"experience" and narrative

[Jim Wilce]

Something Zouhair Maalej wrote on the DISCOURS list about logic and
rhetoric being culturally variable raised in me the hope of getting help
from this list on a teaching challenge I'm facing.

For a couple of years, I've tried to challenge students in my Culture and
Communication course, after reading S. Schaller's A Man Without Words, to
consider the possibility that not only is the quality of our experience of
the world variable because of its linguistic filtering (Voloshinov,
"expression organizes experience") but that the very possibility of
"experience" is not a given.  The argument was made, I think very cogently,
in

Desjarlais, R. R. (1994 ). Struggling along: The possibilities for
experience among the homeless mentally ill. American Anthropologist 96(4):
886-901.

and expanded in Desjarlais's 1997 book, Shelter Blues (U Penn).

Bob's argument goes this way. What we mean by "experience" is not the same
as perception, awareness, sensation, or subjectivity.  "Experience" is "an
inwardly reflexive process that proceeds, coheres, and transforms through
temporally integrative forms."  (1994: 804).  "Narrative typically helps to
form the sense of temporal integration... From Aristotle to Heidegger to
Ricoeur, the interpenetration of narrative and experience has grown
stronger in correlation with the predominance of literature in the lives of
the educated.  The present state of the art is that we can only grasp our
lives through narrative, though few question to what degree this
inescapable fact applies outside the modern West" (889).

Despite the misgivings expressed above, Desjarlais finds that neither
narrative nor experience are categories that fit what he observed in a
shelter for the homeless mentally ill in Boston where people spoke rather
of "struggling along" and did so in less than a coherent fashion.

 So is his point limited to the effects of mental illness?  Not at all;
Desjarlais claims, rather, that the fragmentation of narrative and
experience result from homelessness, not biology of the brain.  Experience
thus depends on certain sociocultural conditions being met.  Bob concludes
his 1994 article thus: "In the modern industrial era, experience might have
seemed an essential part of human nature for some people becuase its
defining features--reflexive depth, temporal integration, and a cumulative
transcendence--blended so well with the reigning aesthetics of that age.
But the poverty, transience, and contingency that increasingly characterize
life on the fringes of postindustrial soceities suggests that experiecne
might become, at least in some circles, a relic of the past" (1994: 898).

Needless to say, it might be ambitious of me to lay that one on students in
a freshmen level course at a mid-tier public university.  Still, I haven't
given up on getting the concept across despite feeling like I can't get
over certain obstacles.  Those seem to be either the sense that their sense
of their own humanism is threatened by the possibility that such a
fundamental category  (experience) is not shared by all persons, or the
sense that even animals "experience".  My challenge is then to demonstrate
the validity of thinking of persons-in-societies as even more deeply
variable than we'd imagined and yet no less human, and of human experience
being something radically Other than a dog's learning from pain or
pleasure.

So, if anyone has overcome a similar pedagogical challenge or has other
insights, I would greatly appreciate hearing from you!

Jim

Jim Wilce
      Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Asian Studies
        Northern Arizona University
        Box 15200
        Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5200

fax 520/523-9135
office ph. 520/523-2729
email jim.wilce at nau.edu
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22/ (includes information on my 1998 book,
Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural
Bangladesh)
http://www.nau.edu/asian