terror attacks. Generally we would expect that this community's religious norms, which prevent them from involvement with the larger society, would also prevent members from participation in cases of death in the public sphere. Nevertheless, Zaka 's tasks involve collecting, matching, and recomposing pieces of human flesh and blood in the public arena. Through these new practices, Zaka volunteers shape new narratives of public death, which are based on two central premises: a discourse of 'corpse symbolism' and a narrative of taboo desecration. This language reinforces and revives Haredis' own religious expressions during terror, allowing them to monopolize the death experience and the handling of dead bodies, introduce sacred meanings of corpses and death into the public sphere, and create their new position as specialists and deathworkers.     

From ancestral conflicts to local empowerment: two narratives from a Nepalese community

This article concerns the first region that the Maoists declared to be their base area, in the western part of Nepal. It examines how the 10 years of insurrection are reconstructed through two narratives by non-aligned villagers from the same community. These accounts concern two different phases of the conflict. In the first account, the violent irruption of the security forces into the village turned a spotlight on the structural features and historical conditions which made the community vulnerable to the outside intervention, whether by the rebels or by the state. The second narrative illustrates the obverse side of the same community: its capacity to stand up to oppression on the occasion of a Maoist ban on a sacrifice to the local god. The juxtaposition of the two narratives reveals a process of political maturation characterised by a critical analysis of the past and a nascent confidence in the expression of needs and rights.