Narratives of Suffering. A Look on Disease in Medical Anthropology – A case study

This paper aims at presenting the way in which the subjective experience of an illness is transposed and renegociated within the illness narrative. Our case study reveals the hermeneutical travail through which a woman suffering of breast cancer tries to give meaning to the experience of her illness. In the first part of the article I present the main conceptual instruments regarding the relationship between illness and narrativity, as it was theoreticized by specialists in the domain. The second part of the study focuses on the process of deconstructing the life narrative – prior to the disease – and on the attempt to reconfigure the narrative into one that is able to restore the order that was destroyed by the disease.

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