Narrating Trouble Experiences

Narrating Troubling Experiences
LINDAC.GARRO
University of California at Los Angeles
Abstract This article presents a process-oriented perspective that relates to
the broad question of how self-related experience comes to be endowed with
meaning. The approach highlights the implications of living by particular
culturally based understandings in specic contexts and centers on how
jointly cultural, social, and cognitive processes offer potentialities for orient-
ing the experiential self without determining self-related experiences. This
process-oriented perspective revolves around the interplay between the
range of historically contingent cultural resources available for endowing
experience with meaning and the socially and structurally grounded
processes through which individuals learn about, orient towards and trafc
in interpretive plausibilities a socially situated experientially based process.
This perspective is informed by, and provides an entree for exploring, vari-
ability within a cultural setting. The narrative accounts examined are from
individuals who grew up speaking either Ojibwa or Cree (both Algonkian
languages) in First Nations communities in Manitoba, Canada.
Key words cross-cultural views of the self cultural processes illness
narratives intracultural variation self-related experience
Much of my work revolves around how troubling experiences with the
potential to be seen as indicating the presence of an illness in need of some
form of care or treatment, enter into and are dealt with in everyday life. In
this article, with reference to accounts of troubling experiences told from
the perspective of the sufferer, I present a process-oriented perspective that
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relates to the broad question of how self-related experience comes to be
endowed with meaning. This perspective centers on how jointly cultural,
social and cognitive processes offer potentialities for orienting the
experiential self without determining self-related experiences.
1
This
perspective is informed by, and provides an entree for exploring,
variability within a cultural setting. The narrative accounts examined here
are from individuals who grew up speaking either Ojibwa or Cree
(both Algonkian languages) in First Nations communities in Manitoba,
Canada.
Although self-related, these are all troubling experiences that enter the
social arena. Whether noticed by the individual alone or by others, these
are instances in which the perceived trouble sets in motion attempts to deal
with the problem. As a breach, as a disruption, these troubling experiences,
especially when unanticipated, engage effort after meaning (Bartlett,
1932). Trouble has been characterized as the engine of narrative: It is the
whiff of trouble that leads us to search out the relevant or responsible
constituents in the narrative, in order to convert the raw Trouble into a
manageable Problem that can be handled with procedural muscle (Bruner,
1996, p. 99). Narrative activity, as a distinctive way of ordering experience,
of construing reality (Bruner, 1986, p. 11), situates troubling experiences
within a larger temporal envelope (Carrithers, 1992, p. 82) and links,
however tentatively, present concerns with perceived pasts and/or to
possible futures.
Narrative is an active and constructive mode of cognitive engagement
that reects participation in specic social and moral worlds and depends
upon personal and cultural resources. In the cases examined here, the
notion of cultural resources most commonly refers to culturally available
understandings (or cultural knowledge) about illness and misfortune.
Hearing about the experiences of others, as recounted through narrative,
is a principal means through which relevant cultural understandings are
acquired, conrmed, rened, or modied (e.g. Early, 1982; Garro, 2000c,
2001; Price, 1987). These cultural resources may be variably drawn upon
to help make sense of ones own or anothers experiences. As resources for
navigating the ambiguity surrounding illness and other troubling experi-
ences, cultural understandings can be seen as tools that both enable and
constrain interpretive possibilities. Still, as the examples will show, multiple
narrative possibilities may be entertained for a given set of troubling
circumstances. Narrative framings may emerge through everyday conver-
sational interactions which serve as a prosaic social arena for developing
frameworks for understanding events (Ochs & Capps, 2001, p. 2). Whereas
some social contexts may structure what is narrated along certain lines
and/or preclude the airing of some narrative framings, others may take
form through or as a consequence of social interactions (Garro, 2000a,
Tr anscult ur al Psychiat ry 40(1)
6
2001; Ochs & Capps, 2001). Reports of life events are shaped for narrative
purposes with a view toward meaning and signication, not toward the
end of somehow preserving the facts themselves (Bruner & Feldman,
1996, p. 293; on the impossibility of retaining the concreteness of the
present, see Kundera, 1995, p. 128; Ochs & Capps, 2001, pp. 288289).
As preamble to a discussion that appears in a later section of this article,
the process-oriented perspective put forward here can be contrasted with
what might be called a content-oriented perspective. The equation of
culture with cultural content is evident in an early and often quoted state-
ment by Ward Goodenough (1957, p. 167) that conceptualizes culture as
whatever it is one must know or believe in order to operate in a manner
acceptable to its members, and do so in any role that they accept for any
one of themselves. Culture . . . must consist of the end product of learning:
knowledge, in a most general, if relative, sense of the term. In a 1981 article,
Roy DAndrade referred to culture as a socially transmitted information
pool (p. 180), the shared information the cognitive content (p. 182)
with which we do our thinking (p. 193) and upon which the cognitive
processes operate (p. 182). Variability among individuals within this
content-oriented perspective is most often conceptualized in terms of
some individuals knowing more than others with regard to specic
cultural domains (e.g. Romney, Weller, & Batchelder, 1986). As DAndrade
(1981, p. 180) puts the matter: one of the characteristics of human society
is that there is a major division of labor of who knows what. Along the
same lines, Romney (1994, p. 269; italics in original) writes: Intracultural
variabilityrefers to the variation in cultural knowledge among informants,
e.g., females know more about manioc varieties than do men among the
Aguaruna (Boster, 1985, 1986). While this approach to variability allows
certain types of research questions to be addressed productively (e.g.
Garro, 1986), not all patterned variability ts easily within this framework
(e.g. see Garro, 2000a). Here, rather than attending just to shared cultural
content for example, shared understandings about illness or widely
known cultural models for illness or adversity a process-oriented
perspective broadens to encompass how culturally available interpretive
frameworks (some widely shared and others not) serve as a resource to
meet the demands of everyday life. This process-oriented perspective
revolves around the interplay between the range of historically contingent
cultural resources available for endowing experience with meaning and the
socially and structurally grounded processes through which individuals
learn about, orient towards and trafc in interpretive plausibilities a
socially situated experientially-based process.
For several reasons, the writings of A. Irving Hallowell (e.g. 1955, 1958,
1976) help set the stage for this article. First, his inuential essays on self
and personhood can be seen as a starting point for renewed contemporary
Gar r o: Nar r at ing Tr oubl ing Exper iences
7
interest in these topics (Csordas, 1994; Fogelson, 1982). The Self in its
Behavioral Environment (the original 1954 article is reprinted in two parts
as chapters 4 and 8 in Hallowell, 1955) and Ojibwa Ontology, Behavior and
World View (Hallowell, 1960, reprinted in Hallowell, 1976) are particu-
larly noteworthy in this regard. Second, Hallowells supporting
ethnographic material is also relevant to the narratives examined here.
During the decade from 1930 to 1940, Hallowell made a number of
summer eld trips to an Ojibwa community in Manitoba, Canada (the
Ojibwa are also sometimes referred to as Saulteaux by Hallowell and are
known as Chippewa in the US). The Ojibwa Self and Its Behavioral
Environment is the title Hallowell gave to the second part of his reprinted
essay. The narrative accounts examined in the present article are from indi-
viduals who grew up speaking either Ojibwa or Cree (both Algonkian
languages) in First Nations communities in Manitoba, Canada. The
discussion of these narratives is framed with reference to Hallowells
writings on self, personhood, and illness as well as my eld research in an
Anishinaabe (Ojibwa) reserve community in Manitoba. As Anishinaabe
(plural, Anishinaabeg) is how people at my eld site refer to themselves,
Anishinaabe will be used when discussing my ndings and Ojibwa when
referring to Hallowells work. Third, even though Hallowells examples are
suggestive of considerable homogeneity within a culturally dened group
expressed through a unied cognitive outlook (1960, p. 362) much of
his general approach is complementary to the process-oriented perspective
developed here. Hallowell urged anthropologists to adopt a behavior-
centered approach by attending to the situated nature of experience,
sense-making and action (e.g. 1955, p. 88; see also 1976, pp. 236237).
Prior to the narratives, several sections build on the ideas sketched out
in this preface. The next section briey introduces some pertinent
anthropological discussions on cross-cultural differences in the self. After
that, a selective overview is provided of Hallowells work concerning the
self in its behavioral environment and the interpretation of troubling
experiences. The sections which immediately precede the narrative
accounts develop the theoretical grounding for cultural and social
processes, as well as narrative and self processes.
Cross-Cul t ural Dif f erences in t he Sel f ?
Recently, within anthropology, there has been a resurgence of interest in
the study of the self (e.g. see discussions in de Munck, 2000; Fogelson, 1982;
Harris, 1989; Hollan, 1992; Holland, 1997; Spiro, 1993). A recurring topic
concerns whether there can be said to be a western self in contrast with a
non-western self (e.g. Geertz, 1984; Hollan, 1992; Markus & Kitayama,
1991; Shweder & Bourne, 1984; Spiro, 1993). An oft-quoted, somewhat
8
notorious, statement by Geertz (1984, p. 126) generated considerable
discussion:
The Western conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less
integrated motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of aware-
ness, emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and
set contrastively both against other such wholes and against its social and
natural background, is, however incorrigible it may seem to us, a rather
peculiar idea within the context of the worlds cultures.
Spiro (1993, p. 108) reads this quote as suggesting that the non-western
conception of the self stands in relative contrast (i.e. not bounded, not
a dynamic center of awareness, not contrasted against other selves or
against a social and natural background). Taking as an example the
boundedunbounded dichotomy Spiro argues that, despite ambiguities in
how self may be conceptualized, such a strong stance is not empirically
warranted. Delving further into the broader literature, he provides a
succinct summary of much of the literature on this topic:
Although these authors are not unanimous in their formulations; neverthe-
less, they do seem to agree that whereas the Western self and/or its cultural
conception is characterized by self-other differentiation, personal individu-
ation, and autonomy, the non-Western self and/or its cultural conception is
not differentiated, individuated, or autonomous, or not, at any rate, like
anything approaching the same degree. Rather, the key characteristic of the
non-Western self are interdependence, dependence, and uid boundaries.
(Spiro, 1993, p. 116)
Spiro nds these bipolar types of self to be widely overdrawn (1993,
p. 116; cf. Straus, 1982). In a cogent discussion, Hollan (1992, p. 283)
suggests that the sharp contrasts often drawn between Western and
non-Western selves have very likely been exaggerated because researchers
often contrast simplied and idealized cultural conceptions of the self
rather than comparing descriptive accounts of subjective experience.
Hollan cautions that world views, cultural conceptions or cultural models
of the self (which unquestionably may vary signicantly from culture to
culture) should not be conated with the experiential self. He presents
evidence, in some contexts, of an independent, autonomous self among the
sociocentric Toraja of Indonesia and of an interdependent, relational self
among egocentric Americans in the United States and submits that the
relationship between ideal cultural conceptions and subjective experience
is complex and problematic and requires active investigation (1992, p. 294;
italics in original). The task ahead, in Hollans view, is to investigate the
manner and extent to which these varied cultural conceptions are lived by
in specic contexts and thereby ascertain the range of the experiential self
9
as well (Hollan, 1992, p. 295). Hallowells focus on the experiencing self
acting in a cultural world appears relevant to this endeavor, as the self so-
dened is an experiential datum that, unlike the Freudian ego, can be
directly described and talked about by actors, not merely deduced or postu-
lated from psychological or cultural theory (Hollan, 1992, p. 284; italics in
original). In this article, the experiential self and cultural conceptions of
personhood are explored in relation to narratives about times of trouble.
In light of anthropological debates concerning western and non-
western selves, it is interesting to note that ethnographic portrayals of the
Ojibwa, as well as those of other First Nations peoples living in the North
American subarctic, often point to their individualism and to the high
value placed on autonomy (e.g. see Black, 1977a; Goulet, 1998; Hallowell,
1955, p. 135; Landes, 1937; Ridington, 1988). Dening autonomy in terms
of freedom of being controlled by other human beings, Black (1977a,
p. 150) states that the importance of individual autonomy in Ojibwa
culture can hardly be overemphasized. In his writings on the Ojibwa,
Hallowell repeatedly emphasized that the central goal was life, in the fullest
sense life in the sense of longevity, health, and freedom from misfortune
(e.g. Hallowell, 1963, p. 407).
2
Further: the main binding force of Ojibwa
institutions was not so much to link individuals together through common
cooperative aims as it was to permit individuals seeking a common central
value to achieve it without too much human interference from without
(Hallowell, 1955, p. 361). Although this article does not revolve around the
individuated/relational contrast described earlier, the narrative material
examined here illuminates how individualism can take a cultural shape
distinctive from that attributed to (mainstream) western selves. At the
same time, my discussion is grounded in an appreciation of the problems
associated with conceptualizing culture in ways that suggest bounded
entities characterized by stability, internal coherence, and homogeneity,
with members of a culture recognized by a set of characteristics that are
generationally reproduced.
Hal l owel l on t he Sel f in it s Behavioral Environment
Hallowell framed the self as at once universal and culturally specic.
Noting that anthropologists had paid comparatively little attention to
aspects of self-awareness, Hallowell aspired to clear the ground for a more
effective handling of cross-cultural data that seem relevant to a deeper
understanding of the role of self-awareness in man as culturally constituted
in different societies (1955, p. 79; italics in original). Couching his
discussion at what he called a phenomenological level (1955, p. 79),
Hallowell characterized self-awareness as the reexive discrimination of
oneself as an object in a world of objects (1955, p. 75) and viewed it as a
10
generic (universal) attribute requisite for human sociality. This capacity for
selfother discrimination is grounded in certain basic orientations
provided by culture self-orientation, object orientation (including other
persons), spatio-temporal orientation, motivational orientation, and
normative orientation which align the experiencing self with the external
world and structure the psychological eld in which the self is prepared to
act (1955, p. 110). Although reexive self-awareness is highlighted,
Hallowell also refers to unarticulated concepts that constitute the assump-
tions on which basic orientations rest (Hallowell, 1958, p. 65; 1960,
pp. 361362; see also Fogelson, 1982, pp. 8485). The basic orientations
implicitly guide the perception and interpretation of experience, including
what one takes to be objective reality, as well as affording a normatively
informed basis for reection, decision, and action (cf. Hallowell, 1958,
p. 79; 1976, p. 391).
The world in which the experiencing self develops is more appropriately
referred to as a culturally constituted behavioral environment (1955,
p. 87); in a later article, Hallowell linked this concept with that of a world
view (Hallowell, 1960). As cultural means and content may vary widely
(1955, p. 89), the nature of the self, considered in its conceptual content,
is a culturally identiable variable as the individuals self-image and his
interpretation of his own experience cannot be divorced from the concept
of the self that is characteristic of his society (1955, p. 76). Because
concepts of self are, in part . . . culturally derived (1955, p. 80), Hallow-
ell asserted that assuming, as far as possible, the outlook of the self in its
behavioral environment (1955, p. 89) enables us to approximate more
closely to an inside view of culture (1955, p. 88) a more direct insight
into the psychological eld of the individual as heexperiences it than a
purely objective cultural description affords (1955, p. 110; italics in
original). Csordas (1994, p. 6) provides a useful synopsis of Hallowells
concept of self:
Understood in terms of perception and practice, Hallowells concept of self
thus did more than place the individual in culture. It linked behavior to the
objective world, but dened objective in terms of cultural specicity. It
linked perceptual processes with social constraints and cultural meanings,
but added self-awareness and reexivity.
Csordas (1994, pp. 79) constructively adds that Hallowell left out of his
framework the prominent role that others play in the reexive awareness
of self.
3
Later in this article the narrated accounts illustrate some of the
ways this occurs.
According to Hallowell (1958, p. 63; italics in original), among the most
important objects in the behavioral environment of the self are persons.
He characterized the Western scientic tradition that conceptually
11
identies person with human being as involving a radical abstraction
from psychological reality. For, he continued, all human cultures include
classes of other-than-humanpersons that are an integral part of the psycho-
logical eld of the individual. Rather than imposing an arbitrary
dissection of the total phenomenal world of a people, he maintained that
an examination of their cognitive orientation toward all classes of person
objects can reveal how conceptualization, processes of perceiving, remem-
bering, imagining, and reasoning in the individual are related to actual
behavior.
Within the Ojibwa behavioral environment, the social relations of the
Ojibwa self are correlative with their more comprehensive categorization
of persons (Hallowell, 1958, p. 64).
4
For these social relations, the funda-
mental differentiation of primary concern to the self is how other selves
rank in order of power (Hallowell, 1955, p. 181). Human beings do not
differ from other-than-human persons in kind, but in power (Hallowell,
1958, p. 76) with other-than-human persons occupying the top rank in the
power hierarchy of animate being (Hallowell, 1958, p. 76; 1960, p. 377; see
also Black, 1977a, 1977b). An earmark of power is metamorphosis, the
ability to change external form. Other-than-human persons may move
between other external forms (such as animals or forces of nature) to
assume human form (and thus may be taken for a human being); meta-
morphosis is an inherent capacity of other-than-human persons. With
regard to human beings, while the potentiality for metamorphosis exists
and may even be experienced, any outward manifestation is inextricably
associated with unusual power, for good or evil. And power of this degree
can only be acquired by human beings through the help ( blessings) of
other-than-human persons (Hallowell, 1958, p. 76).
Enabling human beings to do things that would otherwise be imposs-
ible, the gifts, blessings, knowledge or powers took diverse forms and
were expressed in many different ways. Examples include success in
hunting or warfare, knowledge of specic healing skills or more general
abilities to heal or to covertly harm others, and the ability to communicate
with other-than-human persons to learn things that would otherwise be
unknowable (Hallowell, 1955, p. 104). Such gifts were typically bestowed
in the context of private sensory experiences, such as dreams or visions.
For these dream-conscious people:
. . . self-related experience of the most personal and vital kind includes what
is seen, heard, and felt in dreams. Although there is no lack of discrimin-
ation, nor inherent confusion, between the experiences of the self when
awake and when dreaming, both sets of experiences are equally self-related
. . . When we think autobiographically we only include events that happened
to us when awake; the Ojibwa include remembered events that have
occurred in dreams. And, far from being of subordinate importance, such
12
experiences are for them often of more vital importance than the events of
daily waking life . . . it is in dreams that the individual comes into direct
communication with . . . the powerful persons of the other-than-human
class. (Hallowell, 1958, p. 77; 1960, p. 378)
Although such dream experiences could occur at any time, they were
actively sought, especially by males, through isolation and fasting at the
time of puberty. The puberty fast was, in Hallowells terms, the oppor-
tunity of a lifetime (1976, p. 384). As direct statements about ones gifts
were not made, others can only infer what powers have been bestowed
upon others. In social relations: no one can tell how much power another
individual has, or whether it enables him to do evil or not (Hallowell, 1951,
p. 187).
Gifts do not come unencumbered (Hallowell, 1992, p. 92). Bad
conduct, manifested in the failure to fulll obligations imposed by other-
than-human persons or the failure to behave in an appropriate manner was
signaled by trouble, such as a serious, unexpected or puzzling illness and/or
other indicators of lack of fortune. Alternatively, such trouble could be the
result of the covert use of power through sorcery (1955, p. 173) or witch-
craft (1992, p. 96) by a human aggressor. (To refer to such illnesses,
Hallowell, 1955, p. 282 also uses the term nicinbewpinewhich he trans-
lates as Indian sickness, but which can perhaps be more appropriately
glossed as Anishinaabe sickness.) From the culturally informed standpoint
of the Ojibwa self retaliation by this covert means was a stark reality
(Hallowell, 1955, p. 141). Building on Hallowells work, Black (1977a,
p. 149) discusses how bad medicine encompasses harming powers which
include the ability to cause anothers death, illness, or misfortune without
being present or in physical contact. Jealousy, envy, anger, laziness, greed,
desire for revenge or retaliation, desire to avoid privation, and lust are seen
to motivate individuals to use bad medicine to affect others. Bad medicine
contrasts with curing medicine and protection medicine (from bad
medicine). As bad medicine causes others to perform acts or enter a state
that they wouldnt have if left to their own autonomy, its use contravenes
the high cultural value on an individuals right to self determination: If
being in control is good and being out of control is bad, then bad
medicine is in essence the power to render another helpless or out of
control, while good medicine is restoring or maintaining anothers state
of control or autonomy (Black, 1977a, p. 150).
A number of the ethnographic examples Hallowell drew on to illustrate
his portrayal of the self in the Ojibwa behavioral environment and the
Ojibwa world-view involved situations of illness and/or misfortune. In
times of trouble, the self is oriented towards explanations within their web
of interpersonal relations, rather than apart from it (Hallowell, 1960,
13
p. 410); and a culturally constituted psychological set operates which
inevitably directs the reasoning of individuals towards an explanation of
events in personalistic terms (1960, pp. 382383):
All the effective agents of events throughout the entire behavioral environ-
ment of the Ojibwa are selves my own self or other selves. Impersonal forces
are never the causes of events. Somebodyis always responsible. (Hallowell,
1955, p. 181; italics in original)
In a behavioral milieu in which overt expressions of aggression are rare
(Hallowell, 1955, p. 136), covert aggression by others is consistent with
Hallowells description of a general cognitive orientation towards the
perceived world which is open to the possibility that appearances may
deceive (1958; 1960, pp. 377378; see also Black, 1977b):
My Ojibwa friends often cautioned me against judging by appearances. A
poor forlorn Indian dressed in rags might have great power; a smiling,
amiable woman, or a pleasant old man, might be a sorcerer. You never can
tell until a situation arises in which their power for good or ill becomes
manifest. I have since concluded that the advice given me in a common sense
fashion provides one of the major clues to a generalized attitude towards the
objects of their behavioral environment. . . . Even in dream experiences,
where a human being comes into direct contact with other-than-human
persons, it is possible to be deceived. Caution is necessary in social relations
with all classes of persons.
For Hallowell, analytic separation of selves as centers of awareness and
experience from cultural conceptions of the person is crucial. It is by
assuming, as much as possible, the outlook of the self in its behavioral
environment that anthropologists may come to apprehend the most
signicant and meaningful aspects of the world of the individual as
experienced by him and in terms of which he thinks, is motivated to act,
and satises his needs (1955, p. 88). In the case of the Ojibwa, this world
outlook directs attention to the way the nature of persons motivates indi-
vidual behavior and permeates the content of their cognitive processes:
perceiving, remembering, imagining, conceiving, judging, and reasoning
(Hallowell, 1960, p. 381). Hallowells conceptual separation of selves from
cultural conceptions (cultural models) of personhood is relied upon in the
remainder of this article.
But even while Hallowell highlighted the need to attend to self-related
experience, the gradual realization of the broader acculturation problem
led him in the end to attempt to interpret and expound the world view of
the most conservative Ojibwa (1976, p. 10). In his efforts to present the
substantive aspects of their outlook upon the world, as it was constituted
for them, in terms of their aboriginal cognitive orientation (1963, p. 399)
14
he posits the psychological unity of the Ojibwa world (1960, p. 381). Selves
are seen to be structured in ways that reproduce and express a unied
cognitive outlook (1960, p. 362); the behavioral environment of the self is
all of a piece (1958, p. 78).
5
His view of the post-contact situation is one
that at times assumed a one-way progression involving cultural loss and
replacement, rather than a more complex complementarity or fusion
(Brown, 1992, p. 113). And although he expressed condence in his
representation of the Ojibwa world view (1963, p. 266; see also 1955, p. 124
and Hallowell, 1992, p. 98), he reported that the central institution of the
puberty fast had almost died out at the time of my investigations
(Hallowell, 1992, p. 87) and that his reconstruction of the Ojibwa world
view was based on remaining fragments as small, relatively isolated
groups retained living remnants of their old way of life and their traditional
world view (Hallowell, 1992, p. 98). But, as Brown (1992, p. 112) notes, the
Ojibwa had more contact with the fur trade than was apparent to Hallow-
ell and hence were even less historically isolated than he supposed.
Hallowells assurances notwithstanding, the anthropological construal of
the Ojibwa self is a problematic undertaking.
Social and Cul t ural Processes
In the present day, although most Anishinaabe reserve communities are
spatially and economically removed from urban areas, there are myriad
interconnections and integrations with the world outside the reserve.
Important among these are linkages to broader Canadian society through
governmental relations and bilateral obligations, schools, social services,
the health care system, churches, television and radio, and economic
activities pursued both off and on the reserve. The highlighting of
commonalities with others seen as similar variously designated as
Anishinaabe, Aboriginal, Indian, and First Nations provide the foun-
dation for other connections.
My eld research in an Anishinaabe community was initially centered
primarily around understanding how community members think about
and deal with illness (eldwork occurring at various periods from 1984 to
1989). The case histories reected a variety of ways-of-thinking and ways-
of-being with the potential to impact on conceptions of persons as well as
on the subjectively experienced self. A brief summary of some of the main
interpretive frameworks across this data set can only hint at the diversity.
I recorded numerous case histories attributed to Anishinaabe sickness.
Although not simply reducible to Hallowells depiction (see Garro, 1990,
2000b), overall these cases attest to the continuing relevance of much of
Hallowells analysis. But, just as clearly, accounts given in a number of cases
reected exposure to widely shared western explanatory frameworks for
15
illness and other misfortune. Other accounts centered on the intersect of
personal histories with the collective colonial history of the Anishinaabe
and the deleterious changes occurring outside, but affecting those within,
the Anishinaabe community. And, in a small number of cases, the accounts
given reected explanations provided by non-Anishinaabe Indian healers
from outside the community or by non-Indian alternative medicine prac-
titioners found in urban centers (e.g. acupuncturists, chiropractors,
herbalists). My eld material also documents signicant diversity in the
extent to which individuals deem different explanatory frameworks as
credible accounts of illness and misfortune (see Garro, 1990, 1998). There
were individuals who expressed disbelief in Anishinaabe sickness. But
while this is where differences are the most evident, the implications of
diversity within the community are not limited to instances which may
potentially be seen as involving Anishinaabe sickness. For example, vari-
ability in understandings about diabetes cannot be accounted for in terms
of some individuals knowing more and others knowing less about this
cultural domain, but rather appears to be a matter of thinking differently,
of knowing differently, in relation to personal circumstances and patterned
in ways that are associated with divergent life experiences (see Garro,
2000a). Within the context of this single community, the contemporary
situation is a complex one that does not mesh easily with a content-
oriented perspective on culture and intracultural variability.
Despite growing interest in the thesis that culture shapes mind, that it
provides us with the toolkit by which we construct not only our worlds but
our very conceptions of our selves and our powers (Bruner, 1996, p. x),
what is meant by culture often remains underdeveloped with the potential
danger of conveying a view of culture as deterministic, homogeneous, and
unchanging. As noted earlier, within any socially dened group, much
more variability exists with much less constancy across time than any
discrete notion of culture admits. Sapir was one of the rst theorists to
grapple seriously with the import of intracultural variation and the
problem this posed for impersonal anthropological description in the
conception of a denitely delimited society with a denitely discoverable
culture (Sapir, 1985b, p. 570) that catches up the individual and molds
him according to a predetermined form and style (Sapir, 2002, pp.
244245). In an article rst published in 1932, Sapir (1985a, p. 515) wrote:
the true locus . . . of . . . processes which, when abstracted into a totality,
constitute culture is not in a theoretical community of human beings known
as society, for the term society is itself a cultural construct which is
employed by individuals who stand in signicant relations to each other in
order to help them in the interpretation of certain aspects of their behavior.
The true locus of culture is in the interactions of specic individuals and,
on the subjective side, in the world of meanings which each one of these
16
individuals may unconsciously abstract for himself from his participation in
these interactions.
Pointing out that cultural patterns may be real and compelling only for
special individuals or groups of individuals and are as good as non-existent
for the rest of the group (1985a, p. 517), Sapir underscored the problems
of an anthropology organized around what all the individuals of a society
have in common (1985a, p. 509). In its place, Sapir championed the study
of interpersonal relations involving human beings adjusting to actual
situations, by means of structures of symbols (2002, pp. 204205). The
anthropological task then becomes to determine what are the potential
contents of the culture that results from these interpersonal relations in
these situations (Sapir, 2002, p. 205). With regard to variability, he
examines an extreme case in which an individuals disagreement with a
social convention, even when unique, may still be viewed as cultural the
complex resultant of an incredibly elaborate cultural history, in which
many diverse strands intercross at that point in place and time at which the
individual judgment or preference is expressed . . . and carrying the
potential to impact others (Sapir, 1985b, pp. 572573). Based on this
example, he continues:
Have we not the right to go on from simple instances of this sort and advance
to the position that any statement, no matter how general, which can be
made about culture needs the supporting testimony of a tangible person or
persons, to whom such a statement is of real value in his system of inter-
relationships with other human beings?If this is so, we shall, at last analysis,
have to admit that any individual of a group has cultural denitions which
do not apply to all the members of his group, which even, in specic
instances, apply to him alone. Instead, therefore, of arguing from a supposed
objectivity of culture to the problem of individual variation, we shall, for
certain kinds of analysis, have to proceed in the opposite direction. We shall
have to operate as though we knew nothing about culture but were inter-
ested in analyzing as well as we could what a given number of human beings
accustomed to live with each other actually think and do in their day to day
relationships. (Sapir, 1985b, p. 574)
In this article, the term cultural processes is used to refer to socially
grounded ways of learning which contribute to the way an individual
thinks, feels, and acts the experiences and forming of understandings
(schemas, cultural models) based on those experiences. Social interactions
and the cultural meanings that are abstracted from these interactions by
those present at such encounters (active participants and listeners alike),
as the quote from Sapir suggests, are integral to this process-oriented
perspective. Although in many situations it would be more accurate to refer
to processes that are jointly social and cultural (as well as cognitive), for
17
ease of reference cultural processes will be used to refer to the amalgam of
cultural and social processes. Separate mention of social processes will be
used to draw attention to the socially situated and interactional dimensions
of meaning making. At a broader level, social processes can refer to the role
of pre-existing structural arrangements in facilitating or impeding partici-
pation in activities and groups as well as expectations linked to specic
interactional settings. For example, as in the narratives examined here,
what is reported to physicians relates only to physical symptoms.
The focus on cultural processes highlights connections between
experience, learning, sharing and variability (see Garro, 2000a; Strauss &
Quinn, 1997). Through talk and action, individuals are exposed to ways of
thinking about the world (or specic aspects of the world) and ways of
acting in and responding to the world. These experiences may be
mediated through cultural products (e.g. books, televisions, computers).
Learning through similar life experiences can result in sharing in diverse
locations throughout the world (Strauss & Quinn, 1997, p. 7). For example,
biomedical physicians whether from Japan, the US or somewhere else
will share ways of recognizing, labeling, thinking about and dealing with
disease despite the many ways they differ from each other and even though
each has been trained in medical schools and hospitals within their own
countries. A limited distribution characterizes other ways-of-knowing.
There are, for example, widely known explanatory frameworks for illness
within the Anishinaabe community that are essentially unknown (not
culturally available) to individuals living in nearby rural communities who
are descendants of European settlers. Within the Anishinaabe community
it is possible to see these cultural resources as a form of collective memory,
resources variably relied upon by individuals to help make sense of ones
own experience and in relation to unfolding events in the social world.
Individual lives are embedded in a variety of social and cultural
processes which shape them, although not in a deterministic fashion. Vari-
ability in any given setting is anticipated as individuals participate in and
encounter diverse cultural processes. In addition to understandings that
are widely known within a given setting there exist others which are less
shared but no less cultural. These may even appear idiosyncratic, as in the
case of one woman in the Anishinaabe community who linked her high
blood pressure to a blood transfusion she had after an accident. She told
of how a television program had alerted her to the possibility for illness to
be transferred in this manner and saw this as most likely in her case as she
discredited a number of other possible explanations that were commonly
offered by other community members. This way of understanding what
happened to her in the past was seen to have clear implications for dealing
with high blood pressure in the present and future.
6
In this article, refer-
ence to the framework of possibilities afforded by culture or to culturally
18
available knowledge is intended to acknowledge the existence of cultural
resources that are not widely known in a given setting. It also recognizes
that cultural resources may be introduced or come to be seen as relevant
through social interactions. The shift in emphasis from culture to cultural
processes highlights the dynamic nature of lived experience and
cultural learning, and allows for individual agency and invention while still
recognizing culture as the medium of human existence. In the remainder
of this article, more attention is given to cultural processes and explana-
tory frameworks that are not characteristic of mainstream North
American cultural settings.
As noted earlier, within a given setting, there may be signicant diver-
sity in the extent to which individuals deem different explanatory
frameworks as credible accounts of illness and misfortune. Similarities and
differences in life experiences, for example, those associated with historical
circumstances as well as participation in different activities and social
groupings may lead to patterning in the distribution of variability. In the
Anishinaabe community, for example, a number of adults had spent time
during their youth in boarding schools where teachers strove to distance
students from their lives in the Anishinaabe community. One way of
achieving this was by instructing pupils in modern ways of thinking about
illness and of relating to the world. Often, though by no means always,
these individuals did not credit accounts of Anishinaabe sickness and did
not think that Anishinaabe medicine persons (or healers) had special gifts.
There was also a marked tendency for the adult children of these indi-
viduals to express similar views. The case histories obtained from these
individuals about illnesses in their households were typically restricted to
explanatory frameworks more commonly encountered in the broader
North American society. (Though it was also learned that in some
instances another household member, such as a spouse or a grandparent,
consulted an Anishinaabe medicine person without informing those who
did not take a positive stance towards Anishinaabe healers [ Garro, 1998,
p. 350] . Thus, clearly divergent accounts of the same illness were at times
obtained from different persons living in the same household.) Variability
within the community is not consistent with some version of accultura-
tion. The situation is more complex. Many in this community view
themselves as Christians and attend church services while also expressing
condence in the special abilities of Anishinaabe medicine persons.
Anishinaabe medicine persons also number among those in the church
congregation.
7
In addition, some of the community members with higher
levels of formal education and income, along with their families, were
among the most frequent visitors to Anishinaabe medicine persons. They
had the economic wherewithal to appropriately acknowledge the Anishi-
naabe medicine persons assistance (see Garro, 1998, p. 345) and they
19
tended to consult both Anishinaabe medicine persons and physicians
(whose fees are covered by universal health insurance in Canada) essen-
tially concurrently. Further, although the impact is difcult to assess, there
were a variety of other inuences, many in contexts outside the community
for example, listening to elders and healers from other communities in a
variety of venues, visits to other communities (e.g. pow-wows, hockey
games, family-oriented social events) and interactions with individuals
from a variety of First Nations communities, involvement in university-
based Native Studies Departments, referrals to traditional Native healers
by Indian medical interpreters in hospital settings (see ONeil, 1988), and
the impact of Aboriginal Spirituality programs in Canadian federal peni-
tentiaries (Waldram, 1993, 1997).
8
Overall, in a variety of venues, both
within and outside the community, this was a time of increasing dis-
cussions about the role of Aboriginal healing traditions in the present day.
This trend has continued since the time of my eld research.
Narrat ive and Sel f Processes
Along with the general human potential to learn through social means and
the spontaneous and vital human capacity (Shore, 1996, p. 319) to confer
meaning on experience, the notion of narrative thinking is central to the
socially situated experientially based process-oriented perspective
advanced here. As a fundamental human way to understand life in time,
through narrative we try to make sense of how things have come to pass
and how our actions and the actions of others have shaped our history.
Writing about the spatio-temporal orientation of the self, Hallowell (1955,
p. 94) noted: Human beings maintain awareness of self-continuity and
personal identity in time through the recall of past experiences that are
identied with the self-image. Bruner (1987, p. 12) maintains: We seem to
have no other way of describing lived time save in the form of narrative.
Accordingly, we becomethe autobiographical narratives by which we tell
about our lives (p. 15; italics in original) so that a life is not how it was
but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold (p. 31). Narra-
tive thinking links the remembered past to concerns of the present, with
the potential to make projections into the future. Although by no means a
transparent communicator of ones thoughts and feelings, storytelling can
be used to convey what matters to a narrator and in this manner mediate
between an inner world of thought-feeling and an outer world of observ-
able actions and events (Bruner, 1986; Carrithers, 1992; Mattingly, 1998;
Mattingly & Garro, 1994).
9
Stories of personal experience disclose stances
taken towards other specic persons with the potential to provide insight
into conceptions on the nature of personhood.
20
Narratives of personal experience rely on interpretive frameworks of
relevance within culturally constituted behavioral environments. Through
the narrative process, personal experience is inevitably congured in ways
that reveal what Ochs and Capps (2001, p. 55) refer to as a central paradox:
. . . the practice of rendering personal experience in narrative form entails
de-personalization. Though the experiences may be unique, they become
socially forged. Idiosyncratic experiences become co-narrated according to
local narrative formats, recognizable types of situations and people, and
prevailing moral frameworks, which inevitably constrain representation and
interpretation. It is in this sense that narratives of personal experience are at
the same time narratives of impersonal experience.
The narratives presented here convey how the effort after meaning need
not run along a single path but may admit alternative interpretive possi-
bilities. Cultural understandings serve as resources, but there are often
multiple interpretive frameworks which are potentially applicable to a
given situation and what is considered interpretively plausible may change
through time in response to ensuing events. Different ways of framing or
labeling may carry divergent narrative ramications. The pull towards
coherence and order in narrative theorizing may be accompanied by a pull
towards remaining open to allow for engagement with other conceivable
framings (Good, 1994; Ochs & Capps, 2001). When we are in the midst of
troubling experiences, it often isnt clear what actually matters or how
things will develop. There is the potential for multiple, even conicting,
interpretive frameworks, to be seen as relevant. Even after the trouble
subsides, interpretation may remain ambiguous (see Garro, 1998, 2002).
Narrative activity can take the form of a sense-making processrather than
as a nished product in which loose ends are knit together into a single
storyline (Ochs & Capps, 2001, p. 15; italics in original).
Although each is told from the perspective of a single individual, these
narratives are very much socially embedded. Further, the experiences
recounted have been deemed worth telling a story about. Mattingly (1998,
p. 154; italics removed) states: If narrative offers a homology to lived
experience, the dominant formal feature which connects the two is not
narrative coherence but narrative drama. Seen as human dramas,
the narratives impart how complex interactions with socially positioned
agents are seen to contribute to the unfolding understanding of lived
experience through legitimating, challenging, offering alternatives, or
persuading shifts in the construal of life events.
If it is not appropriate in the context of this article to speak of an Ojibwa
self (or an Anishinaabe self, or a non-western self, or a western self ), then
it becomes critical to establish just what types of selves are being referred
to here. Although grounded in a much larger argument than will be
21
explored here, Csordas has argued that analytic attention should be given
to self processes rather than selves. Other scholars (e.g. de Munck, 1992,
2000; Dennett, 1991; Ewing, 1990) contend that the very notion of a self
is a necessary illusion and there is no self (or selves) enthroned somewhere
in the head (or elsewhere) (de Munck, 2000, p. 39). Csordas (1994, p. 276)
notes that if the self is elusive, it is because there is no such thing as the
self. There are only self processes, and these are orientational processes.
These processes of orientation are the same as those which move experi-
ence from indeterminacy to what Hallowell referred to as culturally reied
objects (Csordas, 1994, p. 7). Csordas also brings in Bourdieus (1977)
concept of habitus, dened as a system of perduring dispositions which
highlights the lived, acted content of the behavioral environment
(Csordas, 1994, p. 9). Thus, those:
. . . who experience these self processes are not only oriented with respect to
certain cultural domains, as Hallowell (1955) supposed, but their being in
the world is integrated and coordinated within a habitus. Whereas Hallow-
ells idea of a behavioral environment presumes the environment to be a
condition external to the self, the notion of habitus suggests that self process
and habitus are mutually constitutive. (Csordas, 1994, p. 276)
Here, the position taken is that narratives of troubling experience can help
illuminate this mutual constitution of self process and behavioral environ-
ment by exploring the role of jointly cultural, social and cognitive processes
in relation to our very conceptions of our selves and our powers (Bruner,
1996, p. x). The shift from self to self processes complements Hollans
(1992) call for studies that investigate the manner and extent to which
various interpretive frameworks (cultural models) are lived by in specic
contexts. In place of cultural conceptions or cultural models of the self,
attention is directed to the processes through which selves come to frame
their own actions and those of other persons in relation to pre-existing
cultural understandings. The focus here will be on reports of self-related
experience in relation to a limited range of interpretive frameworks for
troubling experiences and some of the conceptions of personhood associ-
ated with these frameworks. With regard to self processes, my formulation
for this article, of course, does not encompass all that could be considered,
but it does highlight aspects of self processes approachable through narra-
tives of troubling experience.
Cul t ural Processes and Narrat ing Sel f -Rel at ed
Experiences
The two cases introduced in this section are based on transcripts of inter-
views with two individuals from a Nhinaw (Cree) community in
22
Manitoba (these cases are more fully discussed in Bruyre & Garro, 1998).
In the rst interview, a mixture of Nhinaw and English was spoken
(following the lead of the interviewee), whereas in the second the Nhinaw
language was used almost exclusively. Both narratives came out of dis-
cussions about a condition referred to as -k-pmikwhit awiyak. In
essence, this term translates as one who has been given a twisted mouth by
someone else through the use of bad medicine (although literally the
translation alludes to a twisted face the focus is understood to be on the
mouth, hence the more colloquial twisted mouth which serves as the
English gloss for this condition). In the Anishinaabe community, where a
closely related Algonkian language is commonly spoken, a parallel term
exists. As in the Anishinaabe community, reference to bad medicine
involves the intentional, malevolent, and covert wielding of power by
another human being. (When speaking in English, bad medicine and
curse may also be used.) Cases comparable with those detailed here were
recorded in the Anishinaabe community during regular household visits
to a sample of families to ask about ongoing illnesses. Because only notes
were taken during the household visits, I do not have a full record of what
was said in these cases (but see summaries of two parallel cases from the
Anishinaabe community in Garro, 1998, p. 348).
The rst case concerns a woman in her thirties who will be referred to here
as Mrs Cook. At the time of her illness, Mrs Cook was living in a large urban
center and studying for a career in biomedicine (a eld in which she works
today). Prior to this illness, Mrs Cook knew of, but gave little credence to
bad medicine, an opinion shared by both of her parents. During a visit to
her home community during summer vacation, Mrs Cook went to bed early
one evening after taking an aspirin to deal with a headache and a twitching
eye. The next morning, she awoke to nd:
My face was all twisted, my tongue was pulled back to one side. Anyway
I go Aaaaah! I thought I had a stroke or something and I dont feel
anything on my face. My mom and dad came running out and they said
Whats the matter? My eye was like this [ she pulls her eyelid down] .
Her mother, who for as long as the condition lasted considered it as a
common, non-serious illness, described it as simply a pulled face, using
Nhinaw terms that did not implicate bad medicine or the involvement of
others. Mrs Cooks initial, and indeed her most consistent, interpretation
was to see the condition as linked with a car accident she was in a month
previously. However, when a visit to a physician and a prescribed medication
did little to help, she started to actively entertain the possibility that bad
medicine was involved. She recounted:
I was scared. Some people in our community they sort of accept it, you
know, the traditional way. Someone cursed on you. If they did not like
23
the way you did something. My brother said Who did you provoke?Ha,
ha. And I said, I dont know, maybe it was unintentional. He said, It
does not matter, if they dont like your attitude or something, they might
do something to you. But thats what they used to say. Someone cursed
you for something. Maybe if you wore too much make-up and someone
didnt like you, you know?
She went to see an Anishinaabe medicine person who took steps to rid her
of the bad medicine and gave her a herbal remedy. Her father expressed
skepticism about the validity of the actions performed by this medicine
person. Mrs Cook later speculated that the herbal remedy may have had
anti-inammatory ingredients and it was this that led to the modest
improvement she experienced. Still concerned, she continued her quest by
consulting an acupuncturist and then went back to her physician. In retro-
spect, she is open to the possibility that any (or all) of the practitioners she
consulted contributed to her almost complete recovery. Nevertheless, even
though she was quite willing to experiment and confer with the Anishinaabe
medicine person, Mrs Cook remains quite doubtful about whether bad
medicine, if it even exists at all, can permeate bodily boundaries and lead to
afiction. Her distrust of therapeutic efforts aimed at addressing bad
medicine has not lessened; the efcacy of the Anishinaabe healers minis-
trations have come to be seen as limited to the herbal remedy. Mrs Cook
does not credit the medicine person as having the gift for communicating
with other-than-human persons; she does not participate in this assumptive
world.
In contrast, Mr Peters, a man in his late twenties, accepts bad medicine as
the only reasonable account of what happened to him. His account can be
considered a more typical case in that the ascribed cause and what is judged
to be effective treatment t local cultural expectations for this condition. Mr
Peters described the onset:
It was last year before Christmas. We were home all day. Then, in the
evening, it was then I started to feel it. It was hardening on the left side.
I looked at myself in the mirror. I was trying to smile and make use of
my face movements, wondering what was happening to my face. I went
to show it to [ my mother-in-law] . She told me that I was getting twisted
mouth. She knew. I was really scared, really frightened.
His mother-in-law, renowned as being gifted with some healing powers,
advised an emergency visit to a highly regarded medicine person in the next
province. Mr Peters sought help from a kinsman who wholeheartedly, and
without hesitation, supported the decision to consult a medicine person. Mr
Peters explained: Thanks to [ name] who made all the arrangements. About
the money that is. We would not have been able to go otherwise. He gave us
some money and said just go! This response indicates that this high level
of concern, as well as the recognized need for obtaining treatment from a
medicine person, is shared by others in the community. Despite a snow
24
storm that made driving treacherous and substantially lengthened their
journey, he set off with his family almost immediately. The medicine person
advised them that someone was attempting to get at his mother-in-law
through Mr Peters. The medicine person did not disclose the identity of the
person using bad medicine, but stated he knew who it was. Mr Peters main-
tained that recovery began almost immediately after the medicine persons
treatment to remove the physical presence of bad medicine from his body.
He was told by the medicine person that it would take a month to return to
normal. Despite this improvement, he decided to consult his physician upon
returning home, just in case something else could be done. The account the
physician was provided with dealt only with the physical symptoms. Of the
physician, who diagnosed the problem as Bells palsy, Mr Peters commented:
They have a name for it but they dont know what causes it. They only have
a name for it. For Mr Peters this inability to offer an adequate explanation
of what had occurred is a deciency in the biomedical model and strength-
ened his conviction about the involvement of bad medicine.
Reecting on what happened, Mr Peters stated: someone hates you, is
jealous of you. I always think all I have is my family. I thought at least the
person who used the bad medicine did not kill me. I still have my children.
It is because someone has taken umbrage or is envious, that is what causes
it. His ongoing anxiety, especially with regard to his children, is palpable
when he adds that if the person using the bad medicine cant get the person
they want, they get the weakest link to that person. For Mr Peters it is
through this experience that his pre-existing cultural knowledge of the
possible bodily intrusion of bad medicine has become tempered into the
certitude that some (clandestine but ostensibly affable) persons have the
capability and desire to carry out such acts, even going as far as to kill
another person, perhaps even a child. It is not surprising that Mr Peters
reports being much less trusting of others. In his own words:
I dont know why it happened to me. I dont hate anyone. I dont dislike
anyone. I hate that anyone could do that to a fellow human being. I guess
a person has to be really evil to do that. Those people, especially those
who are called friends, I dont trust them anymore.
While the embodied trouble instigating these two accounts is similar, the
reported experience takes quite different form. The privileging of a
biomedical interpretation for responding to bodily ills, underpinned by
labeling the experience as a pulled face, orients Mrs Cook initially to visit
a physician. Nevertheless, throughout this incident she struggles with the
widely shared proclivity (within her home community) towards interpret-
ing what happened to her in terms of bad medicine. Although Mrs Cook
knows about bad medicine, prior to the illness she rejected the construal
of reality this alternative perspective entails. Yet, in this case, knowing
allows for the possibility that this interpretive framework might be useful
for negotiating the world. Although there is a pull here towards ordering
25
what happened in a manner consistent with biomedical understandings,
there is also a pull towards remaining open so that conceivable framings
are not prematurely closed off. In Mrs Cooks narrative account, multiple
perspectives are entertained, suggesting alternative narrative plots about
the source and outcome of the illness, which justied continued care
seeking and sustained hope for the possibility of a cure.
For Mr Peters it is essentially the converse situation. From almost as soon
as he rst experienced symptoms, he sees himself and is seen to be suffer-
ing the effects of bad medicine, an assessment that sets in motion the need
to seek out an appropriate source of care. Still, once the crisis has abated,
Mr Peters consulted a physician, to assure himself there was nothing
further that could be done.
For both cases, social processes exemplied by the reactions of others
enter into how unfolding events are responded to and later reconstructed
(see Garro, 2001). Mrs Cooks parents consistently framed the situation as
that of a normal illness. Nevertheless, the teasing, but concerned,
comments of Mrs Cooks brother contributed to her decision to see an
Anishinaabe medicine person. For the contrasting case of Mr Peters, the
shocked and frightened responses of others catapult him and his family
into an urgent, almost dangerously so, quest for care. Implicit in these
narratives are self processes, as the protagonists move from culturally
informed experiences to culturally grounded accounts of what happened
and why. For Mr Peters, his manner of being in the world is altered through
his experiential knowledge that bad medicine is a real threat to his well-
being. His outlook is reinforced by the conrmatory reactions of those
around him, especially those of trusted family members. As a consequence
of this experience, bad medicine and concerns that affability can mask
hostility have become more salient aspects of the behavioral environment
within which he is prepared to act. For Mrs Cook, bad medicine remains
within the realm of possibility but is placed at the periphery, with negligi-
ble impact on her experiential reality.
Social and Cul t ural Processes in Personal Transf ormat ions
The nal, rather extended narrative account, from the Anishinaabe com-
munity, starts with a troubling situation and involves a transition from
indeterminacy to a culturally grounded interpretation that motivates
action and sets in motion a transformation of self. Social processes, in this
instance advice given by a medicine person, radically alter a womans
interpretation of a singular, emotionally charged, occurrence and lead to
new ways of thinking about her future possibilities. Her husband is seen to
undergo a transformation of a different sort, one in which he comes to
accept the reality of Anishinaabe sickness and the behavioral environment
26
it entails. To follow this account, some additional background information
about Anishinaabe sickness in the context of the contemporary com-
munity is needed.
Generally speaking, I found that knowledge about Anishinaabe sickness
(which encompasses more than bad medicine) was widely shared in the
community with numerous case histories across a sample of households.
Consistent in broad strokes with what Hallowell reported (see Garro, 1990,
2000b, 2002 for elaboration), three features recurred across the cases I
recorded: (i) it originates in discrete and identiable, or potentially
knowable, actions of human beings, alive or dead; (ii) it involves breaches
of certain behavioral tenets which govern social relationships within the
Anishinaabe behavioral environment; and (iii) a diagnosis of Anishinaabe
sickness can neither be conrmed nor can an appropriate course of action
be determined without the guidance of other-than-human persons. As
noted earlier, since the majority of individuals have not been gifted in ways
that allow for direct interactions with other-than-human persons on a
recurring basis, the assistance of an Anishinaabe medicine person is sought
as a way of entering into already established relationships with other-than-
human persons. With their gift, Anishinaabe medicine persons are
positioned to act as intermediaries on behalf of those who seek guidance
and knowledge from other-than-human persons. However, in the case of
Anishinaabe sickness, to receive efcacious counsel and care from a
medicine person requires more than seeking their help and following their
advice. It requires conviction in the ontological reality of other-than-
human persons, acceptance of the cultural rationale for the specic
instance of Anishinaabe sickness, and complete condence in the medicine
persons gifts. The epistemological stance implicit here is a relational one
in which the route for acquiring true knowledge about the etiology and
most appropriate way to deal with troubling experiences is through direct
interaction with other-than-human persons.
In addition to bad medicine, the other prominent causal framework is
ondjine. Ondjinerefers to illness or misfortune that occurs for a reason
and which can be attributed to specic types of transgressions. To partici-
pate in the Anishinaabe behavioral environment is to enter into respectful
relations with other animate beings, and one common explanation of
ondjine is causing an animal to suffer unnecessarily. Humans are also
required to behave appropriately towards sources of power, which includes
fullling obligations towards other-than-human persons. When these
obligations are overlooked or disregarded, even unintentionally and/or
unknowingly, ondjinemay result.
10
Further, ondjineis the inevitable conse-
quence of the abuse of power intrinsic to the use of bad medicine.
Anishinaabe sickness may be suspected when a physician is unable to
cure an illness, or if there are other clues that suggest that the situation is
27
a more complicated one. Ambiguity may exist even when a biomedical
practitioner is able to effectively treat the surface manifestations of the
illness. Appearances are seen as possibly misleading, with the root of the
problem left untouched. If left unaddressed, an Anishinaabe sickness will
lead to recurring misfortune, affecting the same individual and/or family
members.
Still, similar to the two cases from the Nhinaw community, despite
evidence that almost all knew of these explanations, variability exists with
regard to how often individuals reported considering such possibilities in
times of trouble. There were some who were considered by others as
inclined to act too readily upon fears that bad medicine was implicated and
still others who steadfastly disavowed any belief in Anishinaabe sickness
and further did not credit Anishinaabe medicine persons as being gifted
with any special abilities. The majority can be considered as located some-
where between these two extremes.
Thus, to varying degrees, cultural understandings about Anishinaabe
sickness inform self processes through orienting individuals to the possi-
bility that bodily afictions and other misfortune may be a consequence of
disordered social relationships. The centrality of interpersonal relation-
ships and the normative expectations governing respectful relations among
animate beings should not be seen as contradicting ethnographic accounts
of individualism and the high value placed on autonomy but it does add
another layer to the portrayal of self processes within the Anishinaabe
community. For many, the reality of Anishinaabe sickness both alerts indi-
viduals to threats to autonomy from other individuals in the community
as well as sets limits to autonomy, predicated on the dependence of human
beings on the benevolence of other-than-human persons (cf. Black, 1977a;
Hallowell, 1955, p. 71).
Emily McKay is one of those who is oriented to the possibility of Anishi-
naabe sickness. At the time of the events recounted here, Emily was in her
mid-thirties, married with three children. Her family was one that was
visited every two weeks to ask about ongoing illness cases, but Emily was also
someone I knew relatively well. I lodged at the home of one of her close
friends in the community and we visited relatively frequently, dropping in
on each other at home and sharing cups of tea and conversation. Emily is a
uent speaker of both English and Anishinaabemowin. Our discussions
were in English. During one of the case collection visits, Emily indicated that
she was quite worried that she might be heading towards a nervous break-
down. Despite the fact that she had recently started a new job that she was
quite happy to get, the past few weeks had been rather trying. I knew from
earlier conversations that Emilys marriage had been going through a tumul-
tuous period for some time but Emily reported that things had worsened
considerably during the past few weeks and Emilys husband had been
28
treating her badly. Complicating the situation further, Emilys car kept
breaking down, causing her to be late on a couple of occasions for her new
job. What was even more worrisome, however, were several spells of dizzi-
ness and debilitating headaches. Emily indicated that she was planning to
see her doctor the next day but, in addition to raising concerns about a
nervous breakdown she speculated that someone could be trying to harm
her with bad medicine. Emily expressed specic concern that someone was
jealous of her new job. Like other cases that I had followed in the
community, the conuence of cultural and cognitive processes contribute to
a state of heightened awareness for detecting additional signs that were
consistent with a construction of the self being assaulted by bad medicine.
In making sense of what was happening, both Emily and I were drawing on
other remembered accounts of how cases involving bad medicine typically
unfold. In a later conversation, Emily commented on how suspicions arise
that someone is directing bad medicine towards you:
When things start to go wrong. When you seem to notice a change in
something. Its usually that something will start happening to your car,
but then usually its just a coincidence, its just your car has had it. Or,
or when one of your kids are . . . theres a change in their attitude or stuff
like that. The other thing too is youll dream things. Youll dream of this
person or youll dream of something and then youll kind of know that
you know, youll suspect it as if someones trying to do something to
harm you.
As I was getting ready to leave, Emily asked if I could take her to one of the
local stores to pick up a couple of things. She was still having problems with
her car. As we left the store, Emily, visibly shaken, asked me if I had noticed
how another woman had stared at her while we stood at the cash register.
She indicated that this woman was one of the unsuccessful applicants for her
job. This is one example of how the orientation of the self towards the threat
to autonomy posed by bad medicine impacts on attention and perception.
Taken together, a number of Emilys worries the cars breakdowns,
impaired health, the new job, the perception of malice in a distrusted other
converge on a prototypical cultural scenario consistent with suspected bad
medicine and would have been understood as such (without mentioning
bad medicine) by any community member.
When I next saw Emily a couple of weeks later she told me she had seen
the doctor at the local health center complaining of the dizziness and
headaches. The doctor examined her, ran a couple of tests, and in the end
suggested that the most likely explanation was that she was under a lot of
stress. This, of course, did nothing to allay her fears that someone was
attempting to harm her using bad medicine. That evening, after Emily had
gone to bed, something happened that convinced her that she needed to seek
the help of a medicine person. Here is how Emily talked about this event:
29
Well, it was just one night. Like I woke up. I didnt know if I was
dreaming or something, but the way it was, I was lying on my stomach.
Then it seemed like I woke up. I guess I had seen something. There was
something behind me, like something black. And I kept trying to look
back and I couldnt. I couldnt look back. I could see something out of
the corner of my eye. But I couldnt its as if something was holding
me, not letting me look back. I just couldnt look back. And then I felt
like the bed was just moving. And then later the next morning, Frank
[ her husband] asked me if the bed was moving or something, and I told
him yes, it felt like it was moving. Then I told him, I thought that was a
dream, did you really feel the bed moving?He said yes. Well, then I got
up and all that night I kept trying to think was this a dream or some-
thing, or did it happen. I couldnt sleep. I was scared after that, cause I
thought what if this is the devil or something. Then I told my mom
about it and then she told me that I should do something about it. She
told me, it must mean something. And then I decided to see a medicine
man.
Jointly cultural, social and cognitive processes contribute to the narrative
marking of this event as signicant and meaningful in ow of time in self-
related experience a dramatic nighttime encounter with implications for
the future. As Emily tells us, Franks question about the bed moving steers
Emily towards an interpretation that this wasnt just an ordinary dream but
one that heralded other possibilities, including that someone might be
trying to harm her. Unnerved, she seeks advice from her mother. Her
mothers judgment that it must mean something further points towards
this interpretation. In other comments, Emily foreshadowed the likely
involvement of bad medicine. At best, it was simply a nightmare, at worst a
premonition of impending danger. The decision to confer with a medicine
man recognizes the value of his gifts for conrming or dismissing this threat.
The person Emily consulted had been widely recognized in the community
as gifted for a period of around thirty years. Emily recounted that she went
to see the medicine man (who, like Emily, considered himself a devout
Christian) with the express purpose of obtaining protection medicine for
her and her family. However, when she actually visited him, she only told
him about the nocturnal episode itself and nothing about her fears. Emily
reported what happened during the visit:
Then he [ the medicine person] started singing. I heard three voices. I
know I heard a mans voice and two old womens voices, cause I was
sitting there and he was singing. And I thought, oh no, what if someones
coming, while hes singing and all this, cause I heard someone. I kept
looking and there was nobody, you know, I was just waiting for someone
to come up the stairs and no one was coming. All through that time like
my legs just felt weak and you know, I dont know how I felt, I just felt
like I wanted to cry right there and then. Then, after he nished singing
he told me that dream that I had was like a warning it was the devil
30
it was sort of like he was trying to take my life. The spirits were giving
me a warning through my dream for me to try and do something right
away. The dream was meant for real, that I had to do something right
away.
11
At rst, unaware that the medicine person was in communication with spirit
beings (other-than-human persons), Emily McKay does not realize the three
voices she hears are not those of other human beings coming to visit but
rather her spirit guides/protectors. But through the medicine mans
guidance she comes to understand that they were also present at her dream.
As well, he presents an alternative scenario, one which still draws on
culturally available understandings (i.e. consistent with a culturally appro-
priate narrative form) but which rejects the more common and predictable
interpretation of bad medicine. In this alternative scenario, by restraining
her movements, the spirit protectors shielded her from the presence of evil
the unseen black shape which, for Emily, is now conrmed as the devil.
Emily explained that what transpired is like somebodys trying to help you
. . . someones trying to protect you. The headaches and spells of dizziness
came to be seen as additional warning signs sent by her spirit protectors.
While phenomenally the description of Emilys nighttime encounter
remains the same, as a consequence of the social processes set in motion by
her consultation with the medicine person her interpretation has been quite
dramatically transformed. In essence, Emilys health problems and the
dream were recast as consistent with ondjineand thus indicating that Emily
needed to make some changes in her life. Emily McKay describes herself as
someone who believes deeply in God and in what she refers to as the
tradition. But, due to the number of stressful events in her life, she admitted
that she was not living up to her spiritual commitments, she was letting
things go. In accepting the protection of other-than-human persons and
acknowledging her dependence on their benevolence, Emily was incurring
an obligation to change her life and behave more respectfully by honoring
her commitments to the other-than-human persons.
In addition, Emily now considers herself blessed by the visitation,
especially as the medicine man intimated that the visit bears the promise of
future gifts. He also instructed her in a number of rules she should follow
to give thanks to those who are watching over her. Although only cryptical
allusions were made at the time by Emily, she has come to see the import of
the medicine persons intimations as a sign that she herself is gifted with the
ability to interact with other-than-human persons in a way that will obligate
her to take on the mantle of a medicine person in the future. The dream is
taken as a portal onto true knowledge which, similar to what Hallowell
reports for the dreams and visions experienced during the puberty fast of
the Anishinaabe past, is a self-related experience of the same order of
phenomenological reality as that experienced in waking life. For Emily, the
dream has become a major transition point in her life.
Emily stopped being concerned that one of the unsuccessful job
applicants was jealous and attempting to get back at her. Her headaches and
31
dizzy spells abated to a large extent. Suspicions about bad medicine soon
resurfaced, however, as Frank, Emilys husband, continued to behave in-
appropriately and uncharacteristically. They would seem to be getting along
and then, suddenly, things would explode. Speaking of this time, Emily said
she didnt know what to believe. While it was possible that bad medicine
was causing Franks bad behavior, it was also possible that it was just Frank
being mean. At the same time, Emily noted:
Because there were just certain times of the day when Frank was being
such an idiot . . . and I always wondered why is it only at these times.
Cause it started at evenings, and during the day was just OK, and
evenings, like, he says, I want to go here, I want to go here, like he
couldnt stay at home. It was like he was acting, like a sixteen year old, I
guess. And, he was so mean at times.
What especially gave Emily pause, however, were some times immediately
after he had mistreated her when:
. . . he would say, I dont know why I do that. Like you know he would
break down and cry and he would never do that before. And he said it
seems like, lets see how would I say this in English, but anyway what he
said was I dont know, I dont know why Im doing this, I try hard not
to, but, I still do it.
Emily, however, was reluctant to even share her concerns with Frank as he
had many times in the past expressed amazement that anyone could believe
in Anishinaabe sickness and in the powers of medicine persons. Over the
course of their marriage, Emily had consulted with medicine persons on
numerous occasions, for herself and for her children, but she had never once
told Frank about any of these visits. One time, soon after their marriage,
Frank became extremely ill and cure was elusive despite being under medical
care. Emily went to see a medicine man who told her that an old girlfriend
of Franks, someone with whom he had been involved before he married
Emily, was the source of his illness and, if left unaddressed, that Frank would
eventually die. The medicine man said that he would take care of it and
Frank recovered soon after. After a while, Emily told him that somebody put
medicine on him, like he didnt believe me at that time. I nally told him
about that, and he didnt believe me. He said it just wasnt true and all that.
One evening, when Emilys sister was visiting. Frank started treating
Emily badly. Emily described what happens next:
I was going to leave right there and then, I was standing at the door and
I told Frank, Im going to leave. Im never going to come back. Then you
know, we were just arguing and all this. And then just right there in front
of me and my sister he just stood there and he broke down and cried
and he said, I dont know why this is happening. And, and then right
there and then like I kind of knew, like I kind of believed it. Like I
believed it but its so hard to say I believed it and then again I couldnt
32
believe it, like cause its happened so many times that I didnt want to
believe him, I guess. And then, but anyway at that time, cause he really
keeps to himself. He wont tell anybody anything and that time I couldnt
believe he would break down and cry right in front of my sister, cause
he always tries to make himself look good in front of everybody. I was
surprised that he did that in front of my sister and then I kind of, I kind
of thought, you know, there really is something wrong.
Emily left but the next day she went to see the same medicine man that she
had previously consulted. The medicine man told her that it was the same
woman again, this time trying to break Emily and Frank up as a couple
through the use of bad medicine to alter Franks behavior. Again, the
medicine man said he would take care of it. After a few days at her sisters
home, Emily decided to give Frank one more chance. What happened next
was truly surprising to Emily:
Suddenly, a few days after I came back, Frank wanted to go see a
medicine man and I wondered. And then he said all that time I was gone,
he had seen something or he imagined this, this woman or something.
He said that he had seen her in his dream and all that, and then he knew
Id take it seriously. I didnt say anything to him and he was the one that
wanted to go and see a medicine man. Then we were told that someone
was trying to put medicine on him again or something and then he was
told to take some [ protection] stuff and he was supposed to get some of
that stuff youre supposed to carry with you all the time.
Emily reports that since these events transpired, they have had only the
normal ups and downs of a married couple. From Emilys perspective, Frank
has undergone a transformation through which he accepts as reality the
conceptions of self and behavioral environment within which Anishinaabe
sickness is embedded. He even initiated a family journey to a medicine
person living in another province to seek spiritual guidance for living in a
manner consistent with the tradition.
Concl usion
Through narratives of troubling experiences this article has explored how
cultural, social and cognitive processes enter into the perception and
interpretation of self-related experience as well as the mutual constitution
of self and behavioral environment. Steering clear of the pitfalls encoun-
tered when hypothesizing particular kinds of cultural selves (e.g. an
Anishinaabe self, a Japanese self ), the approach taken here draws attention
to self-processes as orientational processes the self-related implications
of living by particular culturally based understandings.
Seen as a kind of collective memory in the Anishinaabe community,
cultural understandings associated with Anishinaabe sickness serve as
resources variably relied upon by individuals to help make sense of ones
33
own experience in relation to unfolding events in the social world. Drawing
on Martin Heideggers phenomenological concept of temporality,
Mattingly (1998) and Ochs and Capps (2001) discuss the narrative struc-
turing of experience. Lived experience our life in time . . . is a time which
is always situated between a past and a future (Mattingly, 1998, p. 64). We
are always in the process of becoming and that future saturates each
present moment with meaning (Mattingly, 1998, p. 93; cf. Ochs & Capps,
2001, p. 157). In the face of uncertain future, desire plays a central
structuring role. We hope for certain endings; others we dread. We act in
order to bring certain endings about, to realize certain futures, and to avoid
others (Mattingly, 1998, p. 93). In narratives of personal experience, occur-
rence of a troubling event sets in motion the probabilitythat a subsequent
state or action will occur (Ochs & Capps, 2001, p. 172; italics in original).
These potentialities (affordances) infuse narrated events with a sense of
anticipation (Ochs & Capps, 2001, p. 172). Cultural understandings afford
plausible narrative frames that are oriented to the present in a way that
anticipates future possibilities while organizing the past. As important as
it is to address a concern of the present, an implicit aim of those seeking
the assistance of an Anishinaabe medicine person is to avoid future trouble,
which is sure to recur if Anishinaabe sickness is indeed at the base. As
sketched below, a myriad of orientations and anticipations are associated
with bad medicine and Anishinaabe sickness more generally.
To be oriented to Anishinaabe sickness as a possible cause of present
troubling experiences is to entertain the possibility that the root of
misfortune may be in ones own inappropriate actions or in the covert ill
will of another. To allow for illness and misfortune occurring as a
consequence of not living up to ones obligations to other-than-human
persons entails an acceptance of the ontological reality of such beings as
well as seeing oneself as dependent on the continuing benevolence of such
beings and of the necessity to live in a manner that recognizes this depen-
dence. To be attentive to clues that someone who seems outwardly affable
may have secretly taken steps to cause misfortune or afiction in another
contributes to a cautionary stance in interactions with all but ones most
trusted allies. To realize that bad medicine exists is to conceive that
substances can permeate bodily boundaries unnoticed by the victim. To
expect that bad medicine may lead an aficted person to behave in an
unusual fashion is to allow for an interpretation of anothers or ones own
misbehavior in a manner that is free of individual blame. To anticipate that
bad medicine boomerangs and that misfortune is the inevitable conse-
quence of covert actions that interfere with the autonomy of fellow human
beings, opens onto possibilities for interpreting the afictions of others. To
accept that other-than-human persons may bestow gifts that enable
humans to establish ongoing relations with them is to conceive that some
34
individuals may have acquired such powers. To accept that other-than-
human persons can communicate through dreams and visions is to be
open to the possibility that private sensory experiences may represent true
knowledge of the world as it currently is or as it may become.
Taken together, these orientations to reality do not correspond with
contrasts drawn between western and non-western selves based, for
example, on postulating cultures as either construing self in ways that are
independent or interdependent (e.g. Markus & Kitayama, 1991). As
illustrated, to varying extent, by the narratives examined here, cultural
understandings of Anishinaabe sickness inform self processes by orienting
individuals to the possibility that misfortune and ill health may be a conse-
quence of disordered interpersonal relations as well as to recognition of
dependence on other-than-human persons as guides to what has gone
awry. Such possibilities do not countermand an ethos of individual
autonomy and the acceptance of moral responsibility for ones own
actions, rather they reinforce them.
By participating in social life in the Anishinaabe community, individuals
may come to interact with others who rely upon cultural models of
Anishinaabe sickness to make sense of troubling experience and/or hear
narratives centered around Anishinaabe sickness and the ways-of-under-
standing and the ways-of-being that organize such accounts. These jointly
cultural, social and cognitive processes offer potentialities for orienting the
experiential self but they do not determine self-related experiences.
Although cultural resources relating to bad medicine and Anishinaabe
sickness afford tenable guidelines for understanding and being in the
world, these are not the only cultural frameworks available as interpretive
resources for moving from the indeterminacy of culturally informed
experience to culturally grounded accounts of interpretive possibilities. In
the Anishinaabe community, individuals are also likely to interact with
others who are dismissive of the assumptive world which underlies
accounts of Anishinaabe sickness and rely on other interpretive frame-
works for making narrative sense of troubling experiences. These different
frameworks for explaining misfortune implicate different sorts of self
processes. The situation with regard to bad medicine is similar in the
Nhinaw community (Bruyre, personal communication). Thus, even
though an individual may know about Anishinaabe sickness and about
the relational epistemology and ways in which disordered social relation-
ships are seen to result in illness and other misfortune, there is great
variability in the extent to which these understandings guide self processes
so that individuals align with and render personal experience in a manner
compatible with such understandings. As in the examples of Mrs Cook and
Mr Peters, individuals may engage in subjunctivizing tactics (Good, 1994;
Good & Good, 1994) in which multiple perspectives are entertained,
35
suggesting alternative plots with divergent implications for how self, and
other persons, are understood. But overall, for Mr Peters, his pre-existing
conviction that twisted mouth implicates bad medicine dominates his
account of his experiences. For Mrs Cook this interpretive framework
remains only at the level of plausibility. She, along with her parents, is much
less inclined to accept the version of reality this interpretation entails and
she remains skeptical, but not entirely dismissive, of the existence of bad
medicine. Interpretive frameworks that come to be seen as useful for narra-
tively organizing the remembered past become possible tools with which
to meet the present and to anticipate future possibilities.
As supported by the narrative concerning Emily and Frank McKay,
jointly social, cultural and cognitive processes provide a way to talk about
transformations in self-related experience. Such self-transforming pro-
cesses can be seen most clearly in Emilys story. Given the acceptance of a
reality in which medicine persons are gifted in ways that give them access
to otherwise unattainable truths from other-than-human persons, the
medicine person sets in motion a transformation of how self-related
experience is to be understood that relies on notions of the powers which
may accrue to persons and a pre-existing culturally available narrative plot
that carries signicant implications for Emilys future self. Frank, aware of
the interpretive possibilities offered by Anishinaabe sickness, comes to
adopt a narrative framing that allows him to explain the otherwise bafing
changes in his behavior.
This process-oriented and interactive view of how experience comes to
be endowed with meaning depends upon a more dynamic and exible
conceptualization of culture in relation to the rendering of troubling
experiences; one that revolves around the interplay between the range of
historically contingent cultural resources available for endowing experi-
ence with meaning and the socially and structurally grounded processes
through which individuals learn about, orient towards and trafc in inter-
pretive plausibilities a socially situated experientially based process.
Selves and behavioral environments come to be mutually constituted with
diverse social and cultural processes that lead to intracultural variability
manifested in different proclivities for interpreting ones own experiences
and the experiences of others. In the narratives recounted here, cultural
processes and social interactions guide the interpretation of experience
with regard to pre-existing cultural understandings but the diversity of
cultural resources available for making narrative sense of troubling experi-
ence leaves open alternate framings with divergent implications for
self-related experience. The behavioral environment within which the self
is prepared to act is not a predetermined given but emergent, at once open
to revision and to subjunctive possibilities.
36
Not es
1. Reference to cognition does not exclude affect, but rather recognizes the inter-
dependence of thought, emotion, and motivation.
2. Interestingly, in at least one location (Hallowell, 1955, p. 360) the sentence
describing the central goal closes with not only for oneself but for ones
family.
3. Csordas (1994, pp. 56) also describes Hallowells approach as proto-
phenomenological for in dening the self as the product of a reexive mood,
he cast his analysis at the level of the already-objectied self. The person
already objectied is a culturally constituted representationof self (Csordas,
1994, p. 14; italics in original). In contrast, a fully phenomenological account
would recognize that whereas we are capable of becoming objects to ourselves,
in daily life this seldom occurs (Csordas, 1994, p. 6). According to Csordas
(1994, p. 8), phenomenology is a descriptive science of existential beginnings,
not of already-constituted cultural products. . . Our goal is to capture that
moment of transcendence in which perception and objectication begin,
constituting and being constituted by culture. The concept offered to allow
us to study the embodied process of perception from beginning to end is the
preobjective self a culturally constituted mode of being in the world
(Csordas, 1994, p. 8, 14; italics in original). Still, even though Hallowells
framework does not differentiate between what Csordas refers to as the pre-
objective self and an objectied self, Hallowells formulation, as already noted,
extends to implicit culturally based dispositions that structure being in the
world. In this article, attention cannot be directed to that moment of tran-
scendence as the material I examine consists of narrated accounts of past
events. The starting point here is what gets selected in the ow of human time
as requiring redress and the role of social, cultural and cognitive processes in
the narrative framing of self-related experience. As in some of my earlier work
(e.g. see the review and examples in Garro, 2001) I am also interested in how,
when remembering the personal past, recollected experiences may take on
new contours to meet the needs of present and future.
4. Attributes of personhood, which do not depend on outward appearance but
on an inner vital part which is enduring, include self-awareness, under-
standing, personal identity, volition, autonomy, speech and memory
(Hallowell, 1960, pp. 380381).
5. Although the outlook of the self is unied, Hallowell eschewed cultural deter-
minism at the individual level. While detailed case examples are not as
common in his later, more theoretical writings, some of his earlier work
claries his position. For example, in two case studies one in which an ill
man reports experiences leading to the identication of a sorcerer respons-
ible for his illness and another who hears the nearby presence of a windigo
(mythical cannibal giant) Hallowell discusses how unconscious forces and
wishes as complex personal needs selectively inuence and direct the
dynamics of perception. In the two cases, the narrator is seen as responsible
for the perceptual structuralization of this particular situation (Hallowell,
1951, pp. 184190, italics in original; see also Chapter 15 in Hallowell, 1955).
37
6. Another example of socially structured cultural processes in relation to appar-
ently idiosyncratic understandings comes from a now classic article by
Kleinman, Eisenberg, and Good (1978, p. 254) which centered on the
importance of eliciting explanatory models from patients. One of the cases
examined involved a a 60-year-old white Protestant grandmother who,
during her hospital stay, induced vomiting and urinated frequently into her
bed. A psychiatric consult was requested: When asked to explain why she was
engaging in it and what meaning it had for her, the patients response was
most revealing. Describing herself as the wife and daughter of plumbers, the
patient noted that she was informed by the medical team responsible for her
care that she had water in the lungs. Her concept of the anatomy of the
human body had the chest hooked up to two pipes leading to the mouth and
the urethra. The patient explained that she had been trying to remove as much
water from her chest as possible through self-induced vomiting and frequent
urination. She analogized the latter to the work of the water pills she was
taking, which she had been told were getting rid of the water on her chest. She
concluded: I cant understand why people are angry at me.
7. The truce-like, even harmonious, situation portrayed here is dissimilar from
that in some other Anishinaabe communities in which there are conicts
reported between Christian fundamentalists and those who believe in the
powers of Anishinaabe healers. ONeil (1988) presents a case history illus-
trating this conict at the family level. I have worked in another community
in which efforts to revitalize Anishinaabe healing traditions initially met with
diverse reactions, many of them negative ones but others quite positive. Those
opposed saw these traditions as contrary to the teachings of Christianity. At
my primary eld site, the community discussed in this article, accommo-
dation appears to have developed over time. This is a community where the
most respected medicine persons, who have been recognized as such for many
years, see themselves as descendants, in spirit if not through direct familial
connections, of other Anishinaabe medicine persons reaching back into the
communitys past.
8. Waldram (1997, p. 79) documents how a pan-Indian, heavily Plains-
inuenced culture is being promoted: it provides highly visible symbols that
many offenders (like non-Aboriginal peoples in general) have come to view
as quintessentially Indian. Prison inmates may be exposed to understand-
ings and practices that are foreign to their traditional cultures and the strong
pan-Indian orientation is likely foreign to some extent to most Aboriginal
offenders (Waldram, 1993, p. 349). Towards the end of my eldwork, a man
recently released from prison was seen by others as attempting to spread
teachings learned through one of these programs. I heard several comments
questioning his legitimacy, contrasting his explicit pedagogic efforts with the
way Anishinaabe medicine persons typically gain recognition through actions
that revealed their gift.
9. The phrase thought-feeling comes from Wikan (1989).
10. Ones offspring may suffer the consequence of their parents misdeeds. All
such cases I recorded involved young children. I have never heard of an adult
child being aficted in this manner.
38
11. Although Emily refers to the devil when telling me about her experiences, I
do not know whether references to the devil were made to or by the medicine
person. In earlier conversations with Emily she explained that the use of bad
medicine constituted evidence that someone had obtained power for evil
from the devil. She also indicated that some medicine persons were gifted with
powers for both good and evil.
Acknowl edgment s
This is a substantially revised version of a article originally prepared for a forth-
coming volume, Narrative, Self and Social Practice, edited by Uffe Jensen and
Cheryl Mattingly (University of Aarhus Press). Stimulating discussions associated
with the graduate class on narrative that I co-taught last year with Elinor Ochs
have helped me think through the revision of this manuscript. All the participants
in the class have my deep thanks. More than the citations to her work in this article
attest to, conversations with Elinor Ochs have inuenced this revision and it is a
pleasure to acknowledge these formative occasions. I would also like to express my
appreciation for other ongoing conversations with the Mind, Medicine and
Culture group at UCLA and also with Cheryl Mattingly, Candy Goodwin, Mary
Lawlor, Gelya Frank, Janet Hoskins, and Nancy Lutkehaus. I was pleased to receive
extremely helpful comments from three anonymous reviewers and I am indebted
to them for assistance in clarifying my argument. Any deciencies, of course,
remain my own. The research in the Anishinaabe community was supported by
grants from the National Health Research and Development Program of Canada
(6607140243) and the Manitoba Health Research Council (6278) and by a
Health Research Scholar career award from the National Health Research and
Development Program. I thank Robert Whitmore, as always, for his help with this
manuscript.
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LINDA C. GARRO, PHD, holds doctorates in Social Sciences Anthropology (1983,
University of California, Irvine) and Cognitive Psychology (1982, Duke Uni-
versity) and is Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of California,
Los Angeles. Her current research activities are in the areas of medical and
cognitive anthropology and center on the following topics: representing cultural
knowledge about illness; variability in cultural knowledge; health care decision
making; illness narratives; and remembering as a social, cultural and cognitive
process. Research sites include a Purpecha (Tarascan) community in Mexico and
several Anishinaabe (Ojibway) communities in Canada. She is co-author, with
James C. Young, of Medical Choice in a Mexican Village(1994, Waveland) and co-
editor, with Cheryl Mattingly, of Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness
and Healing (2000, University of California Press). Address: Department of
Anthropology, University of California at Los Angeles, 341 Haines Hall, Box
951553, Los Angeles, CA 900951553, USA. [ E-mail: lgarro@anthro.ucla.edu]
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