The Max Kleinman Reader
This was gradually replaced with a new humanism. This meant that we lost something important in our own tradition of reading itself. Stock asks, Is this loss permanent? If not, where might it be recovered? He offers an intriguing answer. Such meditative practices and associated views of mind-body connections are being revived, but not within the old domains. Rather, and surprisingly, they have appeared within some new developments in biomedical research. Many of the successful experiments in mind-body medicine are influenced by traditional presuppositions about what mind-body relations should be like: In Stock's second lecture, he offers a more detailed explication of this shift in reading practices, one that gradually took hold in the late middle ages twelfth to fourteenth centuries.
Texts themselves, as well as reading practices, changed. They became material for correct understanding rather than material and he includes visual imagery as well as actual written or oral texts to be pondered meditated upon , as an avenue for bringing about inner, and embodied, transformations of experience. Stock's third lecture is most directly relevant to my paper, for in it he most clearly links narrative, spiritual beliefs and practices, and contemporary clinical work.
His own historical analysis provides an invaluable backdrop to my own considerations of these connections in current clinical work. There are two ways I propose to amend Stock's very interesting proposal. First, I want to suggest that it is not only within alternative mind-body medicine that claims are being made about the need to develop clinical approaches that recognize the connection of mind to body.
I will say a bit more about this presently. Second, a point I also develop subsequently, I will argue that while Stock's claim of a mind-body dualism holds within the framework of espoused biomedical beliefs, this becomes more complex if one expands the picture to include both the actual everyday practices of clinicians and the practices of consumers of medicine that is, the patients and their families.
I enter Stock's argument from my home discipline of cultural and more specifically medical anthropology. Stock points out that Western biomedicine is not an obvious place to turn in considering meditative reading or mind-body practices of any kind. After all, he notes: He adds that despite recent experimental research on mind-body practices like meditation, there is still tremendous reluctance in the medical community to look to mind-body practices as legitimate approaches to healing.
Like Stock, anthropologists have described Western biomedicine as a practice that has eschewed a holistic mind-body approach to healing. Anthropologists have been quite critical of Western biomedicine in this regard. They have been especially attentive to a set of assumptions within the culture of medicine that portray biomedical practice and clinical reasoning as an applied natural science. It is not surprising that biomedicine has been reluctant to embrace mind-body practices imported from non-Western healing systems.
For, as many have pointed out, biomedicine is based on a language, a mode of perception, and an organization of practice that disregards moral concerns. How can I go on with my life? The history of Western biomedicine has been built upon a progressive distancing from the moral, the cosmological, and the emotional. This history has gone hand-in-hand with the development of a particular notion of reason itself and has offered a potent image of the doctor as working scientist. Medicine has drawn its prestige and claim to truth by its relation to science.
The body becomes a thing apart from how it is given human or cosmological significance. In Western society generally, the rational and instrumental, in which medicine is squarely placed, are separated from the symbolic, the affective, the spiritual, and the social.
Although this dualism is powerful as an espoused picture, and also highly influential in shaping the beliefs of working clinicians, when one actually examines clinical practice, things get muddier. A number of scholars have contended that while medical professionals may have the self-conception that they are practical scientists trafficking in neutral facts and biological universals, their actions belie this.
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Clinical transactions are necessarily hermeneutic. Such a commitment to a more holistic perspective is often propelled by a prudential concern. After all, patients especially in the case of chronic or disabling conditions do not merely receive care, they must participate in it. And participation is no minor element of efficacious treatment.
They not only need to show up for appointments, or take their prescribed medications, they may also need to carry out arduous home programs of exercise, reform life-long dietary habits, or undertake other very basic and fundamental tasks. This difficult and subtle clinical work carries the health professional far from any espoused picture of scientist or technician treating a biological or mechanical problem.
Instead, clinicians find themselves, for better or worse, in a much murkier domain where separating mind from body means that treatment is likely to fail. Such practical, strategic concerns are not the only factors that challenge mind-body dualism in clinical work. There has also been, from many disciplines, an active call to reject a reductionist, biologically-based approach to biomechanical care in favor of a meaning-centered approach.
Such a conception of clinical care rejects the assumption that clinical work is confined to the treatment of disease. Quite obviously, patients' personal and cultural beliefs, values, and experiences influence how they experience the disease. This alternative conception is grounded in a fundamentally social picture of illness, distinct from the individualism that characterizes biomedicine. For illness as experienced always occurs in a context of complex cultural and social worlds, including family and community worlds.
An important context is also the interactional and institutional spaces in which health care occurs. This is part of the clinical encounter and the meaning an illness acquires for a patient or family caregiver, whether or not it is acknowledged by clinicians themselves.
Narrative has played a significant role in this meaning-centered tradition. Often, though not always, there has been an interest in the dramas which surround illness, in the temporal contexts in which illness occurs, and in illness and healing as dynamic processes in which meaning is not a given but something actors struggle to discover.
Is The Max Kleinman Reader the funniest book of the 21st Century? Or does it mark the discovery of a dazzling American poet? Kleinman is a skid-row genius. Editorial Reviews. From the Back Cover. Max Kleinman's poems are at once heartbreaking and The Max Kleinman Reader - Kindle edition by Lionel Endenberry. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets.
Why has narrative become so attractive, especially in connection with chronic or disabling clinical conditions? Personal identity becomes intimately tied to the pain, uncertainty, and stigma that come with an afflicted body. What might it mean to be healed when a cure is only a distant possibility or no possibility at all? The inevitable poverty of biomedical responses to this question has a great deal to do with why narrative is so irresistible.
Stories reveal a world. They can help transform identity, interpret the meaning of the past and even provide images of possible futures. Stories can render experience meaningful by placing events into a culturally and personally understandable plot. It is often contended that narratives provide coherence to the chaos introduced by illness. This can be heard in anthropologist and psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman, in his influential discussion of illness narratives. The plot lines, core metaphors, and rhetorical devices that structure the illness narrative are drawn from cultural and personal models for arranging experiences in meaningful ways and for effectively communicating those meanings.
Telling stories can offer a way to make meaning of what is otherwise unthinkable, uninterpretable. It allows the sufferer to assimilate the illness experience into her life.
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For him, this different thinking provoked by serious illness engenders a certain kind of storytelling. This work has resulted in studies of narratively structured explanatory models across a broad range of cultural communities. Memories of the past shape future action, including actions individuals take in seeking to recover from illness. Narrative plays an increasingly significant role in contemporary critiques of traditional ethics and the rethinking of ethics generally. A number of scholars have proposed an ethical framework that pays special attention to the particularity and context-specific nature of practical action.
Rita Charon, a preeminent spokesman for this tradition, puts it this way:. Any number of alternative approaches to addressing the ethical problems in health care—feminist ethics, communitarian ethics, liberation ethics, phenomenological ethics, casuistry, and virtue ethics—have altered the conceptual geography of bioethics. With their foundations not in law and Anglo-continental moral philosophy but in the particularities of individuals, the singularity of beliefs, the perspectival nature of truth, and the duties of intersubjectivity, new alternative approaches to ethics share a realization that meaning in human life emerges not from rules given but from lived, thick experience and that determinations of right and good by necessity arise from context, plot, time, and character.
All this may seem far afield of Stock's particular concern with meditative reading practices and their connection to healing. Rather, such reformers argue, attention to meaning is something clinicians ought to cultivate in their practice. Intriguingly, Stock's analysis puts this contemporary discourse in historical perspective.
I will quote him on this point at some length:. Christian thinkers believed that the essence of a person was nonmaterial. As a consequence, they championed the view that health and disease are best understood through the interaction of body, mind, and spirit. In the Gospels and patristic writings an alternative is proposed to the naturalistic interpretation of the disease; this consists in distinguishing between the cause of an illness and its meaning.
The cause is considered to be natural, but the meaning is cultural even religious, if one chooses to view the widespread prevalence of disease as the consequence of Adam's sin. The cause can be understood through the analysis of material conditions, but the meaning, however it is conceived, has to be understood through thought and language. But what of meditation and its role in healing in contemporary health care? To see where it flourishes, I turn my attention away from clinicians per se to explore the active role of family caregivers as purveyors, as well as recipients, of healing.
In contemporary America, within certain highly religious communities, meditative practices, such as prayer, are a critical aspect of healing and are even intermingled with traditional biomedical care. To strengthen my claim that patients can be healers too—a position that is not, at first glance, obvious—I turn to quite another intellectual tradition: What are the implications of this portrayal of clinical care as an interpretive task, a hermeneutic, or, more specifically, narrative transaction?
In other words, what is revealed by looking at clinical work as an encounter between clinicians, with their professionally influenced cultural beliefs about illness, the body, and patients, who bring their own beliefs and values to the table? For one, patients emerge not merely as the recipients of health care, but as active agents who help shape it.
Modes of consumption are also modes of cultural production, reception theorists argue. However, this argument has particular relevance for the everyday consumption of biomedical texts as well. Reception theory offers a compelling picture of just such blurring. Reception theory's portrayal of consumption challenges any simple textual notion of meaning, that is, the idea that meaning is located in the commodity or media text itself.
As Debra Spitulnik notes, reception theories presume that meaning is a complex and local practice of negotiation between the world of the text and the world of the audience. Against this passive picture, de Certeau offers a radically different view. Rather than becoming similar to, consuming can involve making something similar to what one is, making it one's own. Such inattention has the significant consequence of not recognizing everyday creativity. In the remainder of this paper, I will take up these claims about the active role of patients as interpreters and even producers of clinical work and look at how, through their participation, meditative healing practices are brought into clinical care.
I draw upon ethnographic research my colleagues and I have been carrying out among one interpretive community. The primary research that informs this paper is a longitudinal ethnography that began in Los Angeles in January and has been conducted by an interdisciplinary team of anthropologists and occupational therapists.
During this study, we have followed a cohort of African-American families who have children with serious disabilities or chronic illnesses and the health professionals who serve them. We initially recruited thirty African-American families from the Los Angeles area whose children aged birth to eight were being treated in several clinical sites. Most families though not all were low-income. Eighteen of those initially recruited have continued to participate.
Others joined subsequently as some families left the study for various reasons for example, moving out of state. All families now participating have been part of the project for at least three years. This continuity of families has allowed us to come to know the ebb and flow of chronic illness and to witness what that means in the never-ending process of negotiating health care with shifting casts of health professionals and changing bureaucratic processes. The research has involved accompanying families to clinical visits, observing and sometimes videotaping those encounters, and separately interviewing participants about what they perceived to have happened in the encounters.
We have also observed and videotaped children and families at home and in the community, especially at key family events. This kind of longitudinal design has revealed a great deal about clinical encounters as events in family lives and about multiple perspectives between families and clinicians as these develop and change over time. As I will try to show, in this interpretive community, a great deal of work is done by families to redress what they see as a key neglect by the clinical community—the neglect of the spiritual.
The consumption of biomedicine involves acts of imaginative appropriation in which families creatively remake or reinterpret the oral and written words of clinicians and incorporate them within their own narratives of miraculous recoveries, the power of faith, and the centrality of meditative prayer. Their narratives treat biomedicine as one, but only one, aspect of healing. These stories often underscore the comparative powerlessness and ignorance of biomedical professionals who mistakenly believe healing is only up to them. Strong critiques of Western medicine are voiced in some of their stories.
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Write a customer review. Showing of 6 reviews. Top Reviews Most recent Top Reviews. There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later. Kindle Edition Verified Purchase. A unique voice in modern American literature. Lionel compares Max to Basho but I don't think he goes far enough. Max is a man of his times and history will need look no farther to understand the life of a true poet in late 20th century America.
The perfect holiday gift to share with someone you love. Since I am a scholar, a friend asked if I thought this was the writings read, ravings of an authentic person or a hoax. Literary hoaxes are not my specialty so I can't tell, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book, whatever it is. The freelance writer who edited this collection says that he found the self-published and unpublished writings of Max Kleinman at a garage sale and, impressed by their literary quality, determined to get them into print.
The book IS fun to read. Kleinman's pieces are so short that they never have the chance to grow tedious and are so off-kilter that they engender a perverse fascination. Who else ever thought of making long lists of the things he repudiates? Who but editor Lionel Endenbery thought repudiations worth publishing?
Yet they are lively reading. So is everything in this collection. This isn't because Max Kleinman is a great undiscovered writer, as the editor seems to think. For simple quality, Kleinman gets one star, not the four I have given this book. The pleasures here are akin to the Bulwer-Lytton writing contest for bad first sentences, except it is all bad or, maybe, just maybe it is all a put-on. If this collection is the serious writings of a deranged mind, it is sad and should be studied by literary psychologists. If this is a joke, it is a very funny book. Original production was to have ended after April 4, , with the show continuing to air in reruns , but host LeVar Burton said on February 7, , that five new episodes of the show would be shot in despite the continuing financial troubles of PBS.
In January , the Reading Rainbow App surpassed 10M books read and video field trips watched by children in 18 months. The new goal is to create an educational version for schools to use, free of cost to those schools in need, and help America get back to high literacy rates. They are also going to create a website for students to use to assist them with learning how to read. The following day, May 29, , they reached two million dollars double their goal at 1: With , backers, the campaign holds Kickstarter's record for most backers and is the 8th highest amount raised on Kickstarter as of June 1, In March , Burton launched a new online educational service called Reading Rainbow Skybrary for Schools that follows the same mission of the television series, while expanding to integrate into classroom curriculums.
The lawsuit also seeks to enjoin Burton from using the Reading Rainbow catchphrase, "But you don't have to take my word for it," on his podcast. WNED is currently working on the next chapter of Reading Rainbow and will continue its mission of fostering education for a new generation. The annual writing and illustrating competition for children grades K through 3 continued until when it was relaunched as "PBS Kids Go!
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