Healing and Peacebuilding After War: Transforming Trauma in Bosnia and Herzegovina by Julianne Funk & Nancy Good & Marie E Berry

Author:Julianne Funk & Nancy Good & Marie E Berry [Funk, Julianne & Good, Nancy & Berry, Marie E]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780429674037
Goodreads: 50920622
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

Storytelling’s potential for social transformation

Storytelling consists of language, narrative and dialogue. As language, it encodes the culture of a particular community, including a shared understanding of identity, power, history, values and utopian visions. As a narrative, it can serve as the rationale for action, because it encodes knowledge that everyone in the group buys into and therefore holds narrative potency. And as dialogue, it is a direct interpersonal interaction and can generate and sustain person-to-person relationships (Senehi 2002). As such, public speaking events (PSE) hold the power to raise awareness, change attitudes and initiate socio-transformative processes.

Senehi (2002) illustrates two ways in which storytelling can be significant in conflict resolution, peacemaking and peacebuilding. First, storytelling invites a paradigm shift – it catalyzes transformation – and second, it is accessible both technically and intellectually to the listener, something unusual when hearing from the “other.” Bar-On and Kassem (2004) found that storytelling among Palestinian and Jewish students contributed to their ability to listen to one another and to construct a more complex image of the other than usually conveyed by the media. As a method to communicate personal truth, storytelling encourages social healing and reconciliation by promoting individual responsibility over general group blaming and collective assignment of guilt. When the truths of past crimes are exposed, individuals – not entire ethnic, religious or cultural groups – are exonerated from guilt (Mendelof 2004). Therefore, as Halpern and Weinstein (2004) note, the storytelling process helps to individualize members of opposing groups and challenges dehumanization of their behavior and nature. Storytelling can help individuals and groups to learn, experience and acknowledge that both groups are victims of the conflict and have experienced loss, albeit uniquely (Justad 2006).

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