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Making Scenes
Author(s) -
Park Melissa
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
medical anthropology quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.855
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1548-1387
pISSN - 0745-5194
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1387.2008.00024.x
Subject(s) - positivism , sociology , ethnography , existentialism , narrative , narratology , epistemology , field (mathematics) , psyche , aesthetics , philosophy , anthropology , linguistics , mathematics , pure mathematics
A tension in medical anthropology, as an interdisciplinary field, exists between those polar territories of the logic—and therefore grammars—of a positivist–scientific stance of biomedicine and a literary–philosophical one used to represent experience. Taking up literary‐philosophical and existential perspectives from anthropology proper, I draw on an ethnographic study of a sensory‐integration–based clinic to propose that imaginative practices are one arena where such tension can be worked out. Enacted narratives, as a method, reveal how imaginative practices foreground the ways in which desire and hope are integral to healing.Kenneth Burke's (1969[1945])theory of dramatism, particularly his scene: act ratio, provides an analytic lens to examine the imaginary play of a singular session between a child with autism and an occupational therapist. Further, an interpretive frame that tacks between the positivist–biomedical and literary–philosophical discourses excavates how making scenes is integral to a healing of belonging and its embodiment.