Cardboard hero/tin saint: A look behind,a look within.
详细信息
- 作者：Nonemaker ; Jeffrey Lee.
- 学历：Doctor
- 年：2001
- 导师：Hamabata,Matthews M.,eadvisor
- 毕业院校：Fielding Graduate Institute
- ISBN：9780493409757
- CBH：3028773
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：7622926
- Pages：203
文摘
This study is an examination of a unique gift relationship created between a living organ donor and the donor's unrelated recipient. Through sociological and psychological literature relating to giving,organ donation,altruism,and grace,it explores the question: "What is the experience of giving self as body?" Material is drawn from personal journals,transcriptions of interviews,and my own reflections. Using an unrestricted,naturalistic approach,I turned to writing as my method of inquiry,creating the experimental ethnographic form of an autoethnography having the self,the subjective experience,and the existential and emotional concerns as the objects of the inquiry. The complexities of the genre allow the consolidation of the ethnographic impulse to look outward,as an expatriate American,for a sense of place and identity within the modern Greek societal and medical realities,with the autobiographical impulse to look inward for a place to interpret a personal engagement with the donation and transplantation experience (Neumann,1996). Within this cultural context,demands for explanations of my motivations,from medical professionals and others,were a common approach for making meaning of their perceptions of sacrificial behavior or an act of compassion,because such actions struck them as rare,pure,or heroic. An adequate language of motivation seems to be one of the critical junctures at which an individual and society intersect. It is at this juncture that I utilized the text of and self-reflection on my journal to get to a deeper understanding of my personal awareness of the simplicity of my donation: an other-directed,undramatic act of ordinary grace. The simplest human action involves choice and deliberation,and "it is narration that carries over to explicit consciousness action's implicit moral tenor and attempts to preserve it" (Kerby,1991,p. 54). My act of giving self as body was merely an affirmation of my simple and sacred connection to humanity: a response born from an attentiveness to an opportunity for exercising empathy with another (Frank,1995).