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Preface

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Cheryl Mattingly
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Summary

This book gave me trouble. For one thing, there was the difficulty of voice. How much should I reveal of my own prejudices, my own quite individual experiences of the people I studied? I chose to write from a fairly personal perspective, especially in the first chapter and again in the third one which begins the ethnography proper. Or, more accurately, I waffled. I wrote and rewrote. Some versions were highly revealing and confessional. I especially confessed a conversion which life among occupational therapists forced upon me. In doing so, I faced the contemporary anthropologist's dilemma. I didn't want to hide in my writing or pretend to an objectivity which masked the realness of my encounters. But I didn't want to write a book about me either. I had some theories about narrative I wanted to give a central place in my account. However, when I edited myself out entirely, I confronted a different sort of problem. The verisimilitude went too. As a reader, how could you tell where you were? The solution, provided by the venerable realist in the genre of ethnography (painting pictures from a “God's eye” perspective) didn't appeal to me. If I was going to give a concrete account of the ethnographic scene, I was going to put a real narrator (me) in the scene as well. “The new ideal,” Suleiman writes about the introduction of the “I” into literary criticism, “is founded on the premise that since all writing is done by some-body for some-body, it is not merely permitted, but downright valuable, to remember who you are as you write” (1994: 2).

Type
Chapter
Information
Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots
The Narrative Structure of Experience
, pp. vii - xi
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1998

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  • Preface
  • Cheryl Mattingly, University of Southern California
  • Book: Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139167017.001
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  • Preface
  • Cheryl Mattingly, University of Southern California
  • Book: Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139167017.001
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Preface
  • Cheryl Mattingly, University of Southern California
  • Book: Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139167017.001
Available formats
×