Tahereh Khazaei
Abstract
Cancer is a social phenomenon with plural social realities arising from the experience and comprehension of people engaged with it. This research is conducted based on 43 in-depth, semi-structured interviews (with 10 cancer patients, 10 family members, and 23 healthcare staff including nurses, oncologists, ...
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Cancer is a social phenomenon with plural social realities arising from the experience and comprehension of people engaged with it. This research is conducted based on 43 in-depth, semi-structured interviews (with 10 cancer patients, 10 family members, and 23 healthcare staff including nurses, oncologists, psychiatrists, and psychologists) in Isfahan’s major cancer treatment center. The approach of the study is phenomenology accommodated by interpretive sociology, the method is basic qualitative research, the sampling technique is purposive combined with complementary, and the analytical technique is thematic analysis. The analysis of people’s narratives is conductive to five themes of dealing with cancer from laxity to subjectivity, patient’s bodily objectivity in redefining the daily life order, the binary of home/hospital and the patient’s spatial and social bewilderment, patient’s alienation under the other’s authority of the physician, and patient as an integrated whole in the nursing care system. Overall, while the Iranian narrative has its own particularities, it complies with the universal intersubjective comprehension of cancer in which the dominant intersubjective construct about cancer is rather shaped by the popular comprehensions (Reconstructing the basic idea of cancer as death and mortality) than the physicians’ authority.
Mohammadtaghi Karami Ghahi
Abstract
Arbaeen walk in its current form is a novel ritual and diverse social phenomenon. The diversity comes from the multiplicity of pilgrims’ narratives and the variety of meanings people attach to it. The feminine narrative of Arbaeen walk, despite all its diverse meanings, is neglected and marginalized ...
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Arbaeen walk in its current form is a novel ritual and diverse social phenomenon. The diversity comes from the multiplicity of pilgrims’ narratives and the variety of meanings people attach to it. The feminine narrative of Arbaeen walk, despite all its diverse meanings, is neglected and marginalized by the formal, masculine meta-narrative. The present research aims at comprehending women’s foot pilgrimage experience through the thematic analysis of in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 25 women aged between 22-68 made in the camps (moukeb) of the pilgrimage route. The findings show that as part of the feminine subjectivity, the female pilgrim constructs herself as a fragmented identity in form of five major themes: fatigue of everyday life and ridding of modern life monotony; gratification of self-imposed, sanctified pain; memory of war and the fluid meaning of body; historical feminine subjectivity averting everyday life objectivity; and spiritual illumination in moving from egoistic, habitual behavior to altruism. The female pilgrim re-presents herself as an active subject by assimilating her experience of Arbaeen walk to the Ashoura agony and its aftermath incidents, thereby deconstructing and re-constructing herself through critical reflexivity on gendered stereotypes constructed in the formal discourse of Iranian society.
