ANTHROP 3HI3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Medical Anthropology, Natural Language, Clifford Geertz
16 Mar 2019
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Document Summary
Narrative in anthropology: anthro was very influenced by the narrative turn in a variety of disciplines in the 1980s - linguistics, literary theory, history, psychology and philosophy. The "use" of narrative in anthro falls generally into 2 "fields": folklore and mythology. Influenced by structuralism, it argues for a difference between story and narrative: sociolinguistic studies. Influenced by performance and literary theories; attends to the temporal unfolding of the story and interactions of characters/actors within: performance-minded anthros argue its not what a story is but what it does. This idea is grounded in the phenomenological assumption that meaning is created through experience: If all experience (the "perceptual world") is symbolic, you have to understand the cultural contexts of symbols to understand experience. In this context, narratives: are a resource that brings awareness to experience, provide a "representation" of experience in which events are given meaningful and coherent order. In cultural contexts, methods of "monitoring" bodily processes are learned, along with the.
