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You are here: ICR : Events : Seminar : Mar 2009 : Veida SkultansVieda Skultans writes: “It has been suggested that the most terrible experiences lie beyond the reach of words. My ethnographic work in Latvia during the early nineties revealed a different picture. It was one in which quite ordinary people from both town and country gave huge importance to finding the right words for their past experience (deportation, imprisonment) and sought to anchor their accounts of the personal past in shared literary and mythical frameworks. By so doing it seemed that they were able to transform a chaotic past into a meaningful story and thereby to reconstitute themselves as meaningful actors in a brutal historical drama.”
Vieda Skultans is professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Bristol where she teaches courses on narrative, madness and gender. She now works in the department of sociology but spent the earlier part of her career in the department of psychiatry. Her recent research has been carried out in psychiatric clinics in western Ukraine and Latvia where her focus has been on the way in which changing psychiatric histories and dialogue reflect changing social and economic circumstances. Her publications include The Testimony of Lives. Narrative and Memory in post-Soviet Latvia (1998 Routledge) and Empathy and Healing. Essays in Medical and Narrative Anthropology (2007, Berghahn).
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