ABSTRACT
An increasing number of scholars across disciplines envision narrative as a new frontier for advancing health-related theory, research and practice. Rhetoricians (e.g., Fisher, 1984, 1985b), medical anthropologists (e.g., Mattingly, 2000, 2001), sociologists (e.g., Frank, 1995, 1997, 2004; Riessman, 2000), physicians (e.g., Charon, 2001; Kleinman, 1988), psychologists (e.g., Bruner, 2002; Polkinghorne, 1988) and communication scholars (e.g., Bochner, 2002; Carbaugh, 2001; Langellier & Peterson, 2004) assert that narrative facilitates emergent social selves, relational identities, and co-cultural understandings. This interest has evolved not only from the linguistic turn in the social sciences, but also from shifts toward postmodern ways of envisioning the world. Indeed, as Morris (1998) noted, “One infallible sign that you have entered the gravitational field of postmodernism is a swerve toward narrative” (p. 250). This book features work that engages narrative forms and practices as constituting
complex and sophisticated knowledge of individuals, as well as the lived sociocultural and political contexts in which agents construct, share, and revise stories. Narratives are especially appropriate means of examining issues of health and healing because they wrestle with complexities that face contemporary health care participants: identity construction, order and disorder, autonomy and community, fixed and fluid experiences.
