Paper short abstract:

In Afro-Brazilian religions, health issues are examined and treated on the basis of oral tradition, including myths and narratives. How are narratives of illness constructed? In which cases do they integrate oral tradition?

Paper long abstract:

In Afro-Brazilian religion, health issues and healing procedures are determined through oracle consultation, where myths (presenting situations involving people, animal, plants, divinities) constitute a paradigm that is interpreted and actualized in order to shade light on and face current problems. Furthermore, a series of myths and stories compose an oral tradition that is narrated and taken as example in ordinary advices concerning behaviours to be avoided or simple rituals that may be realized in order to solve less serious problems.

Biographical narratives, in the healing process, are intersubjectively constructed, told, enacted through words, actions, gestures. They may involve family members, ancestors, other members of the religious community, divinities, objects. Narratives are composed of personal memories, reflexivity, sensibility, affect, bodily experience, and symbolic, aesthetic, social, political and spiritual elements.

Narratives are constructed as a personal myth (often interweaving the healing process with religious experience), that gives a meaning to disease – and, sometimes, to a whole life – on the basis of a collective myth, articulating the two dimensions that Lévi-Strauss detects, respectively, in psychoanalytic and shamanic practice. They constitute, at the same time, a construction of a narrative on oneself and a narrative construction of oneself.

On the other hand, personal myths – especially when they respect specific characteristics – may become part of collective myths, that are told and used as examples that direct choices and behaviours of other people, in a continuous process of growth, evolution and accumulation.

Paper short abstract:

Through letter writing, cancer-stricken children in a pediatric charity hospital voice unheard issues, create new intimate relationships and evoke a call for action that transcends borders and medical isolation. The paper explores this transformative process and its sometimes unpredictable outcomes.

Paper long abstract:

As part of their services to cancer-stricken children and their families, MAHAK, a charity society based in Tehran, works with children and hospital staff to write letters telling the children's stories. MAHAK representatives regularly meet with children and parents to explain the project and evoke stories from the children; depending on their age, the child, a caregiver, or MAHAK representative then writes the child's story in the form of a letter. These letters, circulated across spaces and audiences, become an interdisciplinary tool and collaborative project, drawing children, their families, social workers, psychologists, MAHAK representatives, medical staff, the Iranian state, and the international public into new relationships. Locally, the letters are distributed to the children's doctors and staff via the hospital's newsletters and medical portal. In the process, these letters, which capture the children's struggles and hopes and encapsulate life in a pediatric cancer hospital, visibilize the children and their families to doctors in new ways, sparking the construction of newly intimate bonds between children and their doctors. Broadly, the letters reach journalists, policymakers, and publics in Iran and, in one case, across Europe, where the children's narratives simultaneously drew criticism from the Iranian state, evoked sympathy in Europe for the 'suffering stranger', and effected action that resulted in access to new medicines previously unavailable due to sanctions against Iran. This paper explores how the storytelling process unfolds and how these stories open up children's experiences and co-constituted illness narratives into powerful modes for cultivating new relationships, intimacies, visibilities, and actions.

Paper short abstract:

Recognition from the people studied shape the quality of ethnographic stories and the narrative produced. Credibility becomes a matter of contextual understanding and knowledge, and hence the methods is an powerful tool to continue produce critical thinking.

Paper long abstract:

Recognition shape the quality of ethnographic stories and hence interconnect people and context. Stories that contribute with critical perspectives on how health policies have been developed locally, often consist of practices that show that the intention not necessary correlate with the reality. Power relations, dynamics, different distributions of knowledge and different realization of realities shape different practices. In this paper I will make use of experiences from an interdisciplinary health research in South Africa on living condition and disability to reflect upon how body, subject and interaction shape many faceted stories about disability and how the conceptual understanding of disability is been experienced differently in different context. In one context, characterized as conducive circumstances, disability becomes almost invisible, even though the body is highly visible as impaired. On the other side in a context of poverty disability becomes highlighted as an something people will make visible, negotiated and used as an assets for change. To create an story were disability as phenomena form part of the center for change, embedded within the majority of population becomes particular. The broad perspectives and detailed anthropological description can produce stories that consist of heterogeneity and diversity and hence hope, agency but also suffering, and healing are been enacted at the same time.

Paper short abstract:

He is a renowned doctor, heading a department in a leading hospital in India; turned blind in an acid attack 30 years ago. This study explores meaning blind Indian achievers gave to blindness and intrinsic factors that led them to it by studying their narratives using phenomenological methodology.

Paper long abstract:

Blindness as a disability is associated with multiple meanings, symbolism and imageries. Achievers for this study are defined as individuals who were born blind or became blind and who went ahead to choose a profession and excelled in it. The researcher herself had a lived experience of losing sight as she grew up. This purposefully brought her to the study and also added a unique richness both as a listener and teller. The sampling was purposive. Overall 20 participants including – 7 women/13 men, 5 individuals born blind/15 became blind. Life narratives were captured using semi structured interviews lasting from 90 minutes to 120 minutes. The Interpretative hermeneutic phenomenological approach was deployed. ~250 pages of transcripts produced, themes drawn out and unique aspects retained too. The achievers encapsulate and convey trauma, recovery, hope, healing, agency and power. It showed how blindness causes victimization. The meanings these achievers have attributed to blindness and achievement have changed over a period of time essentially meaning that our stories evolve over a period of time. Today all of them see blindness as a part of their ‘design’, an ‘opportunity to innovate’ and as an opportunity to ‘make a difference’. Studying intersectionality especially from a gender and socio economic area showed the complexity of differentiating the consequences caused by these dimensions in an individual’s identity.

Experiences with disabilities are unique and hence each story is valuable. Lived experiences have to become the bed rock of policy making.