Can a catastrophic experience in early life contribute to the qualitative inquiry of what we humans are about? It may do so if the narrating of that experience clarifies that authentically the “we” is never a “they,” nor even a “Self-Other,” but an “I-you.” Such authentication of the “we” suggests that I am only in your presence; consequently, if you die, am I not dead also?
References
1.
Behar, R. (1991). Death and memory: From Santa Maria del Monte to Miami Beach. Cultural Anthropology, 6, 346-384.
2.
Bultman, R. (1960). Existence and faith: The shorter writings of Rudolf Bultman (S.M. Ogden, Trans. & Ed.). Cleveland, OH: World Publishing.
3.
Cátedra, M. (1992). This world, other worlds: Sickness, suicide, death, and the afterlife among the Vaqueiros de Alzada of Spain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
4.
Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time (J. Macquarrie & E. Robinson, Trans.). New York: Harper & Row.
5.
Otto, R. (1958). The idea of the holy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
6.
Panourgiá, N. (1995). Fragments of death, fables of identity: An Athenian anthropography. Madison: University of Wisconsin.
7.
Parman, S. (1990). Orduighean: A dominant symbol in the Free Church of the Scottish Highlands. American Anthropologist, 92, 295-305.
8.
Richardson, M. (1999). Place, narrative, and the writing self: The poetics of being in The Garden of Eden. The Southern Review, 35, 330-337.
9.
Richardson, M. (in press). Being-in-Christ and putting death in its place in Spanish America and in the American South: An anthropologist’s account. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
10.
Ricoeur, P. (1979). The model of the text: Meaningful action considered as a text. In P. Rabinow & W.M. Sullivan (Eds.), Interpretive social science: A reader (pp. 73-102). Berkeley: University of California Press.
11.
Rosaldo, R. (1989). Culture and truth: The remaking of social analysis. Boston: Beacon.
12.
Strauss, A. (Ed.). (1964). George Herbert Mead on social psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
13.
Unamuno, M. (1974). Soledad. Madrid, Spain: Espasa-Calpe.
14.
Weir, D. (2002). No place to die: The poetics of roadside sacred places in Mexico. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Department of Geography and Anthropology, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.
