Heroism and Wellbeing in the 21st Century

Applied and Emerging Perspectives

Olivia Efthimiou,Scott Allison,Zeno Franco

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315409009
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Psychologie
• Categoría: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

Offering a holistic take on an emerging field, this edited collection examines how heroism manifests, is appropriated, and is constructed in a broad range of settings and from a variety of disciplines and perspectives. Psychologists, educators, lawyers, researchers and cultural analysts consider how heroism intersects with wellbeing, and how we still use—and even abuse—heroism as a vehicle to thrive and prosper in the everyday and in the face of the most unbearable situations. Highlighting some of the most pressing issues in today's world—including genocide, racism, deceitful business practices, bystanderism, mental health, unethical governance and the global refugee crisis—this book applies a critical psychological perspective in synthesizing the social construction of heroism and wellbeing, contributing to the development of global wellbeing indicators and measures.

Section 1
Historical Contexts

1
Transforming Through Ambivalence

Failure, Deviance, and Contradiction in Heroism

Graham Seal

A hero is the subject of the world’s oldest written document. His name was Gilgamesh, and he was said to have lived circa 800 years before his deeds were written down around 1800 BCE (Black et al. 1998; George 2003). The standard version of the Gilgamesh story begins with its protagonist severely oppressing his people. To overcome this oppression, the gods create a companion for Gilgamesh, the wild man Enkidu, whose job is to make Gilgamesh aware of his misbehavior and arrogance and keep him on the straight and narrow.

After slaying the monster Humbaba and saving Uruk from destruction, Gilgamesh and Enkidu fall foul of the gods. Enkidu is cursed to death. Gilgamesh falls into violent mourning and then he journeys to the underworld in search of the secret of eternal youth. Utnapishtim, survivor of the great flood, reveals the secret—an undersea plant. Gilgamesh secures the plant, but it is stolen from him by a snake, and he weeps for his failure to gain the great secret. He returns to Uruk, finally realizing that an individual, even a part god-king, cannot live forever. Gilgamesh erects a magnificent city for his people and their descendants. The hero is recognized, and his people are liberated (Black et al. 1998).

The ancient tale of Gilgamesh includes many of the elements still closely associated with heroic activities and figures. There are some clear parallels with later literary traditions, including Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and Noah and the Great Flood. Scholars have also pointed to echoes of the Gilgamesh stories in Homer. Other elements crop up again and again in the world’s hero traditions, including the role of the companion/helper, contests with monsters of one kind or another, visits to the underworld, and the loss of a magical ingredient (Dalley 2000). While the ending of the epic is often unresolved, partly due to incomplete sources, Gilgamesh’s return to his home and responsibilities signifies a distinct change in his attitude. After saving his city from the Bull of Heaven, he now recognizes the value of the walls that protect Uruk and, by implication, those for whom he has ultimate responsibility. There is a transformation in his character brought about by his trials and recognition of the need for a just, ordered, and secure society (Allison and Goethals 2017).

But this is not an untrammeled heroism. A compelling aspect of the Gilgamesh epic is the contradictory nature of its hero, a form of ambivalence. Gilgamesh is shown to be, at various points in the epic, a villain, a defier of the gods, arrogant, uncaring, and, in his quest for what he considers to be the ultimate prize, a failure. Contradictions of this kind, and others, can be found in many narratives. And while heroes may eventually triumph in one or more aspects of their quests, ambivalence is often an important element of their story. While the hero may eventually win the laurels, these are conferred by his or her people or followers in spite of his or her demonstrated failings and inconsistencies. Ambivalence, in whatever form, is one of the things that makes heroes appealing, reflecting our own contradictions through their stories.

This chapter looks at the range and diversity of hero narratives, briefly discusses some influential past and present scholarly approaches to reading heroism, and identifies ambivalence as a frequent quality of such narratives. Some important aspects of heroic ambivalence are highlighted, including failure, contradiction, and deviance. It is posited that these dimensions of heroic narratives are both psychologically and socially convenient and thus contribute to the historical and contemporary appeal of heroes and heroines.

Hero Narratives

Heroes—displaying one or more of the characteristics found in the Gilgamesh epic—exist in and through the stories that give them life and purpose. These narratives take oral form in myths, legends, songs, dances, and folktales of all kinds. They also exist in literature, cinema, art, opera, ballet, comics, graphic novels, digital games, and every other communication medium so far invented. To understand heroism, we must therefore engage with the narrative forms in which it is articulated, whether these be textual (written and oral), visual, material, or some combination of these (Allison and Goethals 2014).

Heroes are the focus of a particular kind of narrative process in which the motifs that exist in a large pool of international and culturally specific forms are available for selection by those who wish to tell a particular story or sing a song in a particular way. In the past, the main means and method by which such stories were told was word of mouth. As societies became increasingly technologized, the modes and methods of transmission expanded to include mass media and now the Internet. All of these communication media have their own effect on the stories that are told through them (Klisanin 2015). But storytellers still select the motifs that make up their telling and retelling from the pre-existing pool. Thus, each telling of a hero tale is a selection of appropriate elements from a common stock, or items from a menu, to suit the needs of the storyteller and his or her audience(s) (Thompson 1955, 58). An understanding of this process allows us to investigate the origins, spread, and persistence of hero figures and hero types over time, over space, and, just as importantly, over their lodgments in different forms or genres of cultural expression, including folklore, popular culture, and high art. The exact presentation of a hero may differ from genre to genre, but the overall effect is to continually rework and re-present that figure to various audiences.

Heroes, then, are produced and proliferated in many forms of cultural expression and through a variety of cultural processes. Accordingly, they are able to, and do, mean many different things to many different social groups. Heroes can appear in almost any social, cultural, and economic circumstances, and they can have different meanings to different cultures or groups within cultures. Sometimes they are villains, or “malignant transformations” (Allison and Goethals 2017, 396; Zimbardo 2007) as well, as in the case of outlaw heroes (Seal 2009). Sometimes they are unpromising good-for-nothings, usually a “Jack,” “Jean,” or “Hans” populating the folk and fairy tales of various countries. This flexibility can serve as a vehicle for creating endless iterations by popularizers, filmmakers, artists, and just about anyone else who has an interest in such figures. The adaptations of hero tales by the Walt Disney company and other media creators provide many instances of this malleability (Zipes 2011).

Hero narratives allow us to ‘see’ whatever we like into them. While they present as solid structures with a beginning, a middle, and an end, they are in fact designed to be infinitely varied and reshaped according to our expectations, needs, and wants. Heroes are a not-quite-empty vessel into which we can pour our expectations and have them brewed into something palatable. They are not fixed, immutable, with universal meanings for all humanity. Instead they are narrative constructs drawn from a pool of traits and motifs that can be combined and recombined endlessly to tell ourselves the stories we want to hear and see. They are literally “our” heroes, made in our image, serving our diverse needs over more than four millennia and across the fragile rock we inhabit (Goethals and Allison 2012).

There is a very real sense in which hero narratives form a field of common perception and understanding across time and space, a field to which all humans can relate. Indeed, so extensive are hero traditions that it is possible to suggest heroes—or at least their stories and their meanings—are hardwired into our genetic structure, a fundamental narrative strand of DNA through which we process our understanding of the world and of others in that world (Ross, Greenhill, and Atkinson 2013), a possibility encompassed in the work of Carl Jung on the innateness of archetypes and subsequently much developed (Goethals and Allison 2012).

It is the intriguing complexities of such apparently simple stories that have inspired generations of scholarship on heroes and heroines, their quest, their triumphs, their transformation, and the resultant transformation of their environing constituencies (Allison and Goethals 2017). A brief history of these efforts in the modern and postmodern era is explored next.

Hero Scholarship

From the late 18th century, intellectuals were increasingly absorbed in trying to make sense of the spoils transported from the colonial possessions of the European powers. It was not only strange and exotic foods, herbs, spices, and fruits that explorers and colonizers brought home, but also rich cultural booty: new languages, lifestyles, costumes, artifacts, customs, and lore. In that lore, the curious eventually unraveled ancient oral traditions of which they had little or no previous knowledge. This was intriguing enough, but as more and more of these traditions were translated, made available in scholarly circles, discussed, and compared, a surprising situation was revealed. The stories, songs, and poems of the colonized turned out to be remarkably like those of the colonizers. The New World tales of warriors, monsters, magicians, and the like turned out to be pretty much the same as Old World tales, or recognizable variations on the same essential themes. The names of the characters whose deeds were celebrated in these traditions were different, but they were often the same as European traditions found in Greek, Roman, and Scandinavian mythologies and in the bodies of European folklore also being gradually collected and studied at the time. How could this be? wondered those who took the trouble to interest themselves in such things. These New World peoples had no known contact with Europe or, as far as anyone knew, with each other. Why, then, were many of their “savage” traditions so much like our “civilized” myths and legends? And did these similar tales and traditions spring from a common source, or were they created independently?

Then, as now, no one knew the answer to those questions. But that did not stop an increasing amount of musing and speculation on the part of the early investigators like Max Muller (Stone 2002) and Andrew Lang (Lang 1887). Various theories were developed to explain these similarities, parallels, and concordances. Initially, these theories were heavily influenced by philology, the study of the history and diffusion of languages, which highlighted the similarities, real and alleged, between languages as diverse as Sanskrit and English. The recurrence of a relatively limited number of motifs in the hero traditions of the world encouraged some to search for universal formulas and structures in the narratives. Edward Tylor began in 1871, quickly followed by Johann Georg von Hahn in 1876. Otto Rank published The Myth of the Birth of the Hero in 1909 under the influence of Sigmund Freud. Lord Raglan’s famous work The Hero appeared in 1936 and posited a set number of characteristics that applied to many, if not all, heroes (Segal 1990).

Within this crucible of speculation, theorizing, and fantasizing, one scholar emerged who managed to forge a theory that, while not satisfying everyone, certainly satisfied more than any other. Sir James Frazer was the colossus who emerged from the battle of the intellectual titans. In his vast and influential book The Golden Bough, Frazer (1890–1915) surveyed in exhaustive detail much of the world’s known literature and lore, providing overwhelming evidence for the many similarities with a super-theory. Frazer argued that all cultures had developed a concept of the king as a god who needed to be ritually killed on appropriate occasions and succeeded by another to ensure the continued fertility of the land and its people. Frazer’s theory was clothed within a breathtakingly broad body of scholarship, covering many languages and disciplines. Despite its forbidding size, ultimately 12 volumes, later followed by a supplementary 13th volume, The Golden Bough won immediate and wide acceptance not only among scholars, but also—usually in its abbreviated form—among the general public anxious for an explanation. The fact that Frazer’s theorizations are now considered to be mostly nonsense mattered not. Frazer had provided an explanation that satisfied a perplexed generation. He was rewarded accordingly with honors, fame, and fortune, and he continued his studies for the rest of his long life.

Another approach was developed by the Russian folklorist Vladimir Propp (1928/1958). Using a sample of oral texts collected in the field, Propp developed a “morphology” of the folktale in which there were a set number of 31 possible functions, or roles, and outcomes that the hero and subsidiary characters in the tale could achieve. According to Propp, the universal aim of the tale was to liquidate lack—that is, a metaphorical redressing of something missing (love, money, power, etc.) that required replacing or acquiring. The hero or someone close to the hero leaves the safety of the community and receives an interdiction or command not to d...

Índice

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface: Letters from the Ground
• Introduction: Heroism and Wellbeing in the 21st Century: Recognizing Our Personal Heroic Imperative
• SECTION 1 Historical Contexts
• SECTION 2 Teaching and Fostering Heroism
• SECTION 3 Contemporary Professional Practices
• SECTION 4 Crisis, Displacement, and Recovery
• Conclusion: Definition, Synthesis, and Applications of Heroic Wellbeing
• Biographies
• Index