An unanticipated source of hope: stigma and cervical cancer in Brazil

In this article, I argue that although cervical cancer is an often stigmatized condition in Brazil, women with cervical cancer in Recife, Brazil, did not simply endure the stigma, they also perpetuated it. I draw on narrative theory and 18 months of ethnographic research in Recife to argue that rather than resisting the stigma associated with their disease, women in Recife used stigma to construct illness narratives that affirmed that they were still held to the same norms and values as the nonill. In turn, those narratives, and the healing narratives constructed along with them, provided women with hope for a future free from cervical cancer and free from the "imperfections" associated with that disease. Thus, women with cervical cancer used stigmatizing narratives both as links back to the "normal" world they inhabited before they became ill, and as bridges forward to the future they hoped to attain.     

Thinking Temporally or Modernizing Anthropology

Recent changes within social and cultural anthropology have made history a key issue, but in this essay I argue that the field has yet to develop the resources that are required to deal with temporality. This point is made through an extended examination of Jean and John Comaroffs work on Christianity and colonialism in southern Africa. Arguably, the Comaroffs read history backward and then present its unfolding as a kind of inexorable logic. In doing so, they homogenize missionary and Tswana "cultures" and attribute agency to abstractions rather than to people acting in particular material contexts. In contrast, I argue for a narrative approach to historical anthropological explanation. The emergent qualities of events—and the variable ways in which capitalism, hegemony, Protestantism, and vernacular modernisms relate—require narrative for explanation, narrative that encompasses within itself the narratives of social actors themselves, [historical anthropology, narrative, the modern, South Africa]     

Narrative ARTifice and women's agency

The choice to pursue fertility treatments is a complex one. In this paper I explore the issues of choice, agency, and gender as they relate to assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs). I argue that narrative approaches to bioethics such as those by Arthur Frank and Hilde Lindemann Nelson clarify judgments about autonomy and fertility medicine. More specifically, I propose two broad narrative categories that help capture the experience of encounters with fertility medicine: narratives of hope and narratives of resistance. This narrative typology captures the inevitable conflict that women feel when they become subjects of fertility medicine. On the one hand, they must remain hopeful; on the other, they must not surrender themselves completely. Nelson's account of counterstories as narratives of resistance helps us see how women can reconcile the experience of a strong desire to have children with the desire to remain authentic and whole.     

Embodied narratives of disaster: the expression of bodily experience in Aceh,Indonesia

The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 26 December 2004 caused massive destruction to coastal Aceh, Indonesia, and left countless numbers of people dead or wounded. This article focuses on the embodied narratives of three Acehnese women who survived the disaster and, like many others in Aceh, told their stories ‘through’ their bodies. A detailed ethnographic account of their narratives reveals how the body stretches temporally between the ‘narrated event’ and the ‘narrative event’, both through the representation of the body in narratives and through the embodied performance of narratives. Moving beyond meaning‐centred analyses of narratives, I argue that the central accomplishment of these narratives is that they convey poignant bodily experiences to others and thereby create a shared, post‐disaster, world. Ultimately, through these embodied narratives of disaster people remake their world, with others, in the wake of its ‘unmaking’.     

Emplotting Hikikomori: Japanese Parents’ Narratives of Social Withdrawal

Hikikomori, often glossed as “social withdrawal,” emerged as a sociomedical condition among Japanese youth at the end of the twentieth century, and it continues to fascinate and concern the public. Explanatory frameworks for hikikomori abound, with different stakeholders attributing it to individual psychopathology, poor parenting, and/or a lack of social support structures. This article takes an interpretive approach to hikikomori by exploring parents’ narrative constructions of hikikomori children in support group meetings and in-depth interviews. I argue that some parents were able to find hope in hikikomori by ‘emplotting’ their children’s experiences into a larger narrative about onset, withdrawal, and recovery, which helped them remain invested in the present by maintaining a sense of possibility about the future. Contrary to literature that examines hikikomori as an epidemic of isolated individuals, I demonstrate how parents play a key role in hikikomori through meaning-making activities that have the potential to shape their children’s experiences of withdrawal.     

Dying under the bird's shadow: narrative representations of degedege and child survival among the Zaramo of Tanzania

In this article, I examine the cultural interpretations of degedege, an indigenous illness commonly recognized by the Zaramo people of coastal Tanzania as life threatening. Drawing on the narratives of three bereaved parents who lost a child to degedege, I analyze the contextual and circumstantial factors involved in these parents' negotiation of the identity of an illness and in their subsequent therapy seeking behavior. I show that even though cultural knowledge and etiological beliefs about degedege may be shared locally, there is significant variation in the therapeutic pathways that parents follow to deal with an actual episode of the illness. I emphasize the need for more contextualized data on health-seeking behaviors, and argue that it is necessary to pay attention to the micropolitics of health care decision making at the household level. Finally, I also call attention to the politics of provider-patient communication at public health facilities as a means to improve public health interventions to increase child survival.     

“How I Floated on Gentle Webs of Being”: Psychiatrists Stories About the Mental Health Treatment Gap in Africa

A strong movement has emerged recently which is highlighting the high levels of untreated mental illness in Africa and making proposals for reducing this ‘gap’ in mental health care. This movement has been criticised for insufficiently attending to the epistemologies embedded in its recommendations, and inadequately considering the views of practitioners ‘on the ground’. Employing a narrative-based approach, I accessed the stories about the mental health ‘treatment gap’ of 28 psychiatrists all working clinically in public mental health care settings in South Africa, Uganda, Nigeria or Ethiopia. Rather than focusing on the content of these stories, I was more interested in their underpinning meaning-codes and epistemological politics. Dominant thinking about the ‘treatment gap’ was heavily informed by a biomedical paradigm, and associated epistemological order of European Colonial Modernity. There were, however, cracks in this master narrative, which crystalised in the stories that were told by three particular psychiatrists. Their narratives operated within an alternative paradigm, one which appears to be informed by the tradition of phenomenology, and in particular the ideas associated with French philosopher Merleau-Ponty. This more marginalised thinking may offer important insights into reducing the mental health ‘treatment gap’ in Africa in ways very different from those created by current seats of power.     

Investigating the Barons: narrative and nomenclature in Munchausen syndrome

Recounting stories of the 18th-century Baron von Münchhausen, the unauthorized appropriation of his name into literature, and Richard Asher's subsequent medical use of the name Munchausen 150 years later, this article examines the narratives that are told about and through Munchausen syndrome that create meaning within medicine. By analyzing a half-century debate over the name of the illness, this article discusses how the medical literature invests meaning in names and how names create meaning through narrative with effects on the practice of medicine.     

‘The past is a promise to the future’: stories,persons, and the devil in Greece

Drawing on ethnography from central Greece, this article is about the way people narrate their encounters with the devil. Although it echoes the idea that life as told and life as lived are structured in the same way, it takes the argument a step further by suggesting they are structured through a narrative plot wherein the present and the future of the story-tellers pre-date the past of which their stories tell. It also foregrounds the link between this structure and a particular kind of morality which replicates the narrative logic of the stories, giving rise to an inherently relational personhood – a personhood that, just like the way in which its narration destabilizes the logic of before and after, destabilizes the distinction between self and other. Lastly, contextualizing the current economic crisis in the lives of such persons, the article suggests we need to think of it in relation to the devil and the stories people tell of him.     

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 Co-Wife for the Cow: Gender Dimensions of Land Change and Livelihood Shift among Loita Maasai of Southern Kenya

Gender dimensions are fundamental to human/environment systems. I use gender to investigate land change in a forested area of conservation concern in the pastoral rangelands of Kenya Maasailand. Mixed methods reveal a narrative arc from the mid-1970s culminating in a transformation of land, livelihood, and culture by 2014. Empirical findings expand current understandings of livelihood shift in Maasailand to include gender dimensions critical to livelihood success. Remotely sensed satellite data and qualitative evidence expose simplistic narratives about environmental conditions in Loita Forest and Maasai women’s social status. I argue that gender deserves more attention in land-change studies because of its linkages to resource utilization and drivers of forest decline around the world.     

Visibilities,invisibilities and twilight zones at the crime scene in Portugal

The Police are the first element of a chain of custody culminating in the court. The documents they produce mediate the understandings between the crime scene and the court. Based on the formal rules, the police give visibility to the narrative and assign legitimacy and credibility to their performance. However, the decision to turn certain aspects of the narrative visible, leaving others in a twilight zone may have repercussions in the production of a verdict. Based in a qualitative analysis of three Portuguese judicial proceedings in this paper I explore how the narrative constructed by the police, based on what they see and what is unseen, travels between subepistemic cultures. Looking at the visibilities, invisibilities and twilight zones, I will try to understand how police forces at the crime scene in Portugal construct their narratives through the use of biological traces and how these narratives are part of the construction of the evidence. I argue that in criminal investigations in Portugal, the production of a narrative with legal meaning in court can be conditioned by the co-existence of the epistemic subcultures of police work (different police forces at the crime scene) that have different knowledge, practices, understandings and ways of “seeing” the forensic evidence. The degree of technological enthusiasm that guides the performance of different police forces at the crime scene is reflected in the way they “see” the scene and in the sociocultural understandings that they produce. This technological enthusiasm and what I call here “selective professional vision” are mobilized at the crime scene and can impact the robustness and efficiency of the evidence presented in court.     

Anticipating an unwanted future: euthanasia and dementia in the Netherlands

This ethnographic exploration of anticipation draws on fieldwork among people with dementia and their families in the Netherlands. I examine how requests for euthanasia by people with dementia offer insight into the work of anticipation, revealing it to be a temporal orientation through which the future is made tangible. Imagining a future with dementia may prompt some people to request euthanasia, but timing such measures is extremely difficult and often results in deferral. Contributing to an emerging anthropology of time, I argue that anticipation is a process of establishing, collapsing, and renegotiating the temporal distance between present and future, bringing the future into the present while also, and simultaneously, keeping the future at bay as a continuous ‘not yet’.     

Forensic fictions: Science,television production,and modern storytelling

This essay uses interviews with television creators, writers, and producers to examine how media practitioners utilise, negotiate and transform forensic science in the production of televisual stories including the creation of unique visuals, character exploration, narrative progression, plot complication, thematic development, and adding a sense of authenticity. Television as a medium has its own structures and conventions, including adherence to a show’s franchise, which put constraints on how stories are told. I demonstrate how television writers find forensic science to be an ideal tool in navigating television’s narrative constraints by using forensics to create conflicts, new obstacles, potential solutions, and final solutions in their stories. I show how television writers utilise forensic science to provide the scientific certainty their characters require to catch the criminal, but also how uncertainty is introduced in a story through the interpretation of the forensics by the show’s characters. I also argue that televisual storytellers maintain a flexible notion of scientific realism based on the notion of possibility that puts them at odds with scientists who take a more demanding conception of scientific accuracy based on the concept of probability.     

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.     

Constitutional Faith Law and Hope in Revolutionary Kyrgyzstan

This article investigates the interrelation between law and hope in the context of constitutional change in the Central Asian country of Kyrgyzstan. Drawing upon ethnographic and textual data, it is shown that the constitution has acquired particular discursive importance in Kyrgyzstan each time the foundations of the state have been severely challenged or shattered. Paying particular attention to three major political conflicts, the article demonstrates how, in the aftermath of each, speeches, performances, presentations and conversations were infused with ‘constitutional faith’, binding together the political elite and ordinary citizens in an expression of their general hope that constitutional change could bring about a better future. I view constitutional faith as a practice of hope that allows people to actively engage with their being-in-the-world, particularly in times of crisis. In the aftermath of large-scale political conflict, with which I am concerned here, it can become a faith-based mode of conflict resolution.     

Risky subjects: narrative,literary <Emphasis Type="Italic">testimonio</Emphasis> and legal testimony

This article compares the textual production of legal testimony with that of literary testimonio. Using the controversy sparked by David Stoll’s exposé of Rigoberta Menchú’s less than “factual” account of her life lived amidst the genocide of indigenous peoples in Guatemala, the analysis asks why Menchú should be indicted or acquitted based on cultural notions of legal testimony. I use the concept of language ideologies to explore how listeners hold narrators to standards of truth. By suggesting that there are interpretive ideologies of narrative production and function at work, the argument is made that any detractor can find a way to discredit narrative truth. I show this by examining how Latina women and state actors create legal testimony about domestic abuse. While these narratives share much with the Menchú testimonio, in particular the risks they present to their narrators, I conclude that the everyday victim in the U.S. adversarial system has much more to lose, and inevitably has far less discursive power, than Menchú. I examine these topics and themes from sociolinguistic and discourse analytic perspectives.     

Prosperous Pollutants: Bargaining with Risks and Forging Hopes in an Industrial Town in Eastern Serbia

ABSTRACT

The article explores the ‘work of hope’ in relation to air pollution and health hazards in Bor, a polluted copper-processing town in Eastern Serbia. The aim of this paper is to show the mutual imbrication of hope and risk by delineating how hope for a stable personal and communal future was anchored in the polluting company and the toxic substances it produced, which, in various ways, provided a sense of possibility and opportunity. I show how the work of hope demanded simultaneous weighing up, manoeuvring, accepting, and bargaining with risks that became an integral part of the work of hope in a social setting where the double bind of growth versus sustainability was deeply embedded. I argue that together, hope and risk were both framing devices for thinking about and living towards futures in a context of reindustrialisation and recent sudden economic flourishing in this post-socialist town.     

Policy actors' narrative constructions of migrants' integration in Malmö and Bologna

Governments have policies explicitly directed at the integration of migrants. This article addresses how policymakers and politicians privilege certain constructions of the social relationship between migrants and the majority society (expressed through narratives of ‘integration’), while making it seem as if they were presenting facts in their policies. These constructions provide the justifications for adopting a direction in policy-making over other alternatives. This article sets to analyse comparatively how policy actors in two urban contexts construct migrants' integration through policy narratives and how, within this, they evaluate migrants as ‘integrated’ and ‘non-integrated’. Through narrative analysis, the article sheds light on how migrants are positioned by political institutions within the normative order of the society in which they live. Furthermore, it shows that local policy-making is shaped by national citizenship regimes, models of steering, welfare regimes and stories about the nation and its people.     

Chewing over the Future: Khat Consumption, Anxiety, Depression, and Time Among Young Men in Jimma, Ethiopia

This article draws on qualitative and quantitative research to examine the relationship between the consumption of khat, symptoms of depression and anxiety and the experience of time among young men in urban Ethiopia. Young men claim that khat, a mild stimulant, both causes and alleviates symptoms of depression and anxiety. However, our quantitative data indicate that there is not a direct relationship between khat and symptoms of depression and anxiety. We analyze this apparent contradiction in terms of young men’s experiences of time. Long-term ethnographic research indicates that khat consumption and mental distress have a close relationship with young men’s temporal problems. In a context of high urban unemployment, young men struggle to negotiate overabundant amounts of unstructured time in the present and place themselves within a narrative in which they are progressing toward future aspirations. These temporal struggles generate symptoms of depression and anxiety. For young men, khat consumption functions to reposition them in relation to time, both in the present and the future. Ultimately, we argue that the relationship between khat and time has implications for the economic issues that underlie young people’s symptoms of depression and anxiety.