"experience" and narrative

[Nancy Patterson]

Jim,

I'm not familiar with the Desjarlais book, but I'd like to pursue this topic
a little bit.  Also, I'm not sure, that I'm addressing the issue you raise,
but let's see.

Bakhtin argued that narrative is culturally based--that the stories we tell
say much about the sociocultural landscape we inhabit.  Geertz comments
culture is a means through which we share the "imaginative universe within
which [members] acts are signs."  Using Geertz's imaginative universe we can
view culture as something constructed through public discourse, as something
constructed through constantly evolving social negotiations. Dyson and
Genishi, in their nifty book _The Need for Story: cultural Divesity in
Classroom and Community_, add that culture is therefore not statis (as we
all knew), and that individuals within a culture are interrelated because of
the stories, while at the same time distinct because of the "imaginative
universes" they inhabit.  These universes include experiences shared by
others of common ethnicity, gender, class, etc. (Dyson and Genishi cite
Geertz here)

They go on to say "Stores are an important tool for proclaiming ourselves as
cultural beings.  In narratives, our voices echo those of others in the
sociocultural world...We evidence cultural membership both through our ways
of crafting stories and in the very content of our tales" (4).

This doesn't really address the issue of the patients mentioned in the
Desjarlais book, but I wonder if the issue there isn't one of interpreting
the stories, rather than creating them.  In other words, the individuals who
tell the fragmented stories may very well know how the fragments fit and
create a whole, but the key is known only to them.  Fragmented stories do
not strictly belong to schizophrenics, however.  If you look at the movie
_The 12 Monkeys_ for example, the end of the story is at the beginning of
the movie.  And the sequence of events seems almost schizophrenic.

I would guess, without seeing the stories the mentally ill homeless tell,
that they are still culturally based. That the goblins, metaphors, and such
that inhabit their stories, that embedd themselves in the stories are all
part of their cultural selves, even though those selves are isolated by
illness and circumstance.  It would be interesting to see the commonalities
in Japanese schizophrenics as opposed to German schizophrenics, for example.

I question, however, Dejarlais' conclusion that experience is a relic of the
past for the mentally ill homeless he observes.  Why would that be?  Why
would their experiences be relics?  Certainly they may be devalued.  And
that brings us into the issue of who gets to tell their stories. (Perhaps
that is a place to begin with your students?) But their stories still exist,
and I am assuming they are told to each other and to themselves.  Perhaps
Desjarlais means that the stories are never dialogized, never heard beyond a
certain narrow circle?  And for that reason they are relics?

Nancy




>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
>
>
Nancy G. Patterson

"To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can
learn."  bell hooks

patter at voyager.net
<http://www.msu.edu/user/patter90/opening.htm>
<http://www.angelfire.com/mi/patter/index.html>
|  \  /  |
|   \/   |__  _   _
|       / __/| | | |
|  |\/| \___\| |_| |
|__|  |_/___/|_____|