Synopses & Reviews
Hannah Arendt famously argued that politics are best understood as a power relationship between private and public realms. And storytelling, she argued, creates a vital bridge between these realms, a place where individual passions and shared perspectives can be contested and interwoven. In
The Politics of Storytellingrevised in this 2nd edition with a new preface and designanthropologist Michael Jackson explores and expands on Arendts notions, bringing stories from all around the world into impressive cross-cultural analysis.
Jackson retells stories from the Kuranko in Sierra Leone, the Australian Aboriginals, and the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissionby refugees, renegades, and war veterans. Focusing on the violent and volatile conditions under which stories are toldor silencedhe explores the power of narrative to remake reality, enabling people to symbolically alter their relations and help reclaim an existential viability. Above all, he shows how Arendts writings on narrative deepen our understanding of the critical, therapeutic, and politic role of storytelling, that it is one of the crucial ways by which we understand one another.
Review
“Michael Jacksons The Politics of Storytelling is a radical book for our time. I have never read a more compelling vision of how human beings creatively negotiate the borderlands between their private and public worlds. Not since Clifford Geertz has an anthropologist written with such innovative narrative skill, reaching beyond the academy to illuminate what is culturally at stake in our need to tell stories about the shared worlds we inhabit and remake.”
Review
“A book that delivers to the reader, in graceful and at times evocative prose, profound insights into the human condition with all its vexing contradictions. Jackson has written a powerful testimony to the human spirit.”
Synopsis
provides brand new practical and accessible accounts of the major areas of narrative practice that White has developed and taught over the years, so that readers may feel confident when utilizing this approach in their practices. The book covers each of the five main areas of narrative practice-re-authoring conversations, remembering conversations, scaffolding conversations, definitional ceremony, externalizing conversations, and rite of passage maps-to provide readers with an explanation of the practical implications, for therapeutic growth, of these conversations. The book is filled with transcripts and commentary, skills training exercises for the reader, and charts that outline the conversations in diagrammatic form. Readers both well-versed in narrative therapy as well as those new to its concepts, will find this fresh statement of purpose and practice essential to their clinical work.
Synopsis
Maps of Narrative Practice provides brand new practical and accessible accounts of the major areas of narrative practice that White has developed and taught over the years, so that readers may feel confident when utilizing this approach in their practices. The book covers each of the five main areas of narrative practice-re-authoring conversations, remembering conversations, scaffolding conversations, definitional ceremony, externalizing conversations, and rite of passage maps-to provide readers with an explanation of the practical implications, for therapeutic growth, of these conversations. The book is filled with transcripts and commentary, skills training exercises for the reader, and charts that outline the conversations in diagrammatic form. Readers both well-versed in narrative therapy as well as those new to its concepts, will find this fresh statement of purpose and practice essential to their clinical work.
Synopsis
Michael White, one of the founders of narrative therapy, is back with his first major publication since the seminal , which Norton published in 1990.
Synopsis
You will be rewarded in reading this book, by the time you spend with White, and by being in his presence.Michael White has created a definitive text of theory and practice' His prolific body of work stands as a foundation of narrative therapy, summarized and systematically presented for the first time in this brilliant new book'Beautifully organized and a pleasure to read, it brings theory alive with colorful transcripts of therapy in every chapter and offers examples and instructions for applying narrative practices with the full range of mental health challenges that psychiatrists and therapists may be called upon to address. Although it is an excellent, accessible introduction to the field, experienced narrative therapists will draw upon its thoroughness, precision, and subtlety to invigorate and hone their craft.Maps of Narrative Practice, likely to be regarded as his magnum opus, makes it clear why his brand of narrative therapy has broad appeal and great impact on the therapeutic community'I highly recommend this book to practitioners and researchers, especially those interested in positive psychology and positive psychotherapy.If this book were a film or a novel, the blurb would read: 'AT LAST! The long-awaited sequel to the influential 1990 work, Narrative Means to Therapeutic Ends."'.[A] powerfully engaging mixture of personal and professional narrative.This book represents a remarkable leap forward in the narrative literature and in the canon of work on therapy in general.
About the Author
Michael Jackson is the Distinguished Visiting Professor of World Religions at the Harvard Divinity School. He is the author of many books, most recently Being of Two Minds, Road Markings: An Anthropologist in the Antipodes, The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writings, and Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology, the last published by the University of Chicago Press.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Preface to Second EditionIntroduction
Part I - Displacements
The Stories that Shadow Us
"You Never Saw Your Own Faces": Reflections on Privacy and Publicity in the Lives of Refugees
In Extremis: Refugee Stories/Refugee Lives
Displacement, Suffering, and the Critique of Cultural Fundamentalism
Part II - Returns
Preamble
Retaliation and Reconciliation
From the Tragic to the Comic
Prevented Successions
Part III - Histories
Preamble
The Social Life of Stories
Storytelling and Critique
The Singular and the Shared
Notes
BibliographyIndex