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Life Narratives (life + narrative)
Selected AbstractsUntimeliness as Moral Indictment: Tamil Agricultural Labouring Women's Use of Lament as Life NarrativeTHE AUSTRALIAN JOURNAL OF ANTHROPOLOGY, Issue 2 2007Kalpana Ram How do Dalit women forge certain forms of critical perspectives in relation to their existence? This paper explores the very particular poetics that shape the women's responses to an invitation by the ethnographer to tell her their life stories. Their narratives made use of several dominant discourses in south India that ritually construct a woman's life as a teleology of an unfolding essence, an embodied force that comes into flower and fruition, and must be socially shaped and tended in order to bring about an auspicious confluence for both woman and the social order. The women also made use of the structure and tropes of several styles of performance that have tragedy at their emotional heart, and which gain their force against the normative construction of life cycle as temporality. By using these forms, women were able to bring into discourse several aspects of their experience of marriage that would otherwise gain no social recognition. In particular, they highlighted the prematurity of their marriage, having wed while still children themselves. The wider argument of this paper engages with two very different versions of agency,one predicated on the use of reason and consent by the individual, the other derived from an examination of the Dalit women's narratives. [source] Stuck in the past: negative bias, explanatory style, temporal order, and evaluative perspectives in life narratives of clinically depressed individualsDEPRESSION AND ANXIETY, Issue 11 2008Tilmann Habermas Ph.D. Abstract This study attempted to replicate negative bias and depressive explanatory style in depression using life narratives. The two central aspects of narrative, temporal succession and evaluation, were also explored. These aspects were tested for the first time using entire life narratives of 17 depressed inpatients and non-depressed controls matched for sex and educational level. Negative bias and depressive explanatory style were replicated as typical for the depressed group. Life narratives of depressed patients also deviated more from a linear temporal order and compared less frequently the past with the present. Contrary to expectations, the depressed did not differ in the overall frequency of evaluations. However, they used more past than present evaluations and more experience-near evaluations than cognitive evaluations, suggesting that they are more immersed in past experiences. It is concluded that negative bias and depressive explanatory style can be found also in a naturalistic narrative measure, and that depression affects the two major aspects of narrative. It is argued that life narratives, as measures close to everyday clinical practice and as the most encompassing form of self-representation, should complement more experimental procedures in the study of cognitive and communicative processes in psychopathology. Depression and Anxiety, 2008. © 2007 Wiley-Liss, Inc. [source] Exploring the implications for health professionals of men coming out as gay in healthcare settingsHEALTH & SOCIAL CARE IN THE COMMUNITY, Issue 1 2006Bob Cant MA Abstract Coming out as gay is a social process which redefines the relationship between the persons who have decided to disclose their homosexuality and their listeners. This paper, drawing upon Bakhtin's (1984) theories of dialogue, the coming-out literature of gay men and lesbians and contemporary literature on doctor,patient communication, explores the coming-out experiences of gay men with their general practitioners and sexual health clinic staff. The findings are based upon a study of 38 gay men and 12 health service managers in London. The informants were recruited purposively to reflect some of the diversity of the London setting; recruitment was carried out through the channels of gay voluntary organisations and through snowballing. Semi-structured interviews were conducted and a grounded-theory approach was adopted. It was found that coming out in general practice was often/mostly followed by silence/noncommunication on the part of the practitioner; coming out could, however, result in an improvement in communication if the patients were well supported and assertive. If coming out in sexual health clinics did not result in improved communication, the informants in this study were likely to change clinics until they did find improved communication. This paper raises questions about the communication and training needs of general practitioners. It also raises questions about inequalities of access to ,respectful' sexual health clinics; while men who are articulate about the narratives of their lives as gay men are able to exercise informed choices, there were grounds for concern about the choice behaviours of men who are less articulate about their life narratives. [source] Evaluating community participation as prevention: life narratives of youthJOURNAL OF COMMUNITY PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 8 2010Rich Janzen Community-based prevention programs strive to foster the composition of positive life stories, in part, by promoting active participation in community settings. This article used life narratives of youth to explore the experience of community participation and showed how such participation influenced their lives. Youth aged 18,19 years who participated in Better Beginning, Better Futures (n=62), a community-based prevention program, when they were aged 4,8 years, recounted stories of their lives that showed significantly higher levels of participation in community programs and greater personal impacts of that involvement compared with youth who were not involved in Better Beginnings (n=34). Qualitative analysis of a subsample of these youth (n=34) revealed individual and community characteristics that were instrumental in fostering positive outcomes of community participation. The findings indicated both the utility of using a narrative approach to evaluate community-based prevention programs and the value of community participation for children and youth. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. [source] Doubt, faith, and knowledge: the reconfiguration of the intellectual field in post-Nasserist CairoTHE JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE, Issue 2009Hatsuki Aishima The study of the Islamic Resurgence has underestimated the intellectual trials that some key personalities underwent at a crucial stage of the crisis of post-colonial societies. The intellectual leaders of the Resurgence faced the task to redefine the social value of faith and of its converse, doubt, as the insidious flip-side of processes of modernization. Their response to the challenge contributed to a reconfiguration of the intellectual field: in order to reach larger audiences they reinterpreted their cultural credentials and even life narratives in terms of the communicative standards suitable to new media. This paper analyses how the motives of doubt and faith in the trajectories of two personalities aspiring to the status of ,Islamic intellectual' (the Sufi scholar and Shaykh al-Azhar ,Abd al-Halim Mahmud and the media-savvy lay thinker Mustafa Mahmud) contributed to a reconfiguration of the intellectual field. We investigate how their legacy is presently discussed among educated audiences. Finally, we show how the ambivalence of the reception of their public teaching reflects the troubled search for a new ideological balance by the Egyptian middle classes. Résumé L'étude de la Résurgence islamique a sous-estimé les épreuves intellectuelles par laquelle sont passés certains de ses grands noms à un stade crucial de la crise des sociétés postcoloniales. Les meneurs intellectuels de la Résurgence se sont trouvés confrontés à la tâche de redéfinir la valeur sociale de la foi et de son opposé, le doute, comme le revers insidieux des processus de modernisation. En relevant ce défi, ils ont contribuéà reconfigurer le champ intellectuel : pour atteindre un public plus large, ils ont réinterprété leurs références culturelles et même leurs récits de vies selon les standards de communication adaptés aux nouveaux médias. Les auteurs analysent ici la façon dont les motifs du doute et de la foi dans la trajectoire de deux personnalités aspirant au statut « d'intellectuel islamique », l'érudit soufi Shaykh al-Azhar ,Abd al-Halim Mahmud et le penseur laïque Mustafa Mahmud, fin connaisseur des média, ont contribuéà la reconfiguration du champ intellectuel. Les auteurs étudient le débat dont leur héritage fait aujourd'hui l'objet dans les cercles éduqués. Pour finir, ils montrent comment l'ambivalence de l'accueil fait à leur enseignement public reflète la difficile recherche d'un équilibre idéologique dans les classes moyennes égyptiennes. [source] | |||||||||||||