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Amechanon, Vol. I / 2016-2018, ISSN: 2459-2846

concerning body and the attitude towards mourning and memorial performs a process of
«meaning making». This is a process connected to a cultural turnabout from modernism to

post-modernism that has blurred previous existing distinctions, including the line between
scientific reporting and artistic expressions. As a result of this, individual autobiographies

and narratives are involved more with the social sciences, to such an extent that some
writers have begun to ask themselves what the boundary for researchers is, where they

can or are permitted to write in a manner closer to the format of a novel, short story and
similar genres. The basis of this position is that knowledge is a composition of narratives

which are ceaselessly created in a process of social interaction and corresponds to post-

modernist thought. This emphasizes multiplicity and diversity as elements of human
existence.

«I don’t have to accept the general position that I hear in society around me», said
one of the adolescents, «that when the dead person is buried, he is dead and has

no body or as call it ‘another body’. If everyone believes this, I want to disagree
about it and argue that there are already other narratives – for example, that the
body of the dead remain with us in a certain way».

Continuing the thinking of MacHale, who saw the turnabout in the replacement of theory

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by narrative , I suggest here that it is a question of shift or movement from the life
narrative to a philosophical narrative in which there is a ceaseless dynamism.

Throughout the conversations, a dialogue in a number of voices was articulated: the child’s

voice; the deceased individual’s voice through the child; the voice of memory and the voice

of interpretation by the child during the way the community views the deceased and the
world of the deceased. Some of these voices communicate perceptions of struggle or
disagreement.

The philosophical community of inquiry also enhanced the students’ philosophical
sensitivities, principally by promoting multiple identities and meanings. In Truth and

Method, Gadamer argues that all textual understanding is hermeneutic in nature,
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constituting a dialogue between the reader and his/her world and the text . The
philosophical discussions children and adolescents revealed that narratives can prevent a

210 MacHale, B., Constructing Postmodernism, London & NY: Routledge, 1992.

211 Gadamer, H.,G., Truth and method, New York: Continuum, 1998.

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