<p>This thesis analyse how life-histories are expressed and reformulated in connection to a life crisis of ill health. The study is based on ten interviews with people who in connection with ill health have made use of treatments within both orthodox medicine and complementary medicine and who have also developed various forms of self-treatment. The overall aim is, with a point of departure in the concepts health, healing and trust, to analyse narratives as a practice through which the respondents create identity and a life-context. The signifi cance of constructing the (auto)biography of the healing narrative – a form of narrative and performative act – runs as the main thread through the thesis. This act makes up the practice that is recurrently discussed in several of the thesis’ chapters and is synonymously termed the telling of healing narratives or or to narrate health and healing. The analysis of the narrative’s The analysis of the narrative’s healing main themes is mirrored in the order of the chapters. The study is broadly thematic and structured as a generalised healing process beginning with upheaval, continuing with crisis and social drama, and further to the endeavour of expressing values and judgements in a public context.</p><p>The interview themes of self-treatment and alternative treatment have occasioned the investigation into what an ethno-medical perspective can bring to analyses of people’s experiences of ill health in an everyday medical context. One of the points of having the concept ethno-medicine as a starting point is that every practice or narrative formation is ascribed with a potential for interpretation in its creation of knowledge. Another chapter deals with two themes of identity and life-history construction in the practice of healing narratives – the need for a chronology and reappraised perspectives on body, health and lifestyle. Healing narratives can be understood as a genre of life-historical narratives where life is often described as a linear course of events. A model by the anthropologist Victor Turner on the course and content of social drama is used as a comment to analyses of three respondents’ narratives in another chapter. A drama can be understood as a tragic course of events, based on an accident or an upsetting incident that roughly revolves around event/crisis, chaos and the striving for restoration. The concept of other journals is then used to make visible the everyday medical administrative practice and refers to the documentation used in the form of collected documents, written notes, and diaries. As an unexpected part of healing processes, the necessity of familiarising oneself with rules, laws and health insurance systems in order to be able to claim one’s rights is brought forward.</p><p>The social transformation process of various care practices in society makes up both a context and a commonly occurring theme in the narratives that the thesis is based upon. A modern health culture that gains strength from loosely composed social movements exerts infl uence on all levels of society. With an increased individual responsibility, the need grows to fi nd one’s own healing strategies and to create one’s own life-history in narratives that mirror this transformation in an everyday context. Healing narratives can be seen as a form of evaluation of health-care practices where experiences of treatment and notions of health and cure and healing are concretised.</p>

This thesis analyse how life-histories are expressed and reformulated in connection to a life crisis of ill health. The study is based on ten interviews with people who in connection with ill health have made use of treatments within both orthodox medicine and complementary medicine and who have also developed various forms of self-treatment. The overall aim is, with a point of departure in the concepts health, healing and trust, to analyse narratives as a practice through which the respondents create identity and a life-context. The signifi cance of constructing the (auto)biography of the healing narrative – a form of narrative and performative act – runs as the main thread through the thesis. This act makes up the practice that is recurrently discussed in several of the thesis’ chapters and is synonymously termed the telling of healing narratives or or to narrate health and healing. The analysis of the narrative’s The analysis of the narrative’s healing main themes is mirrored in the order of the chapters. The study is broadly thematic and structured as a generalised healing process beginning with upheaval, continuing with crisis and social drama, and further to the endeavour of expressing values and judgements in a public context. The interview themes of self-treatment and alternative treatment have occasioned the investigation into what an ethno-medical perspective can bring to analyses of people’s experiences of ill health in an everyday medical context. One of the points of having the concept ethno-medicine as a starting point is that every practice or narrative formation is ascribed with a potential for interpretation in its creation of knowledge. Another chapter deals with two themes of identity and life-history construction in the practice of healing narratives – the need for a chronology and reappraised perspectives on body, health and lifestyle. Healing narratives can be understood as a genre of life-historical narratives where life is often described as a linear course of events. A model by the anthropologist Victor Turner on the course and content of social drama is used as a comment to analyses of three respondents’ narratives in another chapter. A drama can be understood as a tragic course of events, based on an accident or an upsetting incident that roughly revolves around event/crisis, chaos and the striving for restoration. The concept of other journals is then used to make visible the everyday medical administrative practice and refers to the documentation used in the form of collected documents, written notes, and diaries. As an unexpected part of healing processes, the necessity of familiarising oneself with rules, laws and health insurance systems in order to be able to claim one’s rights is brought forward. The social transformation process of various care practices in society makes up both a context and a commonly occurring theme in the narratives that the thesis is based upon. A modern health culture that gains strength from loosely composed social movements exerts infl uence on all levels of society. With an increased individual responsibility, the need grows to fi nd one’s own healing strategies and to create one’s own life-history in narratives that mirror this transformation in an everyday context. Healing narratives can be seen as a form of evaluation of health-care practices where experiences of treatment and notions of health and cure and healing are concretised.

This study investigates two central research problems. These are: What are the healing practices of Aeta women? What are the implications of the healing practices of Aeta women in the academic discourse? This inquiry is important for the following reasons: (a) it focuses a reconsidered gaze and empirical lens on the healing practices of Aeta women healers as well as the lessons, insights and perspectives which may have been previously missed; (b) my research attempts not to be 'neutral' but instead be an exercise in participatory action research and as such hopefully brings a new space of decolonization by documenting Aeta women healers’ contributions in the political and academic arena; and (c) it is an original contribution to postcolonial, anti-colonial and Indigenous feminist theories particularly through its demonstration the utility of these theories in understanding the health of Indigenous peoples and global health. There are 12 Aeta women healers who participated in the Talking Circle. This study is significant in grounding both the theory and the methodology while comparatively evaluating claims calibrated against the benchmark of the actual narratives of Aeta women healers. These evaluations subsequently categorized my findings into three themes: namely, identity, agency and representation. This work is also important in illustrating the Indigenous communities’ commonalities on resistance, accommodation, evolution and devolution of social institutions and leadership through empirical example. The work also sheds light on how the members of our Circle and their communities’ experiences with outsider intrusion and imposed changes intentionally structured to dominate them as Indigenous people altered our participants and their communities. Though the reactions of the Aeta were and are unique in this adaptive process they join a growing comparative scholarly discussion on how contexts for colonization were the same or different. This thesis therefore joins a growing comparative educational literature on the contextual variations among global experiences with colonization. This is important since Indigenous Peoples' experiences are almost always portrayed as unique or “exotic”. I can now understand through comparison that many of the processes from military to pedagogical impositions bore striking similarities across various colonial, geographical and cultural locations.

This study investigates two central research problems. These are: What are the healing practices of Aeta women? What are the implications of the healing practices of Aeta women in the academic discourse? This inquiry is important for the following reasons: (a) it focuses a reconsidered gaze and empirical lens on the healing practices of Aeta women healers as well as the lessons, insights and perspectives which may have been previously missed; (b) my research attempts not to be 'neutral' but instead be an exercise in participatory action research and as such hopefully brings a new space of decolonization by documenting Aeta women healers’ contributions in the political and academic arena; and (c) it is an original contribution to postcolonial, anti-colonial and Indigenous feminist theories particularly through its demonstration the utility of these theories in understanding the health of Indigenous peoples and global health. There are 12 Aeta women healers who participated in the Talking Circle. This study is significant in grounding both the theory and the methodology while comparatively evaluating claims calibrated against the benchmark of the actual narratives of Aeta women healers. These evaluations subsequently categorized my findings into three themes: namely, identity, agency and representation. This work is also important in illustrating the Indigenous communities’ commonalities on resistance, accommodation, evolution and devolution of social institutions and leadership through empirical example. The work also sheds light on how the members of our Circle and their communities’ experiences with outsider intrusion and imposed changes intentionally structured to dominate them as Indigenous people altered our participants and their communities. Though the reactions of the Aeta were and are unique in this adaptive process they join a growing comparative scholarly discussion on how contexts for colonization were the same or different. This thesis therefore joins a growing comparative educational literature on the contextual variations among global experiences with colonization. This is important since Indigenous Peoples' experiences are almost always portrayed as unique or “exotic”. I can now understand through comparison that many of the processes from military to pedagogical impositions bore striking similarities across various colonial, geographical and cultural locations.