This essay examines the remarkable phenomenon of “life stories,” which the Spanish Inquisition required of its defendants after 1561. The narratives offered by defendants fit into a wider cultural context in two ways. First, they match a rise in autobiographical consciousness which was increasingly present in all sorts of Spanish literature in the sixteenth century. Second, the life stories demanded by Spanish inquisitors also.

Who were the women of Meerut, said to have turned a nonviolent military mutiny – a refusal to load and fire a weapon – into a violent revolt that nearly toppled the British Raj? Were they prostitutes, or were they wives? There is much in the book to suggest the latter, but (ironically) that same evidence also suggests the simultaneous possibility of the former. This paradoxical formulation requires a more nuanced understanding of the nature of north Indian marriage in mid-century. A more fundamental question is: Did the women of Meerut exist? Or were they the product of overheated imaginations casting about for exculpation – on both sides of the racial divide? This necessitates a further examination of the two sources for the story of the Meerut women, or rather the question of their independent narrative origin. While the evidence militates in favor of their historicity, gender humiliation was already in the air: Even if they did not exist, they would be invented. They matter not simply because they enable us to add women to the mix of history (and stir, as the saying goes), but because they allow us to perceive something fundamental about the nature of history itself.

Abstract: This chapter engages closely with the key state of nature passages in Hobbes’s Leviathan, Locke’s Second Treatise of Government and Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality. It shows how each text constructs strikingly distinct imaginaries of the state of nature, and begins to explore some of the real-world implications of these imaginaries.

This chapter recounts the history of the functional approach to autobiographical memory and lays out ways to move the field forward. In the 1970s, prominent cognitive psychologists called for research to expand beyond controlled experimental laboratory procedures to examine memory in everyday life. Early research theorized three broad functions from which a self-report measure was developed. The functional approach is intuitively appealing, but its growth has been somewhat haphazard. One barrier may be the lack of a solid, agreed-upon, definition. To aid the field in moving forward, we present a clear, detailed definition of function. Using criteria related to this definition allows other candidate functions to be rigorously considered. Two candidate functions are explored. Existing work suggesting that emotion enhancement may be a function of autobiographical memory is reviewed and compared with our definition. We then elaborate on a new proposal that social status may be a function of autobiographical remembering. Finally, a brief discussion of how narrative approaches to recalling the personal past might be used to study functions of autobiographical memory is presented.

realism continues to be misunderstood under the influence of 1970s literary and film theory and its continuing import underrecognized in literary and cultural histories. My approach to realism is formalist in the sense that Brian McHale’s Postmodern Fiction is formalist: it is a “descriptive poetics.” My argument is motivated primarily by what I regard as serious persistent errors in academic discourses.These errors are in large measure the result of arguments within the Left. My goal in this book is not to restore realism to the place Georg Lukács once assigned it as the only politically correct kind of literature, but rather to show the continued vitality of realism in late-20th century American culture

Arts-mediated HIV/AIDS education received significant funding from Ghana’s donor partners and global health institutions during the first two decades of the pandemic. Yet these interventions had a mixed impact. On the one hand, there was – and continues to be – near universal awareness of HIV/AIDS, including risk factors and health outcomes. On the other hand, low condom use and persistent stigma suggest that knowledge has not translated into sexual health protective behaviours and psychosocial support. In Chapter 4, I examine how the arts were incorporated into HIV/AIDS interventions, focusing on the use of mass media campaigns to raise awareness and educate, and on ‘folk media’ to educate and empower communities. I discuss a study that applied a narrative approach to examine local knowledge and lived experience, the findings of which illustrate important contrasts between community and indigenous healing system responses to HIV/AIDS and official health service responses. I will conclude with reflections on what these insights yield for developing more robust arts-based HIV interventions in the future.

Developments in magical realist critical discourse have benefited the study of African literature in several ways. The notion that there is no single point of origin for magical realism refocuses critical attention on African oral traditions, where the supernatural has long mingled with realist elements. And clarity over the nature and purposes of magical realism allows insight into how it simultaneously enables recuperation and critique. This essay considers the history of attempts to theorize magical realism in Africa, before turning to two often-neglected early exemplars of the mode, Thomas Mofolo and Daniel Fagunwa. Fagunwa’s countryman, Amos Tutuola, developed the African mode of magical realism in flamboyant ways, as did Ben Okri, and, later, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. In interpreting the work of Ngũgĩ the discussion circles back to global interlocutors like Gabriel García Márquez and Salman Rushdie because, like them, Ngũgĩ self-consciously deploys magical realism to facilitate satire and powerful political critique.

How we transform our memories and experiences into fiction beyond the injunction to ‘write what you know’. The imaginative process includes filling in the gaps of memory, embracing the freedom to invent, selecting a viewpoint and adding energy through dialogue. We need to consider not only which details and descriptions to include but which to omit: the balancing of information affects the meaning and impact of the story.

This introductory chapter begins by considering two general features of the politics of territory in modernity: the expectation that borders should be precisely defined as lines, and the central role of colonial legacies. The book centres on the relation between these two features. Four narratives about the global history of borders that the book seeks to engage with and modify are elaborated: first, colonial-inherited borders are generally remarkable for their vagueness; second, linear borders are originally and most properly a practice of sovereign states or nation-states; third, lines on maps determine politics; and fourth, linear borders were first practiced in Europe, then exported to the rest of the world through colonialism. The chapter outlines the argument and the rest of the book. At its most general level, the argument is that modern borders are distinct not because they express sovereignty but because of certain technical, apolitical practices.

Chapter 1 examines Agnolo Gaddi’s work between 1392 and 1395 in the chapel in Prato cathedral, which was built to house the Virgin’s Belt, the most important relic in the city. Primary sources allow reconstruction of the ceremony during which the precious relic of the Virgin’s Belt was displayed to the public. The monumental narratives of the origins of the Holy Belt and its journey to Prato celebrated Prato’s favored status as custodian of the relic. Detailed surviving payments, here published in full for the first time, reveal a narrative of the chapel’s construction and decoration and bring to light how the artist, Agnolo Gaddi, collaborated with Florentine and Pratese artisans in the enterprise. Agnolo’s  professional and personal connections with the Pratese Opera, and the social identities of its members, expose a rich network of relationships in which the commission unfolded.

The essentially “Bloomsbury” features of the modern novel include the effort to find a significant form for personal relationships, innovations in the representation of gender and sexuality, and the cultivation of aesthetic environments. But Bloomsbury’s signature contribution to literary modernity is “the Bloomsbury voice.” Unlike other more radical forms of narration, the Bloomsbury voice (in novels by Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Mulk Raj Anand, and Desmond McCarthy) bespeaks a residual commitment to history and a nostalgic faith in public authority. However, the Bloomsbury voice of historical authority engages ironically with history in crisis, and the result is not only quintessentially Bloomsbury but also a narrative mode more generally well suited to registering the crisis of modernity itself.

Brief remarks suggest different reading strategies to different readers, both specialist and nonspecialist. Those less familiar with modern Iranian history and politics are invited to begin with Chapter 1, the “Introduction.” More knowledgeable readers may prefer to skim over parts of Chapter 1 in order to begin with Chapter 2, “Tied Up in Tehran.” Thanks to the community of support who have contributed to this project.

This chapter describes material and immaterial labour in the context of the industrial production, resource extraction, and global circulation of the silvery-alkali metal known as lithium. It focuses on the different kinds of material labour involved in lithium’s extraction from local sites in and around the Atacama Desert in Latin America, as well as less visible forms of labour underpinning the mining industry, including the labour of social reproduction and colonial dispossession. In this context, it asks: how do narrative arts document the violence of lithium’s extraction as it materialises in damaged and dispossessed bodies and environments, as well as those less visible traces of lithium’s circulation around the world, and the different affective economies it inhabits? I suggest that a contradiction or tension between materiality and immateriality, between what is seen and unseen, defines every level of lithium’s transformation into a commodity, as registered within global networks of labour. These larger systems, I argue, are rendered invisible; just as lithium silently provides the charge for iPhone and Tesla, it is a vanishing mediator to what some thinkers have described as ‘new extractive imperialism’. This, however, becomes visible—precisely as a kind of ideological dissimulation—across a whole range of narrative forms.

Chapter 1 begins with a selective history of Christian–Hellenic intellectual engagement (including a detailed introduction to Julian and Cyril) in order to show simultaneously (1) the historical uniqueness (thus significance) of Julian’s and Cyril’s polemical projects and (2) the fitness of Alasdair MacIntyre’s insights for making sense of their engagement. The second half of the chapter presents MacIntyre’s analysis of the dynamics when “two large-scale systems of thought and practice are in radical disagreement,” with Julian and Cyril in mind. What I call “narrative conflict” is only one part of the theory that emerges from his argument, the complete scope of which pushes us also to consider whether traditions so engaged might have non-intersecting forms of reasoning. The chapter concludes with a brief consideration of what Julian’s and Cyril’s “narrative conflict” might contribute to how we think about religious and philosophical argument in late antiquity.

“Visual psychological anthropology” is a bridging of psychological and visual anthropology. Its approach combines longitudinal person-centered ethnographic strategies with the methods of contemporary ethnographic filmmaking to cinematically represent individuals, their personal relationships, their central concerns, and the array of culturally, politically, and historically situated pressures that act on them. Based on the premise that it is through the expression of emotion, scaffolded by and contextualized within a film narrative, that participant subjectivity will emerge onscreen, VPA leans on a creative, collaborative, and iterative process throughout fieldwork, filmmaking, editing, and screening. The chapter reviews the historical roots for VPA, outlines its theory and describes its practice, as illustrated through examples from Java and Bali on topics such as mental illness, neurodiversity, trauma, stigma, mourning, and gender. The authors advocate for the relevance of psychological anthropology insights to the craft of visual anthropology and the utility of film, as a mode of research inquiry and as a translational ethnographic product, for psychological anthropologists.

The chapter reviews and systematizes the scholarly work on how “language” and “narrative” shape culturally mediated psychological processes. A challenge is to consider framings that see “language” as either a cause or effect of “psyche,” framings that limit how we consider how “culture” or “ideology” mediate relationships between language and psyche. The authors develop an approach that considers temporal processes across which language, culture, and psyche are co-constituting. The approach systematizes a broad literature in terms of the varieties of co-constitution proposed for language, culture, and psyche: processes that privilege language or psyche in producing relatively stable relationships across time between these three terms, processes that privilege language or psyche in producing highly emergent relationships, and processes that imagine processes of mediation within interactional events, across events, and/or across generations and historical time. The framework unites discussions that have been disconnected, provides conceptual delimitations for that discussion, and highlights how psychological anthropologists can contribute to an interdisciplinary conceptual space.

This chapter discusses the role of phenomenology in psychological anthropology, with an emphasis on its ongoing productive potential for the field. The chapter explores how a phenomenological framework has been mobilized in psychological anthropology to illuminate central concepts like subjects and lifeworlds, intersubjectivity, and the aspectual nature of consciousness and experience. The chapter also emphasizes the valuable methodological implications of bringing a phenomenological framework to the practice of anthropology. Throughout, recent ethnographic examples are engaged to illustrate how psychological anthropologists have generated innovative insights through the use of phenomenological approaches.