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Winner of the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing, 2000

THE 2000 VICTOR TURNER PRIZE

Winner

The Society for Humanistic Anthropology awards the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing for 2000 to Cheryl Mattingly for her work, Healing Dramas and Clinical Plots, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Cheryl Mattingly interweaves theory, description, and analysis in a clear and insightful ethnography about occupational therapists and their patients. This work does much to advance the field of cultural anthropology by taking new directions in narrative theory. Drawing on Heidegger's concept of hermeneutics, she shifts from an analytical emphasis on text to one concerned with lived experience, and in so doing crafts a perspective that reconciles the divisions between post-structuralists and positivists that have been prominent in the discipline over the past two decades. To those who say that we cannot go on writing ethnographies, Mattingly's work poses the provocative question: what if we write accounts of storytelling as sense-making in people's lives, including the writing of ethnography? In this book, she addresses questions central to human experience: how do we know what we know? How do we make sense of a life? How do we come to terms with chaotic events and disparate sets of memories? Mattingly gives us a framework for understanding stories of ability and disability, of "the real world," and of suspended reality. 

Using descriptive vignettes of occupational therapists with their patients, Mattingly helps us to see what has escaped the analyses of others. Readers will be taken aback by her insights and find themselves seeing narrative in the behaviors of others, within their fieldwork and without. In analyzing the preparation for and playing of a game of checkers by two spinal cord injury patients, she concludes that: "What gives therapeutic events significance are their connections to life plots, the extent to which they open onto much broader narrative vistas which lead far beyond therapy."

In relating the experiences of a therapist in designing sessions revolving around the New York Subway System, she shows how the therapist transforms clock time, devoid of significant meaning, into narrative time. She also shows how the stories of a therapist and of a mother of a cocaine-exposed baby differ: "In ascribing different intentions to the child, mother and therapist contest something at a much deeper narrative level, namely what sort of life story the child is in, and what sort of life story is possible for this child."

In illustrating how some moments are more narrative than others, Mattingly sensitively describes the "gentle dance" of a recently injured teenage patient and her therapist. In fact, all of her illustrations are sensitively described in a style of writing that flows uninterrupted from the page. 

In many ways this is an exceptional ethnography, singular in its importance and beauty. In a time of contested perspectives, it boldly leads us in new directions. Analyzing the healing of head-injured and other severely disabled patients through the creation of lived narrative, it gives anthropology the model by which to heal its own rifts by creating a new narrative filled with possibilities. It is also a sensitively written analysis of a topic that points out the subtle significance of the most mundane of actions taking place in a world hidden from most of us.
The prize confers a $500 award and a certificate.

--Barry Michrina, Van Reidhead, and Ann Kingsolver

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Last updated: March 01, 2006.