“This Path Is Full of Thorns”: Narrative, Subjunctivity, and HIV in Indonesia

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the active fostering of subjunctivity in processes of narrative worldmaking. Drawing extensively from the narrative of an HIV‐positive woman in Indonesia, I show that by subjunctively leaving open multiple narrative trajectories and future possibilities, individuals may navigate the ethical complexities of their lives and maintain relationships with the world and others while staying true to the things that really matter to them. I suggest that although entertaining a range of possible future trajectories may involve constructing several alternative narrative plots, most of the time there is no plot to be followed, and not determining future parallel plots may be more helpful in balancing conflicting ethical demands. By not imagining clear beginnings and endings of narratives yet actively retaining narrative possibilities, values that may seem incompatible in the present may then all be kept open for future moral striving. [narrative, subjunctivity, ethics, HIV]

People Made of Glass: The Collapsing Temporalities of Chronic Conditions

“…The increasing interest in chronic conditions is also present in studies that take a psychological, experiential, and/or consciousness‐related approach. Here, the attention is mainly turned toward emotional aspects and temporal experience (e.g., Kohrt et al 2005; Weaver and Hadley, 2011; Throop 2017; Samuels 2018), again with bodily fragility as implicit subject matter. Hence, the theme of bodily fragility exists in anthropology, yet it lives in the shadow of other thematic and analytical foci.…”

Narrative Navigation: HIV and (Good) Care in Aceh, Indonesia

“…1 While the narratives we construct to navigate troubling circumstances may be linear, offering one straightforward trajectory, they are more often non-linear, ambiguous and open-ended (cf. Garro 2003;Samuels 2018;Shohet 2017).…”

“…If narrative helps to renew ''faith that the world is within our grasp'' (Jackson 2013(Jackson [2002:36), here it did so exactly through the acceptance of the human impossibility to control the world-through the deeply ingrained cultural sensibility that whatever happens is part of God's plan and is by nature full of divine wisdom. As I have suggested elsewhere in drawing on the life story of an HIV-positive woman who struggled to retain a range of seemingly incompatible values and hopes, the subjunctive mode of narrative may enable people to move on, exactly by leaving the future open (Samuels 2018). Narrative ''haziness, '' Cheryl Mattingly (2014:123) points out, may be cultivated ''not in order to avoid seeing what is ahead, but in order to face it.''…”

“…Anthropologists concerned with this question have shown how people create narrative interpretations of illness in and beyond clinics, and how interactions with caregivers shape patients' narratives of the future (e.g., Kleinman 1988;Good and Good 2000;Mattingly 1998Mattingly , 2010Mattingly and Garro 2000). Narratives of illness and healing are often non-linear, and containing subjunctive elements that sustain multiple possible plots (Abadía-Barrero 2011; Black 2015;Garro 2003;Good and Good 1994;Mattingly 2014;Samuels 2018; Shohet 2007Shohet , 2018b. Moreover, in everyday practices of care, caregivers and patients frequently engage in what Cheryl Mattingly (2014:20) has called narrative re-envisioning: ''the activity of coming to see oneself in a new way, coming to reform one's sense of possibility and reframe one's commitment.''…”

Troubling Love: Gender, Class, and Sideshadowing the “Happy Family” in Vietnam

“…These haunt both memory work narratives that foreground hindsight, as in backshadowing narratives of the Holocaust (e.g., "Jews should have seen the writing on the wall"; Bernstein 1994), and narratives that are strongly ideological and imagine inevitable futures, as in foreshadowing narratives of progress and modernity (e.g., of the United States' westward expansion as manifest destiny). Sideshadowing, by contrast, emphasizes open-endedness and subjunctivity, which lend narratives their world-making qualities (Bruner 1986;Good 1994;Samuels, forthcoming). This way of analyzing narratives, I think, is especially sympathetic to the idea of ordinary ethics as developed in Lambek (2010) and Mattingly (2014), since here morality is conceived as something more than simply reproducing societal norms and conventions.…”