Strange Distance: Towards an Anthropology of Interior Dialogue

Abstract

The capacity for a complex inner life--encompassing inner speech, imaginative reverie, and unarticulated moods--is an essential feature of living with illness and a principal means through which people interpret, understand, and manage their condition. Nevertheless, anthropology lacks a generally accepted theory or methodological framework for understanding how interiority relates to people's public actions and expressions. Moreover, as conventional social-scientific methods are often too static to understand the fluidity of perception among people living with illness or bodily instability, I argue we need to develop new, practical approaches to knowing. By placing the problem of interiority directly into the field and turning it into an ethnographic, practice-based question to be addressed through fieldwork in collaboration with informants, this article works alongside women living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda with the aim of capturing the unvoiced but sometimes radical changes in being, belief, and perception that accompany terminal illness.

New York Stories

“…Some of these may be recurrent and ongoing to the extent that they define a sense of personal or collective experience and understanding, while others are destined to remain inconsequential and unarticulated or even unarticulatable. This reinforces William James's notion that the spectrum of consciousness ranges from inchoate, barely graspable and transitory forms of thinking and being that exist on the periphery of our conscious and bodily awareness to those more defined, purposeful and stable forms that are more readily articulated in language and can enable persons to establish senses of self and continuity, even amidst radically changing conditions or disruption (Crapanzano 2004;Irving 2009). Although many realms of experience may remain unformed, abject and beyond the reach of language, others coalesce and become articulated into stable symbolic forms for particular purposes, including intentional, descriptive, analytical and communicative purposes, thereby forming a basis for narrative expression to oneself and others, as in the case of Neil's account to Frank and myself as we walked around the neighbourhood.…”

“…The presence of an inner lifeworld beyond third-party observation and knowledge is fundamental to many aspects of social life, action and practice, and is an essential part of what makes us human. Without inner modes of expression and experience, including inner dialogue and internally represented speech (see Irving 2007Irving , 2011Irving , 2013Hogan & Pink 2010) there would be no social existence or understanding -at least not in a form we would recognise -and many routine aspects of daily life and social interaction would be severely compromised, including people's abilities to theorise, understand and plan their actions or when making interpretations about other persons and situations. Social relationships, acts of strategy, deception and secrecy would be rendered impossible, as persons would be unable to simultaneously hold thoughts, intentions and knowledge that differ from their public expressions.…”

“…A possible reason why people's interior expressions (Irving 2007) and imaginative lifeworlds are 'virtually absent' (Csordas 1997: 79) as topics of ethnographic research is their potential to invalidate anthropological truth claims concerning people's intentions, actions and worldviews. At times, the constitution and character of people's inner expressions might even be diametrically opposed to their public expressions -an experience no doubt familiar to many anthropologists in the field and their own social lives -thereby threatening to undermine the evidential grounds for making claims based upon the observation and interpretation of extrinsic forms.…”

Critical Visions and the Unsteady In‐Between

“…Much research on the phenomenology of space (Irving 2011(Irving , 2013Seamon 1980;Wunderlich 2008) highlights the need to find tools for interrupting the taken-for-granted interpretations of the spaces we explore in our everyday lives. This is what the Situationist International did when they staged fights in the middle of a Parisian café, and stimulated people to rethink the nature of the environment in which they were dwelling.…”

The Lives of Other Citizens

“…As documented in Ethnography, Art and Death (Irving 2007), a person might be walking around a city looking for a place to commit suicide or alternatively might be contemplating the radical uncertainty of being while sitting in a café or walking down a crowded street having recently been diagnosed with a serious or terminal illness (see Irving 2010Irving , 2011. In such cases, the person remains a social being and is required to act in a communal public space, but their thoughts and concerns are not necessarily externalised or apparent to the wider world.…”