Discourses Of Loss Research Articles

Loss and autonomy: Making sense of rural life at the inner periphery

AbstractWe have studied how people make sense of their lives in peripheral rural regions. While there are disadvantages in terms of infrastructure, transportation and so forth, we have focused on the ways that people understand their specific position and how they feel about it. Using the tools of the Strong Programme in cultural sociology, we have identified two key discourses: the discourse of loss and the discourse of autonomy. Through the former, residents describe the decline of traditions, of rural community and, in particular, the vanishing ideal of rural childhood. Through the latter, they re‐frame these societal developments as problems of individuals. The dichotomy between individual autonomy and individual dependence is employed as a key cultural framework for explaining and understanding life in a peripheral rural region. The research is based on interviews with residents of small rural municipalities located at the inner periphery of the Czech Republic.

Ideologies and identity performance in users’ discourses about Romani-based special languages (‘Sondersprachen’)

ABSTRACT Drawing on users’ testimonials we discuss how peripatetic populations forge ideologies around their use of group-internal special vocabulary. We identify three recurring themes: The discourse of loss that purports to account for a language history marked by deprivation and anomaly and intertwined with a notion of incompleteness of one’s own identity; contemporary negotiation of identity that draws on external reference points to set boundaries towards others; and explications of language function, which reconstruct contexts of use. Our case studies involve the use of use of special vocabulary derived partly or mainly from Romani among English Gypsies, Norwegian Travellers, and the travelling Showpeople of northern Italy. We approach these Romani-based ‘special languages’ (‘Sondersprachen’) as acts of identity performance and revisit the hypothesis that they emerged through convergence between Romani speakers and indigenous peripatetic populations.

May you Live in Interesting Times. Against a Discourse of Loss and Crisis

May you Live in Interesting Times. Against a Discourse of Loss and Crisis

Losing Culture: Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times

Losing Culture: Nostalgia, Heritage, and Our Accelerated Times

How does a narrative understanding of change in families post brain injury help us to humanise our professional practice?

AbstractIn this paper, we critically explore the discourse of change post brain injury and challenge the dominant discourse of negative change, which alone leaves little room for other perspectives to exist. These negative changes pose a considerable risk to the well-being of families who may benefit from engaging in richer accounts making room for a more coherent and connected sense of self and family post-injury. We explore how narrative approaches provide opportunities for all practitioners to expand their professional scripts and support families to move towards a future which is not dominated by a discourse of loss. While loss and negative change is an important and very real consequence, of brain injury, focusing purely on stories of loss is life limiting for family members and can cause psychological distress. The life thread model is offered as a visible tool for all practitioners to engage with and use while working with families, providing a concrete focus for reflection and discussion of narratives relating to change which otherwise can feel quite abstract in everyday practice. We argue that one way we can humanise our professional practice is to support all practitioners to engage in a narrative understanding of family change following ABI.

Loss, Doubt, and Betrayal: Strands of Vaccination Skepticism on Three Facebook Pages Involved in the Controversy Over Human Papillomavirus (HPV) Vaccination

This study conducted a discourse analysis of posts, comments, and contextual material on three Danish Facebook Pages, all established because of social groups' skepticism of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. The researchers of this study accessed most administrator posts and visitors' comments, and pursued additional information through links provided on the Pages, supplementary media coverage, and available knowledge about the development of the controversy over HPV vaccination in Denmark. Using the discourse analysis framework, discourses of loss, doubt, and betrayal were identified. Associating important existential, propositional, and value assumptions affiliated with HPV vaccination, these three interconnected discourses embody important strands of vaccination skepticism. The loss discourse emerged from the personal stories about losing one's mobility or quality of life, which then mobilized expressions of sympathy and a genuine wish that things would improve. The doubt discourse was affiliated with posts and comments questioning the evidence behind HPV vaccination. Administrators and visitors doubted the information provided by the health authorities for many reasons. Some were skeptical of the epistemic value of studies showing HPV vaccination to be safe, and others simply did not trust the health authorities for sound medical advice. Finally, the betrayal discourse underlying the HPV vaccination skepticism was connected to statements that accused the health authorities of betraying all those who have experienced personal loss in relation to HPV vaccination. This discourse established a difference between “us” and “them.” The “we” indicated all those afflicted by suspected adverse events, and all those taking a critical stance on HPV vaccination. The “they” were all those in favor of HPV vaccination, particularly the health authorities, pharmaceutical companies, and the Danish Cancer Society. Based on the study findings, it can be concluded that HPV vaccination skepticism is mediated through discourses that are personal, epistemological, social, or political, and value-laden in nature. Dealing with one of these dimensions alone, for example treating HPV vaccination skepticism as an information deficit or as a partisan issue, may risk missing the point entirely.

“I still remember this taste”. Senses and emotions in perceiving cultural change

This article focuses on the problem of food memories within the context of individual life stories and collective histories from post-war Poland. The category of taste understood as a sensory experience, a cultural code, and a social norm provides an insight into the ways in which senses evoke and format memory, and how they become a tool for interpreting the past and evaluating the present. Taste memory influences both personal accounts of individual life events, but also the collective memory of the past. This memory is distinct to each generation and offers differing evaluations of the past and approaches to social changes. While the memory of the older generation is nostalgic and set within the discourse of loss, the younger generation’s memory is ambivalent, becoming either a mythical tale of a happy childhood or the means of criticizing the old and validating the present ways of life.

“For the child taken, for the parent left behind”: Residential School Narratives as Acts of “Survivance”

“For the child taken, for the parent left behind”: Residential School Narratives as Acts of “Survivance” Renate Eigenbrod (bio) Theories of Survivance are elusive and imprecise by definition and in translation. The practices of survivance, however, are obvious and unmistakable in native stories. The nature of survivance creates a sense of narrative resistance to absence, literary tragedy, nihility, and victimry. Gerald VizenorNative Liberty Words, language, experience, imagination: these are the elements that constitute the essential tools of the creative writer and the act of writing creatively, leading to the process of (re)visiting and analyzing one’s place in the world. Armand Garnet Ruffo“Where the Voice was Coming From” Against the disempowerment of colonialism, texts written by residential school survivors express a sense of survivance, as articulated by Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor, which may also be understood in terms of agency and “imaginative sovereignty” (Justice, “Literature, Healing” 103). In spite of the dehumanization of an oppressive system that attacked individuality in an institutionalized environment in which every “Indian” child was treated the same—symbolized in Robert Alexie’s [End Page 277] image of “porcupines and china dolls” for the children’s standardized haircut—those survivors who were able to resort to the “essential tools of the creative writer” represented their experiences in widely different ways. Anishinaabe scholar and poet Armand Garnet Ruffo’s essay on the history of the early phase of Native literature in Canada informs my own development of a sub-genre within this field: residential school literature—memoirs, poetry, fiction, and plays that recreate the school experience through the literary imagination and that, like many other differently themed texts written by Indigenous authors, contribute to upholding the continuance of traditions against the discourses of loss and vanishing. They speak to J. Edward Chamberlin’s assertion that “power—a condition of survival, if survival is to mean anything at all—is an agent of the imagination as much as a function of reality” (quoted in Ruffo 179). In tandem with the general marginalization of Native literature in English in the 1970s and 1980s, Indigenous survivors’ stories were hardly noticed and not many were published. It was only with increasing public awareness about the schools, public testimonies by survivors, the emergence of an apology and reconciliation discourse, and the closing of the last school in 1996 that more attention was paid at the end of the twentieth and in the beginning of the twenty-first century to this aspect of Canada’s colonial treatment of Indigenous peoples which started in the late-nineteenth century. Given the topic of the journal issue—Childhood and Its Discontents— this essay will mostly dwell on a selection of literary representations of actual school experiences, both from the child’s and the parent’s perspective, rather than on texts that address the wide-ranging legacy of these experiences. These works, while centred on one theme, offer a wide variety of aesthetic realizations, and it is those variations of a common theme that create the focus for this essay rather than an analysis of the content. Meant for publication for a broad audience, the poems, short stories, memoirs, and autobiographical fiction narratives about residential school experiences are presented, sometimes with the help of an editor, in a purposefully selected format and style, framed by prefaces, forewords, acknowledgements, dedications, and a diversity of images. At the same time, these carefully constructed and richly layered texts are also “ethical works” as Laura Beard asserts about boarding school texts in the United States, arguing with Rosi Braidotti that “ethics includes the acknowledgment of and compassion for pain, as well as the activity of working through it” (quoted in Beard 142); readers of residential school literature may even become attentive secondary witnesses of trauma, to borrow from Dominick LaCapra, [End Page 278] opening themselves to “empathic unsettlement,” which LaCapra terms “a desirable affective dimension of inquiry” (78). In her response to Jo-Ann Episkenew’s monograph on Indigenous literature in Canada and “the healing power of stories” (11), Kristina Fagan Bidwell, building on her own work in Indigenous trauma theory, articulates the need for silence as a constructive alternative to understanding literature as empowerment and healing...

Discourses of Loss and Bereavement in Tigray, Ethiopia

Western trauma frameworks, such as PTSD-focused inventories and interventions, are embedded in a psychosocial discourse saying that highly distressing experiences must be expressed and confronted. This study, which is based on six months of focused ethnographic research in postwar Tigray, Ethiopia, reveals authoritative Tigrayan discourses that encourage people to avoid disclosing and expressing emotional pain. Dogmas of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, saying that grieving and crying would have negative physical and spiritual consequences, were found to have a broad consensus in the society. The ethnography suggests that the Tigrayan psychosocial discourses make sense and may be functional in their context, as the marginal socioeconomic conditions of Tigray force individuals to concentrate on their day-to-day struggle for survival. Findings are discussed in terms of implications for the cross-cultural applicability of conventional frameworks of Western trauma psychology.

The Persistence of Fidelity

The Persistence of Fidelity

Retheorizing Mana: Bible Translation and Discourse of Loss in Fiji

‘Mana’ has been a key term in anthropological theory since the late nineteenth century, but, as Roger Keesing argued more than twenty years ago, it is necessary to rethink mana theoretically based on its changing usage in Oceanic discourse. Keesing criticized mana's nominalization and substantivization by anthropologists. In this paper I review his criticisms and expand upon his argument, making three related claims based on data from Fiji. First, mana is canonically a verb in Fijian, but contemporary speakers frequently use it in its nominalized and substantivized form. Second, a key reason for this nominalization is mana's use in the Fijian Bible to denote ‘miracles’ as well as homonymous ‘manna,’ the food given by God to the Israelites. Third, in order to understand mana in present-day Fiji, scholars must consider it in the context of widespread discourse about decline, loss, and diminution.