Metaphors and cultural narratives on adaptive responses to severe adversity: A field study among the Indigenous Pitaguary community in Brazil

Abstract

The expressions resilience and posttraumatic growth represent metaphorical concepts that are typically found in Euro-American contexts. Metaphors of severe adversity or trauma and the expressions of overcoming it vary across cultures—a lacuna, which has not been given much attention in the literature so far. This study aimed to explore the metaphorical concepts that the Indigenous Pitaguary community in Brazil uses to talk about adaptive and positive responses to severe adversity and to relate them to their socio-cultural context. We carried out 14 semi-structured interviews during field research over a one-month period of fieldwork. The data were explored with systematic metaphor analysis. The core metaphors included images of battle, unity, spirituality, journeys, balance, time, sight, transformation, and development. These metaphors were related to context-specific cultural narratives that underlie the Pitaguary ontological perspective on collectivity, nature, and cosmology. The results suggest that metaphors and cultural narratives can reveal important aspects of a culture’s collective mindset. To have a contextualized understanding of expressive nuances is an essential asset to adapt interventions to specific cultures and promote culture-specific healing and recovery processes.

Metaphors For Trauma: A Cross‐Cultural Qualitative Comparison in Brazil, India, Poland, and Switzerland

“…The data sources presented herein originated from four separate data collections, which are part of a larger qualitative project that uses approaches from cultural clinical psychology and ethnography to explore metaphors related to extreme aversive events and catastrophic experiences and the ways these experiences can be overcome (Maercker & Heim, 2016;Meili, Heim, & Maercker, 2019;Rechsteiner, Tol, & Maercker, 2019). The main field studies were conducted with the indigenous communities of the Pitaguary from Monguba in the state of Ceará, Brazil, in July 2016 and the Adivasis from Pune, in Maharashtra, India, in November 2017.…”

“…Like most of the indigenous people in Brazil today, the Pitaguary mainly speak Brazilian Portuguese and only use selected words from their native language, Tupí. The educational attainment of these participants ranged from 0 to 10 years, except for two participants who were about to obtain their university degrees (Meili et al, 2019).…”

“It should not have happened”: metaphorical expressions, idioms, and narrative descriptions related to trauma in an indigenous community in India

“…The findings of this study partly support evidence from other qualitative studies from our own overarching research project exploring metaphorical expressions in other rural communities (see Rechsteiner, Maercker, Meili, & Heim, 2019). Similar concepts relating to primary embodied metaphors were also found in Brazil and Switzerland (Maercker & Heim, 2016;Meili et al, 2018;Meili, Heim, Pelosi, & Maercker, 2019;. Such universal metaphors can be described as archetypal qualities, reflecting a discourse of collective experiences (Jung, 1969).…”

Cultural clinical psychology and metaphors of trauma effects: discussions from an international expert conference in Zurich

“…The ethnologist Corina Salis Gross (University of Bern, Switzerland) discussed the topic of refugees in Switzerland and reported different views of psychological distress and their rich descriptions in narratives, referring to ‘nerves’ and ‘feeling nervous’ (Salis Gross ). Based on Kirmayer's approach of embodied and culturally contextualized metaphors, Iara Meili (University of Zurich, Switzerland) presented her field research with an indigenous community in Brazil (Meili, Heim, Pelosi & Maercker forthcoming). She examined metaphors on positive responses to severe adversities and reported that both universal and culturally specific metaphors could be identified.…”