...Stories of illness and healing are often arresting in their power, illuminating practices and experiences that might otherwise remain obscure. What can be learned through a comparative look at the range of narrative theories and styles of narrative analysis used by anthropologists to make sense...

... antique Judaism as well as its partner in narrative dialogues and early Christianity. Focusing on the “neighborhood” of the Galilee that is the birthplace of many major religious and cultural developments, this book brings to life the riddles, parables, and folktales passed down in Rabbinic stories from...

...Traumatic brain injury can interrupt without warning the life story that any one of us is in the midst of creating. When the author's fifteen-year-old son survives a terrible car crash in spite of massive trauma to his brain, she and her family know only that his story has not ended. Their efforts...

...The all-female Takarazuka Revue is world-famous today for its rococo musical productions, including gender-bending love stories, torridly romantic liaisons in foreign settings, and fanatically devoted fans. But that is only a small part of its complicated and complicit performance history...

...This chapter discusses three different Arendtian stories, the first from The Origins of Totalitarianism, the second from The Human Condition, and the third from On Revolution. One of Arendt's greatest achievements is the way in which, in stories...

...This book describes the performance of Kampan's medieval text Kamparāmāyanam as a shadow puppet play in Kerala, south India, analyzing the puppeteers' particular telling of the story though translations of their performances. It also explores the wider issues of audience...

...This chapter describes the oral commentary for the shadow puppet play performance of Kampan's text, which spins auxiliary stories and quotations around the text to place it within a wider frame of reference, focusing on the commentary of the episode concerning the first defeat of Rāvana...

...This chapter examines the ways in which unsubstantiated stories become “truth” in Kwanga villages. It moves beyond examining rumor to investigate ways in which stories about recent events influence people's interpretation of future events and their memories of the past, and can ultimately...

...“Origin Stories about Segregationist Philanthropy” examines how the race for eugenics has been conflated with national scientific achievement in the study of South Africa as a modern nation. Thereby abetting the manufacture of white citizenship and transforming settlers...

...This chapter describes my approach to ethnographic research and writing, including the importance of “stories” and my evolving relationships with mothers and babies. It describes my first eye-opening meeting with a group of migrant mothers and their babies, and it illustrates how my relationships...

...This chapter examines the matriarchal myth before J.J. Bachofen introduced his matriarchal narratives. It shows that Amazon stories had been very popular since ancient times, which signals a continuous interest in studying gender reversals. The discussion considers the enduring appeal...

...This chapter deals with two interrelated issues related to supernatural activity. It first describes and places in perspective the appearance of certain narratives that illustrate two different categories of supernatural experiences, namely ghost stories and narratives of spirit possession. Next...

... Africa. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wartime writing contested stories when i took a job teaching anthropology at a provincial New Zealand University, some of my Cambridge friends warned that I would starve for want of intellectual stimulation and slowly go to seed. I didn’t need to be reminded...

...In which the basic argument is laid out: natural history is the set of stories that we tell to explain the diversity that we find in our encounter with the world. History is the set of stories of the people who lived in the “other countries” that we call the past. By studying both we can both learn...

...Religious writing demands imagination and reason, but interpretive writers must give scientific reason to convince readers of the truth in their stories. Discussing stories shifts readers' attention to the element of believability that makes the aesthetic work. This chapter examines the scientific...

...This chapter examines the emergence of a popular genre of crime fiction in Mexico in the 1940s. It looks at magazines and short stories. It argues that despite the lack of official support, this genre became popular and was able to express, through fiction, the problems in the pursuit of truth...

... inhabitants by, among other things, rigorously avoiding these areas, those who live there must resort to other strategies. The chapter lays the foundation for an argument: in the context of a social-moral setting that is coded as illicit, stories and rituals dedicated to Pomba Gira posit an alternative moral...

... citizenship—the prophet and the patriot. The fact that they told such different stories about the origins and development of the American democratic project reveals profoundly different democratic imaginaries—ways of understanding how democracy works and the proper role of active citizens in it. Consequently...

... that as long as groups like Interfaith and the Patriots continue to cultivate and enact many different stories of America, and no single story becomes dominant, then citizens can productively interrogate their respective benefits and drawbacks. anger anxiety disappointment hope Mills C Wright polarization...

...-help ethos has produced a narrative of self that has deeply transformed autobiographical discourse, that is, how life stories are conceived, told, and negotiated in interpersonal interaction, thereby also transforming identity. It suggests that the therapeutic discourse offers endless possibilities...