Between Boundaries: Scripts of the Land

Abstract

This paper examines the link between a person’s narrative and ethical principles, which we can derive from understanding how an individual perceives both their own self and the surrounding world. Myths are often considered to be part of a larger—communal— belief and value system rather than expressing individual phenomenologies. However, in this paper, narratives of personal tragedies from various contexts of natural and humanitarian disasters and crises will be explored for their meanings about a world-view that shifts, fragments, and, ultimately, when the wound balances with a healing. This has implications for our ethical lens, for example, on the normative judgments that settle on coping-methods that are differentiated as aside from dominant discourses on trauma. Narratives, then, lend themselves to forming self-identity and re-framing world-views and in this sense have an ethical value. Finally, the paper concludes with the suggestion for a greater personalisation of ethics in response to situating ethics within a narration discourse.