ggpcinla@yahoo.com writes:
>
>I am intrigued by some of Diane's reflections ...
>
>Diane writes to Staton:
>
>>You want to understand the relations of narrative and emotional activity?
>>You could see a therapist: why try to make it science? Because you care
>so
>>much? I mean if all this is about how much you care, then there are
>>certainly other ways to write about it; but there is certainly no
>>compassion without empathy, and I cannot for the life of me understand
>how
>>science can practice empathy in its methods and still consider itself
>>scientific, anymore than I can understand how a social scientist can act
>>compassionately without some emotional risk -
>
>I do want to understand the relations of narrative & emotional activity --
>(that is, if I can figure out what emotional activity is).
i reckon i am understanding emotional activity on a lotta levels - there
is the surface content of
our stories, always invariably depicted in contexts of the feeling an
experience evoked (i was scared witless!
- laughed so hard i thought i'd drop my chainsaw! - cried like a
baby/wailed like a banshee/sobbed in big gulping gasps - - pain. grief,
victory, joy, terror, etc) -
there is also the levels of a narrative context, how these places in time
and space re-invent emotional affections in reflection, where stanton is
trying to look, in how the telling of an experience recreates/rewrites an
emotional activity in the activity of telling (for example, i wept
uncontrollably
when i saw the film "joy luck club" but when i tell the story now, it is
with humour: but then depending upon who i was
retelling the story with, it might not seem funny, but sad again) - the
interaction of telling presents another level of emotional activity, where
the telling evokes and invokes kinds of responses, which subtly shift the
narration-in-response to the
process of being listened to - indeed writing a narrative can also shift
the levels of emotion, recognizing aspects of
an experience that had previously eluded us, suddenly reflecting upon what
the experience "means" in other ways - writing about an experience to an
other rewrites the meaning,
having that responded reinvites an other way of telling the story...
reading an other's story as a third person rewrites the events, too, and
here is where i wonder where stanton is in his reading of such a traumatic
story, in a re-traumatizing experience, subjected then, ten years later,
to yet another institutional objective analysis -
denial - ignorance - repression also play significant parts in the
narrative - for example, how many academics
write only victory narratives in their socio-ethnographic accounts? the
desire to re-present oneself, as stanton is trying to understand, produces
all kinds of rewriting and recreatings in the interactive context -
no story remains fixed, of course, that's why we tell them all the time,
as a way to re-figure our sense of our lives, perhaps? or the rewrite
emotional content that is unbearable, re-trope the scene so that the
narrator always comes out innocent,
and so on -
all of this counts, i think, as emotional activity in/as narrative
> It's one of my
>many curiosities, one of the many reasons why I became (also) an
>applied linguist. I'm quite convinced that human beings have told
>stories (narratives?) & made art for 30'000 years, and I'm fascinated.
i just wrote a paper on prehistoric art, most of which archeologically
originates in the production of totems/portables, small pieces of
representative figures (bone/stone/antler/clay/etc) that nomadic peoples
could carry around -
this developed into cave-art, the paintings as an effort to re-present the
3-dimensional totems in two dimensional space,
- suggesting that cave art began as a desire to re-produce the nomadic
arts, where settled communities were being influenced
by the roaming peoples, which is why many of the representations depict
animals and scenes that, geographically, were never actually witnessed by
the cave-painters, but were witnessed in the form of portables introduced
in social activity - (wot!) -
this representative work developed later into narrative practices =
interestingly, the totems/portables represent prelinguistic art, so the
possibility is that oral narrative and two-dimensionals (paintings) were
co-evolved, one inspiring the other, so that many of the original stories
were about totems, not personal experience -
but i've studied anthrolinguistics, art history, for the same reasons you
mention - the oral narration of self is
fantastically ancient and fascinating - the shifts to emotional content is
probably latent, as society becomes more structurally repressive the
narratives develop more emotional content - ? but i don't know ... (not
that this has ever stopped me!)
>
>
>Finally, do you really mean it? Is this our choice: science or empathy?
>
>Genevieve
>
i think a scientist can certainly have empathy in her desires to produce,
say, a cure for breast cancer - but in the
contexts of methodologies, i can't see how science- by its own admissions
of objectivity and empiricism - can incorporate empathy into the method -
but now here we slip into the murky space of social science, where the
desire to
be legitimated as science is possibly counterproductive to the work of
benefitting the quality of social activity - to know the social is, i
think, to abandon objectivity, science, rigour, because the social world
is messy, squishy, confused, chaotic, undisciplined, ideological, painful,
wet, angry, hurtful, and zay, silly, crazy, goofy, loving, sweet, kind -
none of these
are accessible as empirical aspects of social worlds, but the social
world, is, after all, people.
i don't know why academics think that only Other people constitute the
social world, but there ya have it.
strictly speaking, science is designed to erase empathy, emotion, and all
those feminine dangers of misinterpretation.
diane
>
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**********************************************************************
:point where everything listens.
and i slow down, learning how to
enter - implicate and unspoken (still) heart-of-the-world.
(Daphne Marlatt, "Coming to you")
***********************************************************************
diane celia hodges
university of british columbia, centre for the study of curriculum and
instruction
==================== ==================== =======================
university of colorado, denver, school of education
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