Foundational Narratives Research Articles

Das narrativas de fundação às narrativas de dissolução. A questão da identidade nacional no cinema contemporâneo

Resumo Apesar das inúmeras problematizações dos conceitos de “nação” e “nacionalismo” no âmbito da historiografia, e das discussões sobre a atualidade e a utilidade da categoria “cinema nacional” no campo dos estudos cinematográficos (BERRY, 2006), essas noções continuam sendo usadas tanto pelos estudos cinematográficos quanto por festivais e premiações. Em contraponto às chamadas “narrativas fundacionais” (SOMMER, 2004), que entrelaçavam felicidade doméstica e ideal nacional, em alguns filmes contemporâneos as esferas “individual” e “nacional” continuam ligadas, mas em chave negativa. Isso nos leva a propor o conceito de “narrativas de dissolução”, com base na análise de filmes do realizador chinês Jia Zhang-ke, e mais especificamente As montanhas se separam (2015).

El discurso factual y ficcional en la narrativa colonial hispanoamericana: Naufragios [1542] de Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca e Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez [1690] de Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora

Este trabajo se constituye a partir de la narrativacomo experiencia, acción y proceso permanente en el periodo Colonial hispanoamericano. Con la ratificación de esta narrativa, trataremos dos textos que se producen en la etapa colonial. Este periodo marcado por el proceso de constitución del pensamiento criollo, es coherente con toda narración inscrita en Libros de viajes, Relaciones, Crónicas, conformando una síntesis entre el discurso factualy el discurso ficcional, en textos que representan no solo las transformaciones del sujeto español indiano, sino también la emergente subjetividad criolla que caracteriza la nueva cultura y su relación conflictiva con el mundo indígena. Por ello, este trabajo propone una primera etapa, incorporando dos obras paradigmáticas, desafectadas de la preocupación de los estudios literarios e historiográficos: 1) Naufragios[1542] de Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. 2) Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez[1690] de Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. Ambas narrativas a través de estrategias factuales enmascararon la composición ficcional, procedimientos que después se incorporarían con toda propiedad, a las prácticas y escrituras características en las Literaturas de América.

Narratives of Origin and Migration in Early Medieval Europe

This contribution concentrates on the origin narratives of the post-Roman peoples and kingdoms in Latin Europe between c. 500 and 1000, including some observations on the elaborate production of origin stories in the later Middle Ages. It thus addresses a period in which a durable multiplicity of polities with ethnic designations emerged in Europe and was anchored in the mental maps of (at least) the political elites through a set of foundational narratives. Most of these new peoples—Goths, Longobards, Franks, Anglo-Saxons and others—prided themselves in their distant origins, be it from Scandinavia or Troy. Their origin narratives are based on a common stock of mythical points of reference, developed in classical mythology and ethnography and complemented by other motifs and memories. Christianity transformed the frame but not necessarily the elements of the narrative. The wide-ranging comparison to other ethnic and tribal origin stories, as exemplified in this issue, sheds better light on the specificities of the Latin European tradition of ‘origines gentium’, the origins of peoples. The result is that we should look at these texts as essentially hybrid products of cultural encounters in which formerly subaltern peoples developed new identities as a ruling minority in former Roman provinces.

Narrating Europe: the EU's ontological security dilemma

ABSTRACTIdentifying the narratives that social actors tell and use can provide us with some insight into how they have understood the world around them, when and how they should act and why. The argument about narratives and ontological security in the EU will make three points when examining two European stories: the EU's foundational narrative and that of united in diversity. First, the EU seeks ontological security generated through narratives. Second, the EU's narratives are not that different from those of national experiences. Third, and relatedly, narratives that attempt to construct ontological security for the EU may increase ontological insecurity in other actors.

The founding narratives of the myth of economic development and the Brazilian neo-developmentalism

Abstract This article aims to interpret the most well-known theories of economic development based on the assumption that these theories are contemporary mythological tales and, consequently, the Brazilian 2000’s neo-developmentalism agenda as an inexact unique blend of them all. The study uses Roland Barthes’ semiotic interpretation on the social structure and roles of myths to argue that theories of development are rather a compound of ideologies than a scientific field of inquiry. In addition, the article draws a parallel between Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey and the five widely known narratives of development: Protectionist, Keynesian, Institutional, Entrepreneurial and Neoclassical.

Narrative: Why It's Important, and How It Works.

Behavior analysts have said little about narrative and storytelling, emphasizing instead the functional/pragmatic aspects of verbal behavior. Nevertheless, these are ubiquitous human activities, and they are important to understand. Stories are prominent in essays on social issues, fund-raising appeals and political speeches, and they are the bedrock of theater. Foundational narratives are at the roots of major religions and of conflicts between them, and narrative has been proposed as an organizing basis for psychological wellbeing as well as a source of empathetic reactions. The ongoing process of reading or hearing a good story entails interlocking relations between establishing stimuli and their related, differentiated reinforcing consequences, with a story's coherence providing a key to its reinforcing effects. What are the behavioral principles that underlie the repertoires involved in all this? Behavior analysts have defined and studied some-the basic verbal classes, of course, although temporally extended sequences require some adjustments in these. Intraverbal behavior needs to be parsed into sub-categories to delineate highly varied sequences such as occur in paraphrase and translation. These two, along with imitation, generalized imitation and re-telling of stories, entail a salient role of complex invariance. The terms pliance and tracking help to balance the roles of speaker and listener, and to account for joint attention, which appears important in early verbal development. Transfer and transformation of function are additional ubiquitous processes, addressed through stimulus equivalence, relational frames, and other higher-order operants, especially naming, which entails the fusion of speaking and listening. Finally, we should consider ways in which a behavioral understanding of narrative can serve both behavior analysis and its surrounding culture.

A Holy Heretical Body

Between the seventh and ninth centuries C.E., different Muslim sectarian groups fashioned their respective communal identities through differing rituals, narratives, and conceptions of Islamic history. This article explores these early Islamic divisions through the lens of literary depictions of, and rituals involving, a strongly potent object within the late antique world: a holy person's corpse, in this case that of the prominent early Muslim Ṭalḥa b. ʿUbayd Allāh. A Companion of the Prophet Muḥammad, Ṭalḥa had a contested legacy among different Muslim groups, being venerated by Sunnīs and vilified by the Shīʿa and Khārijīs. These contesting conceptions of Ṭalḥa are reflected in the variable images of Ṭalḥa's body after his death that appear within early Islamic texts: while some stories portray Ṭalḥa as a saintly martyr whose body lay incorrupt in his grave, others depict Ṭalḥa as a decaying corpse disintegrating in the dirt. Standing in vivid contrast to one another, these variant representations of Ṭalḥa's body exemplify early Muslims' usages of the foundational narratives of Islamic history to make competing claims about politico-religious leadership and community. Yet the sectarian significance of Ṭalḥa's body was exhibited not only in texts, but was also ritually enacted through worship at Ṭalḥa's grave. A site of prayer and miracles, Ṭalḥa's grave emerged as a proto-Sunnī counterpoint to the tombs of other holy persons visited and venerated by the Shīʿa and Khārijīs. The stories and rituals involving Ṭalḥa b. ʿUbayd Allāh's body demonstrate how Islamic communal identity was mapped onto this Companion's corpse.

Identity, Bipolar Disorder, and the Problem of Self-Narration in Kay Redfield Jamison's An Unquiet Mind and Ellen Forney's Marbles.

The field of narrative medicine holds that personal narratives about illness have the potential to give illness meaning and to create order out of disparate facets of experience, thereby aiding a patient's treatment and resisting universalizing medical discourse. Two narratives of bipolar disorder, Kay Redfield Jamison's prose memoir An Unquiet Mind (1995) and Ellen Forney's graphic memoir Marbles (2012) challenge these ideas. These writers demonstrate that one result of bipolar disorder is a rupture to their sense of identity, making straightforward and verbal forms of narrative impossible. During periods of relative mood stability, reliable memories of mania or depression are equally impossible. As a result, these memoirists seek to develop sources of self-knowledge other than memory and introspection, long the foundations of personal narrative. Finally, An Unquiet Mind and Marbles return attention to questions of selfhood at a time when scholarship on memoir rejects interpretations of life stories as clear and reliable expressions of identity.

When Cultures Divide

We two Australian public historians recently published a history of memorials in Santiago, Chile, to the victims of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship, Narrow but Endlessly Deep: The Struggle for Memorialisation in Chile since the Transition to Democracy. Our different upbringings and experiences (one a migrant from Cuba, the other Anglo-Australian) produced disagreements as to how we should interpret the memorializations. In particular, the foundational narratives of Cuba and Australia in which we were raised affected our differing interpretations. The article explains these differing foundational narratives and then cites examples of textual disagreements and how we resolved them. We believe that this challenging interrogation of lifetime values improved the monograph and may offer insights for other cross-cultural collaborations.

The Russian Revolution in School History Textbooks

The article, using discourse analysis, examines critically the role of language and ideology in presenting historical narratives in explaining how do representations of the revolution by different historians, from diverse ideological backgrounds, compare to the depiction of the same events, in this case the October Revolution of 1917, in Russian school textbooks. The article demonstrates that history educators, both locally and globally, have made sense of the October 1917 Revolution in Russia in diverse ways. These different interpretations reflect the way in which meaning is created in history, depicting historical events. Although the October Revolution of 1917 played a significant part in the nation-building process in the USSR, as demonstrated by Soviet school textbooks, its political significance was minimized in the first-generation post-Soviet history textbooks after 1992. However, current prescribed Russian history textbooks for senior secondary students, which are approved by the Ministry of Education and Science, now regard the Russian Revolution as a significant part of a foundation narrative, representing a re-invented new metanarrative. The article analyses both Western and Russian history researchers analysing different historical narratives depicting Russian revolution in school textbooks.

American Founding Narratives, Monarchy, and Republicanism: The Largely Unsought and Incomplete Democratic Revolution

Most of these works argue that the American consensus narrative of an effortless and intentional democratic founding is an incomplete story and, in many ways, an errant one. Three of the works argue that a significant part of the founding elite continued to hold, into the 1780s, a high regard for governments like Britain's limited monarchy—some of whose institutions, especially concerning the upper legislative house and executive—they sought in part to build into the new federal Constitution. These authors contend that the Constitution was purposefully designed to retard American popular democracy, not advance it. Indeed, they find that many poor white males (as well as many others) were excluded from the ranks of the politically active in the new nation. Thus, to the extent that a broad-based democracy followed the American Revolution, it was imposed from below by popular forces on a resistant gentry population, not generously awarded from above. The hallowed "founders" mostly didn't willingly seek to advance democratic institutions; rather, they had to be coaxed to do so to preserve their political careers. It seems also from these works that how one views James Madison's stature and probity indicates whether one is a defender of the consensus democratic founding narrative.

A Globalização Requerida: Narrativas De(s) coloniais da Arte/Educação do Brasil-Mundo

We can identify in the history of brazilian art/education, two foundational narratives, those of Paulo Freire and Ana Mae Barbosa. Both elaborate, from their first productions in attention to the contextual articulations, between “place” and “world”, between the local and the global. His works never obeyed boundaries, geographical or epistemic. It is from this expansive character that we will deal here with the global and colonial aspects of the works of these two central references to the fields of education and art/education, also brazilian. Expansion accomplished both by the “incurable fracture of exile” and engendered by the transnational reception of these epistemologies. Freire’s narrative will be revisited here by the up-to-date reception from the black feminism perspective of bell hooks. Ana Mae Barbosa through the reading of Ramon Cabrera Salort about her Abordagem Triangular. Delineating some of the fundamental concepts to these elaborations, will be approached here “another globalization” as understood by Milton Santos and the term de(s)colonial not only by the theoretical dimension of Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano and Catherine Walsh, but also in its dimension poetic by the narratives of Grada Kilomba, Rosana Paulino and Chimamanda Adiche.

THE MEASUREMENT OF A NOVEL CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK ENTITLED: “PROCESS EDUCATION: LEARNING TO LEARN” VIA AN EXPLICATIVE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF INNOVATIVE TRIOSTATISTICAL METHODS, MODELS, METRICS, AND STATISTICAL PROCEDURES

This paper is part two of the research paper entitled, “AMOVA” [“Accumulative Manifold Validation Analysis”]: An Advanced Statistical Methodology designed to measure and test the Validity, Reliability, and Overall Efficacy of Inquiry–Based Psychometric Instruments” published in the 2015 Journal of Educational Technology. In this narrative AMOVA is operationalized via successful “Process Education: Learning to Learn” (or “PE: L2L”). PE: L2L experiences, whether taught in a camp, course or as professional development requires addressing specific principles, practices, scales, strategies, and concepts that are native to both “Process Education (PE)” and “Learning to Learn” (L2L). PE and L2L were once separate methodologies but are now combined here to create a novel, innovative, and comprehensive learning practice. This new learning model as an all-inclusive learning strategy uniquely unifies the implementation of L2L experiences using the PE philosophy through the idea of “Transformational Education”. Facilitating L2L through the lens of PE requires the implementation and use of a preset of PE: L2L practices and principles that are measurable via AMOVA. L2L has been implemented and researched in Europe and Process Education as a model has been implemented and its concepts have been tested and measured in the United States. This paper provides a unique cohesive perspective that incorporates the best of PE and the best of L2L to create “PE: L2L”. PE: L2L is a novel conceptual framework that incorporates the principles, practices, scales, strategies, and concepts of both PE and L2L into a new measurable paradigm. In addition, three triostatistical models are presented in this text as ideal data analysis methods for the measurement of the new PE and L2L unification, they are: 1.) Tri–Squared Analysis (Osler, 2012); 2.) AMOVA (Osler, 2015); and 3.) The Taxonomy of Process Education (Osler, 2015). The philosophical and theoretical foundational narrative in this paper is adapted from the results of successful PE “Learning to Learn Camps”; “Teaching Institutes”; and online PE professional development.

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction

Opening Acts: Narrative Beginnings in Twentieth-Century Feminist Fiction

Commonplaces: The Poetics of African Atlantic Postromantics

Commonplaces: The Poetics of African Atlantic Postromantics

Narrating Violence, Narrating Self: Exodus and Collective Identity in Early Rabbinic Literature

Narrating Violence, Narrating Self: Exodus and Collective Identity in Early Rabbinic Literature

At the Interface of Past and Future Business: Lessons from the Quakers

This paper argues that there is much to be learned about business and by looking back at how the Quakers–who have been largely forgotten and overlooked in management studies’ founding narratives–were organized and how they ran their businesses. The paper presents a brief history of the Quakers focusing on the beliefs and practices that contributed to their success from 1650 to c. 1880, and which also contributed to their demise from the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards. We also reflect on the various lessons that can be learned through studying the Quakers and their approach to management.

Jewels in the Crown: Motivations and Team Building Processes of Employee Entrepreneurs

This study uses inductive methodology to examine the motivations and team building processes of employee entrepreneurs through the analysis of thirty founding narratives of disk drive industry spin...

Agonism and Hope in William Apess’s Native American Political Thought

This article examines the Native American thinker, William Apess (Pequot), and especially his Eulogy on King Philip (1836), which argues, ironically, that King Philip—the seventeenth century Wampanoag leader who launched the bloodiest rebellion in New England’s history—ought to be embraced as an American pioneer and canonized as a founding father. Apess satirizes conventional founding narratives, even as he upholds the principles of freedom those narratives support. The effect of this irony is to interrupt and invert discourses of progressive history and American patriotism that underlie Manifest Destiny policies, in ways that open spaces for new historical accounts to surface and compete in a force field of agonistic powers. I argue that Apess’s ironic historical revisionism expresses a political theory of hope, one that I contrast with representations of hope by other nineteenth century Native American political thinkers, such as Plenty Coups (Crow).

EFFECTS OF A PERSON-CENTERED CARE INTERVENTION ON RESIDENT QUALITY OF LIFE AND QUALITY OF CARE

This prospective cohort study measured the effect of implementing a person-centered approach to assessment and care planning on quality of life and incontinence care at three residential care facilities for older persons (N=79) in Sweden. Based on the Gothenburg University Center for Person-Centered Care model (Ekman et al 2015), the 10 week behavioral intervention engaged all staff and management. Resident outcomes of quality of life and continence care were measured at base-line, immediately after, and post-six months; staff outcomes included strain. Resident narratives of needs, preferences and earlier habits were recorded in care plans; nursing notes throughout the intervention were examined in relation to these foundational narratives for congruence. Results indicated a significant increase in tailored, individualized assessments for continence care (p<.05), and a positive trend of gains in residents’ quality of life. Staff reported decreased job strain (p<.05). Findings indicate important effects of PCC on resident and staff outcomes.