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into relief (Charmaz 1991). A long, slow downswing may only very gradually affect biography. Personal and family resources may compensate for a brief acute phase, experienced over and over, so that the overall trajectory of the biography remains fairly smooth. Many possible shapes are envisioned: a looping shape in the case of a comeback after a serious, debilitating illness; a very gradual progress of the disease that slowly erodes the biographical trajectory. |
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This model does not seek a Cartesian mind-body dualism, but rather seeks to find a language for the ways in which two (or more) different processes become inextricably intertwined into one thick chain or braid. It makes more complex the sick-well, able-disable dichotomies, and it brings in people's active conversations with and work for their ill bodies as a central concern (see figure 5.2). |
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Thee body's trajectory and the self's are bound together, but not completely tightly coupled. Careers, plans, work, and relationships may continue in spite of, around, and through illness; or, a sudden illness may interrupt plans and biography and reshape the topography. The background landscape is a nested set of contingent possibilities and structural features which in turn act upon the shape of the trajectory. |
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Multiple Identities Along a Body-Biography Trajectory in Sudden Illness or Death |
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Timmermans has suggested emphasizing multiple identities in a dialogue with the Strauss-Corbin BBC model. He studied more than 100 cases of attempted resuscitations (CPR) with victims of cardiac arrest, in the emergency room (in press a, in press b, in press c). He uses the trajectory model to explain the sequence and flow of events as people were brought in by the ambulance crews, worked on by staff, and either declared dead or saved (1998). (The vast majority of people die.) Each patient who undergoes CPR has multiple intertwining identities outside that of heart attack victim, each with its own trajectory. At the moment of the resuscitation attempt, these collapse into a single identity: that of the body-machine (Timmermans 1996). The nurses and doctors and technicians focus down to a single attribute of the person. After resuscitation, if this is successful, the multiple identities restart from the same baseline, but each identity will have been differentially altered by the experience (see figure 5.3). |
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Here the biographical trajectoriesselvesmove from complex, multiple activity to a single focus: life-saving. At death, the identities |
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