Mikhail Bakhtin’s Concept of Polyphony and Studies of Illness Narrative: An Anthropologist’s Notes

Abstract

Our illness narratives can be understood as one of archaic talk forms of indicating, demonstrating, explaining, and manifesting our oral experiences. Even though patients explaining ongoing their sufferings, this type of talk is coincidentally similar with post hoc narrative or in afterlife (Fortleben) form per se. Like chemical chain reaction, the endless form of narratives can be also seemed in the polyphonic talk forms, that Mikhail Bakhtin had formulated in his literary criticism on series of the Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novels. The author has discussed on structural strengths of illness narratives that attract for numerous students of health & medical sociology, and anthropologists.