Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing

Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing PDF

Author: Cheryl Mattingly

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780520218253

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"A valuable collection. . . . The essays in the volume are all fresh, the result of recent work, and the opening chapter by Garro and Mattingly places the current trend in narrative analysis in historical context, explaining its diverse origins (and constructs) in a range of disciplines."—Shirley Lindenbaum, author of Kuru Sorcery "A good place to consult the narrative turn in medical anthropology. Thick with the richness and diversity and stubborn resistance to interpretations of human stories of illness. An anthropological antidote for too narrow a framing of the complex tangle of ways-of-being and ways-of-telling that make medicine a space of indelibly human experiences." —Arthur Kleinman, author of The Illness Narratives

Healing Narratives

Healing Narratives PDF

Author: Gay Alden Wilentz

Publisher: Rutgers University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9780813528663

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Exploring the relationship between culture and health, this text provides readings of the works of five women writers, tracing their common structure of a main character moving from a state of mental or physical disease toward wellness through reconnection with her cultural traditions.

The Illness Narratives

The Illness Narratives PDF

Author: Arthur Kleinman

Publisher: Hachette UK

Published: 2020-10-13

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 154167460X

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From one of America's most celebrated psychiatrists, the book that has taught generations of healers why healing the sick is about more than just diagnosing their illness. Modern medicine treats sick patients like broken machines -- figure out what is physically wrong, fix it, and send the patient on their way. But humans are not machines. When we are ill, we experience our illness: we become scared, distressed, tired, weary. Our illnesses are not just biological conditions, but human ones. It was Arthur Kleinman, a Harvard psychiatrist and anthropologist, who saw this truth when most of his fellow doctors did not. Based on decades of clinical experience studying and treating chronic illness, The Illness Narratives makes a case for interpreting the illness experience of patients as a core feature of doctoring. Before Being Mortal, there was The Illness Narratives. It remains today a prescient and passionate case for bridging the gap between patient and practitioner.

The Paradox of Hope

The Paradox of Hope PDF

Author: Cheryl Mattingly

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2010-12-02

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0520948238

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Grounded in intimate moments of family life in and out of hospitals, this book explores the hope that inspires us to try to create lives worth living, even when no cure is in sight. The Paradox of Hope focuses on a group of African American families in a multicultural urban environment, many of them poor and all of them with children who have been diagnosed with serious chronic medical conditions. Cheryl Mattingly proposes a narrative phenomenology of practice as she explores case stories in this highly readable study. Depicting the multicultural urban hospital as a border zone where race, class, and chronic disease intersect, this theoretically innovative study illuminates communities of care that span both clinic and family and shows how hope is created as an everyday reality amid trying circumstances.

Moral Laboratories

Moral Laboratories PDF

Author: Cheryl Mattingly

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2014-10-03

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 0520281195

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Moral Laboratories is an engaging ethnography and a groundbreaking foray into the anthropology of morality. It takes us on a journey into the lives of African American families caring for children with serious chronic medical conditions, and it foregrounds the uncertainty that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as possible only in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in day-to-day existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a moral laboratory for reshaping moral life. Cheryl Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching stories to elaborate a first-person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality.Ê

Living Narrative

Living Narrative PDF

Author: Elinor Ochs

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 366

ISBN-13: 0674041593

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This pathbreaking book looks at everyday storytelling as a twofold phenomenon--a response to our desire for coherence, but also to our need to probe and acknowledge the enigmatic aspects of experience. Letting us listen in on dinner-table conversation, prayer, and gossip, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps develop a way of understanding the seemingly contradictory nature of everyday narrative--as a genre that is not necessarily homogeneous and as an activity that is not always consistent but consistently serves our need to create selves and communities. Focusing on the ways in which narrative is co-constructed, and on the variety of moral stances embodied in conversation, the authors draw out the instructive inconsistencies of these collaborative narratives, whose contents and ordering are subject to dispute, flux, and discovery. In an eloquent last chapter, written as Capps was waging her final battle with cancer, they turn to unfinished narratives, those stories that will never have a comprehensible end. With a hybrid perspective--part humanities, part social science--their book captures these complexities and fathoms the intricate and potent narratives that live within and among us.

Healing Narratives

Healing Narratives PDF

Author: Gay Alden Wilentz

Publisher:

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 9780813528656

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In Healing Narratives, Gay Wilentz explores the relationship between culture and health. In close reading of works by five women writers - Toni Cade Bambara, Erna Broder, Leslie Marmon Silko, Keri Hulme, and Jo Sinclair-she traces the narrative and structural similarities of a main character moving form a state of mental or physical disease toward wellness through reconnection with her cultural traditions. Whether due to the history of diaspora, colonial oppression, or the subversion of traditional culture by modernity, illness can only be overcome when the cultural construction of disease is recognized and a link to the indigenous is restored. Wilentz's cross-cultural approach-African American, Jamaican, Native American, Maori, and Jewish stories-offers a rich context from which the basis of cultural illness can be examined.

Applied Sociology of Health and Illness

Applied Sociology of Health and Illness PDF

Author: Costas S. Constantinou

Publisher: CRC Press

Published: 2023-01-19

Total Pages: 140

ISBN-13: 1000824969

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Praise for the First Edition: "A real, combined approach of behavioural, social, biomedical, and clinical sciences is paramount. [This book] is one pioneering example of such integration, bridging core sociology with medical education." – Dikomitis L, Wenning B, Ghobrial A, and Adams K.M. (2022). Embedding behavioural and social sciences across the medical curriculum: (Auto) ethnographic insights from medical schools in the United Kingdom. Societies, 12, 101. "Constantinou’s book not only contributes to bridging the gap between theoretical sociology and medical education, it also contributes to the way we teach a new generation of students – how to understand patients in context, how to treat them with respect and, ultimately, how to be a better medical doctor." – Andrea Stockl from her Foreword to the First Edition Comments from Medical Students: "‘Ignorance is not just lack of knowledge but lack of implementing knowledge gained’. I encourage everybody going into a clinical and general work setting to read this book and implement." "I believe this book is the key to unlocking the minds of medical students in viewing illness as not only physical and emotional also as social experience." "I believe everyone should read this book, especially medical students and practitioners who wish to become all-round competent and understanding doctors." "The better you understand your patient’s illness and his/her suffering, the healthier you can make him/her – this book teaches this important skill." This popular and accessible text continues to cover the basic principles of the sociology of health and illness in an eminently readable way. This fully revised second edition has been inspired, informed, and reviewed by medical students. By creatively employing a problem-based learning approach, the book examines commonly covered topics integrating underlying principles and research findings through real-life stories. The book investigates the relevance of sociology and considers a new direction – one that places sociology in the context of healthcare settings, making the topic more realistic, useful, and memorable. The book will be an invaluable companion for medical students throughout undergraduate studies and is also a useful reference for students in nursing, social work, psychology, and sociology, as well as qualified doctors and healthcare practitioners.

Diagnosis Narratives and the Healing Ritual in Western Medicine

Diagnosis Narratives and the Healing Ritual in Western Medicine PDF

Author: James Peter Meza

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-07-17

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 1351804987

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The dominance of "illness narratives" in narrative healing studies has tended to mean that the focus centers around the healing of the individual. Meza proposes that this emphasis is misplaced and the true focus of cultural healing should lie in managing the disruption of disease and death (cultural or biological) to the individual’s relationship with society. By explicating narrative theory through the lens of cognitive anthropology, Meza reframes the epistemology of narrative and healing, moving it from relativism to a philosophical perspective of pragmatic realism. Using a novel combination of narrative theory and cognitive anthropology to represent the ethnographic data, Meza’s ethnography is a valuable contribution in a field where ethnographic records related to medical clinical encounters are scarce. The book will be of interest to scholars of medical anthropology and those interested in narrative history and narrative medicine.

Stories of Illness and Healing

Stories of Illness and Healing PDF

Author: Sayantani DasGupta

Publisher: Literature and Medicine

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 348

ISBN-13:

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A collection of women's illness narratives Stories of Illness and Healing is the first collection to place the voices of women experiencing illness alongside analytical writing from prominent scholars in the field of narrative medicine. The collection includes a variety of women's illness narratives--poetry, essays, short fiction, short drama, analyses, and transcribed oral testimonies--as well as traditional analytic essays about themes and issues raised by the narratives. Stories of Illness and Healing bridges the artificial divide between women's lives and scholarship in gender, health, and medicine. The authors of these narratives are diverse in age, ethnicity, family situation, sexual orientation, and economic status. They are doctors, patients, spouses, mothers, daughters, activists, writers, educators, and performers. The narratives serve to acknowledge that women's illness experiences are more than their diseases, that they encompass their entire lives. The pages of this book echo with personal accounts of illness, diagnosis, and treatment. They reflect the social constructions of women's bodies, their experiences of sexuality and reproduction, and their roles as professional and family caregivers. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Stories of Illness and Healing draws the connection between women's suffering and advocacy for women's lives.