Narrating Troubling Experiences

Abstract

This article presents a process-oriented perspective that relates to the broad question of how self-related experience comes to be endowed with meaning. The approach highlights the implications of 'living by' particular culturally based understandings in specific contexts and centers on how jointly cultural, social, and cognitive processes offer potentialities for orienting the experiential self without determining self-related experiences. This process-oriented perspective revolves around the interplay between the range of historically contingent cultural resources available for endowing experience with meaning and the socially and structurally grounded processes through which individuals learn about, orient towards and traffic in interpretive plausibilities -a socially situated experientially based process. This perspective is informed by, and provides an entree for exploring, variability within a cultural setting. The narrative accounts examined are from individuals who grew up speaking either Ojibwa or Cree (both Algonkian languages) in First Nations communities in Manitoba, Canada. Key words cross-cultural views of the self • cultural processes • illness narratives • intracultural variation • self-related experienceMuch of my work revolves around how troubling experiences with the potential to be seen as indicating the presence of an illness in need of some form of care or treatment, enter into and are dealt with in everyday life. In this article, with reference to accounts of troubling experiences told from the perspective of the sufferer, I present a process-oriented perspective that

Thinking Hearts, Feeling Brains: Metaphor, Culture, and the Self in Chinese Narratives of Depression

“…Ever since Sapir (1958Sapir ( [1932), anthropologists have argued that any understanding of culture must include the variations that result from diverse personal interpretations of cultural models (Garro, 2000(Garro, , 2003(Garro, , 2005Hollan, 1992 Hollan, , 2000Sapir, 1958Sapir, [1932Schwartz, 1978;Shore, 1995;Wikan, 1990). Several of these scholars suggest that as individuals are exposed to different ways of understanding the self, they develop a set of multiple and often contradictory models, each with differing metaphorical entailments (Garro, 2003;Strauss, 1990). Rather than being forced to shape their narratives in terms of static culturally determined metaphors, then, people are able to strategically draw upon these differing linguistic forms and conceptual models in constructing accounts of their experience in different contexts (Ochs, 2002), drawing upon "whatever cultural resources happen to be at hand" to spin "webs of meaning" around their experience (Ortner, 1999, p. 9).…”

“…Meaning-making, which exists as "a complex and dynamic process at the intersection of personality, personal history, and the appropriation of various cultural models" (Mitchell, 2005; See also Geertz, 1973), often occurs in the process of narrative construction (Capps & Ochs, 1995;Mattingly & Garro, 2000;Bruner, 2002;Garro, 2003). As Garro (2003) points out, moreover, the narrative expression of experience, in illness or health, involves an "effort after meaning" (p. 21) in which individuals draw upon cultural and personal understandings to make sense of their experience.Cultural understandings, in this sense, refer to the multiple and often variable resources for interpreting experience that are available in a given cultural setting (Garro, 2003). Sometimes referred to as cultural models, these understandings offer frameworks with which to conceptualize the physical, emotional, and cognitive self.…”

Comment on Boyer’s multiattentional method

“…Still, to the extent that multiattentional method as a practice of social theorizing by intellectuals is predicated on the ability to take multiple perspectives on what transpires in social settings, it seems relevant to note analogous abilities to entertain and assess multiple perspectives have informed anthropological theorizing in other settings as well (where the focus is not primarily on professionals or ''cultures of expertise''). Within my own work, I have examined narrative accounts to show how ''effort after meaning'' need not run along a single path but may reveal the play of alternative interpretive possibilities with regard to a given situation or state of affairs (Garro 2003(Garro , 2005. In this view, narrative thinking as culturally informed perspective-taking relies on resources for meaning-making available in a cultural setting.…”

“…I use this phrase, borrowed from Bartlett (1932), to broadly refer to meaning-construing processes which may, but do not necessarily, involve conscious reflection. I view ''effort after meaning'' in everyday life as a jointly culturalcognitive-social process, linked to and dependent upon our social involvements within specific settings (Garro 2003(Garro , 2005.…”

“…In this view, narrative thinking as culturally informed perspective-taking relies on resources for meaning-making available in a cultural setting. Instances of reflective theorizing (or to use the broader term, ''theoretical attitude''), advanced as explicit theorizing statements or conveyed through narrative, offer explanatory perspectives on how a particular state of affairs has come about and what this may mean for the future, such as assessments of how one could act to help bring about a desired future or take steps to avoid what would be unwelcome (e.g., Garro 2001Garro , 2003Garro , 2005Garro , 2010. Observations of social interactions, accounts of what transpired in a social interaction, following an evolving situation through time, and interviews, offer windows on everyday theorizing, evidencing the assessment of multiple locally available explanatory frameworks.…”