Metaphors and cultural narratives on adaptive responses to severe adversity: A field study among the Indigenous Pitaguary community in Brazil

Abstract

The expressions resilience and posttraumatic growth represent metaphorical concepts that are typically found in Euro-American contexts. Metaphors of severe adversity or trauma and the expressions of overcoming it vary across cultures—a lacuna, which has not been given much attention in the literature so far. This study aimed to explore the metaphorical concepts that the Indigenous Pitaguary community in Brazil uses to talk about adaptive and positive responses to severe adversity and to relate them to their socio-cultural context. We carried out 14 semi-structured interviews during field research over a one-month period of fieldwork. The data were explored with systematic metaphor analysis. The core metaphors included images of battle, unity, spirituality, journeys, balance, time, sight, transformation, and development. These metaphors were related to context-specific cultural narratives that underlie the Pitaguary ontological perspective on collectivity, nature, and cosmology. The results suggest that metaphors and cultural narratives can reveal important aspects of a culture’s collective mindset. To have a contextualized understanding of expressive nuances is an essential asset to adapt interventions to specific cultures and promote culture-specific healing and recovery processes.

Keywords

Brazil idioms of distress metaphors posttraumatic growth resilience socio-cultural context

Introduction

Trauma (“wound” in Greek) is a metaphorical concept that originates from Euro-American somatic medicine and that gives rise to the implicit understanding that traumatized people have a “wounded psyche” (Maercker & Heim, 2016). Resilience and posttraumatic growth (PTG), on the other hand, are widely known metaphorical concepts representing adaptive responses to trauma or severe adversity. Although the two terms have been treated as synonyms (Sattler, Boyd, & Kirsch, 2014), it has been argued that they represent distinct concepts (Tedeschi, Shakespeare-Finch, Taku, & Calhoun, 2018). Resilience, a metaphor originating from materials science, refers to a personal trait of being flexible and able to bounce back from adversity (Bonanno, 2004), the capability to withstand adversity and to return to the previous status quo. As a biological metaphor, PTG is applied to the positive psychological outcomes of struggle with difficult circumstances (Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004). Related metaphorical expressions for growth are “development” or “maturation,” which indicate an aspiration to go beyond the previous status quo in the aftermath of adversity and achieve a higher state of wellbeing. A growing literature has taken a culture-sensitive approach to these two concepts (e.g., Hinton & Kirmayer, 2017; Lewis, 2013; Splevins, Cohen, Bowley, & Joseph, 2010; Ungar, 2011). It has been argued that adaptive responses to severe adversity depend on the cultural and historical context and that the universality of the Western-devised phenomena of resilience and PTG is questionable (Pals & McAdams, 2004; Ungar, 2011; Vázquez, Perez-Sales, & Ochoa, 2014).

Culture-specific concepts or idioms of distress have gained much attention in the fields of cultural-clinical psychology and cultural psychiatry in recent years (den Hertog, de Jong, van der Ham, Hinton, & Reis, 2016; Hinton & Lewis-Fernández, 2010; Kirmayer, Gomez-Carrillo, & Veissière, 2017; Kohrt et al., 2014). Idioms of distress have been defined as an “embodied symbolic language for psychosocial suffering that derives its legitimacy from its shared metaphors, meaning and understanding in a group” (de Jong & Reis, 2010, p. 302). In their renowned book Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) postulated that “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980, p. 5). Metaphors are said to emerge from a cultural context (Kövecses 2015) and can be amplified by cultural narratives grounded in a folk epistemology and shared ontology (Kirmayer & Ramstead, 2017). A shared ontology can be defined as a “specific set of cultural expectations, embodied in cultural symbols and places, and enacted through everyday habits and rituals” (Kirmayer & Ramstead, 2017, p. 25). Cultural ontologies are said to be “a shared style or mode of expecting the world to be a certain way [that] afford certain possibilities for action while foreclosing others” (Kirmayer & Ramstead, 2017, p. 26). Metaphorical narratives can reflect fundamental aspects of a culture, such as its values, implicit thinking patterns, and shared mindsets (Kruse, Biesel, & Schmieder, 2011; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). Thus, metaphors provide an important window onto shared idioms relating to severe adversity in specific socio-cultural contexts (Schmitt, 2017).

It follows that the term “trauma” must be recognized as referring to a Euro-American metaphorical idiom of distress that may not coincide with other cultures’ conceptualization of the aftermath of severe adversity (Marsella, 2010; Summerfield, 1999). It has been argued that trauma and the associated diagnosis of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)—concepts which are derived from Euro-American contexts— strongly imply an individual-centered perspective that is rooted in biomedical and biographical understandings of human functioning (Bracken, 2001; Summerfield, 1999). From this etic or outsider’s perspective the unit of study is the “wounded” or “scarred” individual, and this approach may overlook the diversity among non-Euro-American populations. Differences may be considered regarding Indigenous communities or Latino populations that have survived trauma or severe adversity (Hill, Lau, & Sue, 2010; Summerfield, 1999; Whitley, 2014). Recent research has suggested that an emic, i.e., culturally immanent, perspective reveals variation in cultural concepts of trauma and distress, particularly outside Euro-American contexts (Kohrt et al., 2014; Rasmussen, Keatley, & Joscelyne, 2014). These concepts have numerous metaphorical connotations and clearly differ from the concept of “trauma” as it is used in the mental health literature (for further detail, see Maercker & Heim, 2016). To avoid the problems associated with assuming that “trauma” is a universal concept, we will use the term “severe adversity” in the rest of this article.

Similar concerns have arisen concerning culture-specific perspectives on resilience and PTG. Whereas members of White middle-class communities in Western cultures may be apt to view the process of overcoming adversity as an individual task requiring personal effort, non-Western groups may conceptualize adversity as a social problem requiring collective forms of processing (Karasz, 2005). Ungar (2011) states that resilience cannot be understood as an individual trait, but that the whole system in which an individual is embedded contributes to protective processes in the face of adversity. Noticeable emphasis has been put on studying and promoting community resilience in rural, North American Indigenous communities (e.g., Allen et al., 2014; Cloud Ramirez & Hammack, 2014; Kirmayer, Sheiner, & Geoffroy, 2016). Tedeschi and colleagues (2018) suggest that communities and cultural groups that experience PTG may strengthen their bonds, provide new opportunities, and build new norms. Páez, Vázquez, and Echeburúa (2013) similarly posited that collective PTG could be defined as “benefits perceived in the community and society as a response to collective trauma experiences. It is a process of community learning reflected in collective emotions, emotional climate, beliefs, values and social behaviors” (p. 18). In a useful contribution about collective PTG, Williamson (2014) reported on the case of survivors of the genocide that took place in Rwanda. The author concluded that PTG at the collective level is about agency and communion, thus highlighting changes in culturally shared ideologies. Hence, the balance between autonomy (freedom) and relatedness (reconciliation) is suggested as an essential element to increase group cohesion and collective identity.

Culture-specific metaphors for adaptive and positive responses to severe adversity have so far been under-represented in cultural-clinical psychology research. In a previous comprehensive review published in this journal, we showed that there is a wide range of metaphorical concepts used to describe adaptive and positive responses to severe adversity in different cultures and that these metaphorical concepts are rooted in specific socio-cultural contexts (Meili & Maercker, 2019). We argued that adaptive and positive responses to adversity can be roughly classified into eight categories of metaphors: organic, battle, path, container, balance, object, weight, and network. The review concluded that in cultures that are relatively detached from Euro-American biomedical assumptions about mental health, there might not necessarily be a striving for cognitive and affective restructuring processes labeled as “growth” or “maturation.”

Universal and context-specific metaphors

The question of whether metaphorical speech and symbolic representations of mental health are universal or prone to cultural variation has been a subject of research since it was first raised by C. G. Jung (Samuels, Shorter, & Plaut, 1986). Today there is growing interest in finding an understanding of universality and cross-cultural variation in metaphorical speech relating to mental health (Hinton & Kirmayer, 2017; Kirmayer & Ramstead, 2017; Kövecses, 2010). Kövecses (2015) introduced the notion of a difference between metaphors related to the body and to context, arguing that primary metaphors are related to bodily sensations and may be universal, whereas there is a broad range of what could be termed contextual metaphors both within and across cultures. Contextual metaphors depend on culturally sensitive understandings of practices, history, and environment (Kövecses, 2015; Yu, 2008).

Kirmayer and Ramstead (2017) elaborated on the distinction between body- and context-related metaphors. They argued that embodied experiences give rise to primary metaphors and context-specific cultural narratives. These cultural narratives are based on discourse, social interaction, and collective practices rooted in specific socio-cultural and historical contexts. Conversely, narrations of experience elicit new metaphors that influence individuals’ experience and new narratives, which are extended through collective enactments. This results in ongoing cycles of embodiment and enactment, occurring over the course of an individual’s lifetime, a period of change in a community, or a historical process. Metaphors, therefore, can be seen as tools for positioning one’s self in the world and can, in turn, provide interpretive framing for one’s self-perception. Finally, all these factors shape people’s understanding of mental health and ways of talking about it, as well as how individual and intersubjective processing of mental health disorders depend on implicit self-concepts (Kirmayer, 2007; Kirmayer & Ramstead, 2017).

Several authors have tried to catalog how concepts of self influence the processing of traumatic events (de Jong & Reis, 2013; Maercker & Horn, 2013; Papadopoulos, 2007). A decade before publishing ideas on the distinction between embodied metaphors and cultural narratives (Kirmayer & Ramstead, 2017), Kirmayer (2007) proposed a categorization of self-concepts based on the differentiation between egocentric, sociocentric, ecocentric, and cosmocentric ontologies. This scheme has been applied to Indigenous communities in North America (Kirmayer, Brass, & Valaskakis, 2009) and provides context for the exploration of culture-specific metaphors and narratives in the present study.

As outlined, it seems to be most important to acknowledge that cultural specificities and variations shape core parts of individuals’ identity in ways that can be integral to mental health. Numerous authors have highlighted that this need has become particularly evident in their work with Indigenous populations (e.g., Kirmayer et al., 2016; Matheson, Bombay, & Anisman, 2018; Nelson & Wilson, 2017). The Stories of Resilience project conducted by Kirmayer and colleagues explored the resilience metaphor and factors that promote mental health resilience in North American Indigenous peoples (Dow, Dandeneau, Phillips, Kirmayer, & McCormick, 2008; Kirmayer, Dandeneau, Marshall, Phillips, & Williamson, 2012). We aimed to build on that research by exploring the kinds of shared metaphorical concepts and culture-specific narratives of adaptive responses to severe adversity that exist among the Indigenous Pitaguary people living in Brazil. Despite the increasing number of studies on cultural notions of overcoming adversities, there is still a considerable lack of emic studies from different parts of the world, compared to the number of studies on PTG and resilience in the Western context. Emic research from different parts of the world is expected to add pieces to the “larger picture,” which will hopefully contribute to a better understanding of how culture shapes these processes. Unlike North American or Australian Indigenous communities, Latin American Indigenous people—especially Brazilian—have received little attention in the international literature on mental health so far. We aimed to shed light on their perspective, considering their very particular historical and socio-cultural context, and to integrate these insights into the larger body of literature on how different cultures deal with personal and collective adversities.

Our goals were, first, to construct a catalog of the shared metaphorical concepts related to adaptive responses to adversity; and second, to suggest how these metaphors are related to the participants’ socio-cultural context by making the bridge to culture-specific narratives and implicit self-concepts with reference to the theoretical model proposed by Kirmayer and Ramstead (2017). We were particularly interested in investigating whether the Indigenous Pitaguary long for personal or collective gain after a severe adverse event and what else their metaphors imply about their collective perspective on adaptive responses to severe adversity.

The Indigenous Pitaguary community in Brazil

We chose to investigate metaphorical concepts of the Indigenous Pitaguary community because relationships already established by the third author (A. P.) gave us access to research facilitators and community leaders.

The Pitaguary reside in four different communities in the townships of Maracanaú and Pacatuba, which are on the periphery of Fortaleza, the capital city of Ceará state, in Northeastern Brazil. The Pitaguary are a rural Indigenous community of nearly 4300 individuals (Souza, 2013), of whom approximately 800 live in Monguba, where this research took place. The community’s official language is Portuguese and their native language, Tupí, is only used occasionally, during ritual songs and to refer to locally cultivated products. The Pitaguary traditionally identify as animists and accord great significance to nature and spiritual healing. Today they describe their syncretic religion as a blend of Christianity (including Catholicism and Evangelism), Umbanda (originating in Afro-Brazilian traditions), and Indigenous spiritual beliefs (Gersem dos Santos, 2006; Seligman, 2014). The Pitaguary reside at the foot of a rocky mountain, surrounded by rainforest in an area that is nevertheless close to the main road connecting nearby larger cities. “Their” mountain, which they consider an important source of energy and home to their spirits, has been heavily targeted as a source of raw materials and this has greatly intensified the community’s conflict with the local government.

Indigenous populations in Brazil have been exploited since the invasion of European settlers around 1500; their homeland, the rainforest, has been destroyed and replaced by agricultural land (Gersem dos Santos, 2006; Ribeiro, 2006). There was a period of intense conflict between the Indigenous people and the Portuguese colonists, following which Indigenous peoples were severely affected by enslavement and deadly diseases that decimated their populations in what is now referred to as the “Indigenous genocide” (Garfield, 2001; Warren, 2001). Today, like many other Indigenous communities worldwide, the Pitaguary are engaged in ongoing political struggle for their territorial rights (Galdino, Ladim Neto, Da Silva, & Gorayeb, 2016). Widespread discrimination against the Indigenous peoples of Brazil and poverty among their communities remain urgent issues and are a cause of despair, contributing to high rates of depressive symptoms, as well as alcohol and drug abuse (Gersem dos Santos, 2006). Elevated suicide rates are reported among Indigenous people across the whole country (Gersem dos Santos, 2006), as well as among the Pitaguary (including the suicide of the Cacique, the main political leader, three months before our fieldwork took place).

In line with North American research on Indigenous mental health (Hill et al., 2010), it has become evident that suffering among the Pitaguary may be best understood through reference to the “historical trauma” they have been suffering from. A historical trauma is defined as “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding across generations, including the lifespan, which emanates from massive group trauma” (Brave Heart, Chase, Elkins, & Altschul, 2011, p. 282). In re-visioning the construct of historical trauma, Kirmayer, Gone, and Moses (2014) pointed to the importance of differentiating the persistent Indigenous suffering from other forms of historical trauma, possibly the most famous of which is the Holocaust. They emphasize that the impact of colonization, cultural suppression, and historical oppression of peoples in the Americas reflects not so much past trauma as ongoing structural violence. Thereby, it must be acknowledged that the kinds of adversity faced by each generation may differ. Moreover, Kirmayer et al. (2014) stress that the impact of adversity on mental health requires a broader understanding of identity, community, forms of adaptation, and ways of overcoming it. Against this cultural and historical background, we aimed to explore the metaphorical concepts used by the Indigenous Pitaguary to describe locally shared concepts of adaptive responses to the severe adversity they have experienced.

Methods

Recruitment of informants and procedure

During a one-month field trip to Monguba, Ceará, in Brazil in July 2016, the first author conducted semi-structured interviews with 14 members of the Pitaguary community in Brazilian Portuguese. The informants were seven men and seven women aged between 19 and 63 who held various roles: community leaders, counselors, teachers of the Indigenous school, elders, local healers, and the Pajé, the medicine man. At the beginning of each interview, the informant was briefly informed about the aims of the study, but the focus on metaphors was not disclosed. Information about the interview process, audio-recording, participants’ rights and confidentiality were provided orally, and participants provided written consent. The duration of the interviews was variable (20 to 90 minutes).

To ensure triangulation of the data, most of the first author’s time was spent observing social interactions in the participants’ homes, at community meetings, and in informal conversations. These field observations, as well as the many-sided informal interactions with the community, were intended to provide a better understanding of the informants’ habits and their social relationships, functions, and roles within the community.

This study group is characterized as not being a clinical sample, that is, none of the participants had reported having a clinical diagnosis. The interview questions were intended to solicit general opinions and expressions rather than individual experiences, so we anticipated that informants would provide relatively objective accounts of adverse experiences. Our non-clinical perspective allowed us to analyze informants’ perceptions of adverse events without imposing our own definition of trauma.

Semi-structured interviews

The interviews started with an unstructured opening question followed by a semi-structured question catalog adapted from the Stories of Resilience project (Dow et al., 2008). Questions revolved around: (1) descriptions of personal and collective experiences of adversity and recovery; (2) potential differences between collective and personal experiences of adversity and recovery; (3) changes or positive consequences of adversity at community and individual level; (4) language, words, and expressions related to adversity and recovery. Whenever necessary, supplementary questions were used to explore an issue in more depth or solicit specific information. At the end of each interview, answers from other members of the community were cross-validated in order to obtain a mutual understanding of specific terms.

All interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Transcripts were analyzed in the original language with the aid of qualitative data analysis software (MAXQDA, version 12.3). During a follow-up visit in May 2017, the preliminary results were discussed with the community members to confirm that the research team had correctly understood their metaphorical expressions.

Systematic metaphor analysis

The systematic metaphor analysis technique developed by Schmitt (2017) was used for analysis. This technique was chosen because we wanted to identify collective interpretative patterns, in order to reconstruct the community’s social modes of thought, language, and action. This method allows an interpretation of reality, not as an idiosyncratic construction, but rather as a social construction for making sense of the world.

Systematic metaphor analysis consists of three main steps. First, the text is parsed word-by-word and narrative fragments and metaphorical expressions are identified and collected. Second, the metaphors are categorized and compiled into concepts. In this process, metaphors that are assigned to the same concrete source domain and the same abstract target domain are grouped together, which allows us to iteratively differentiate, extend, and specify them in an inductive–abductive way. Finally, the metaphorical concepts are interpreted and analyzed according to their context. This heuristic approach provides insights into what the metaphors highlight and hide, as well as shedding light on the informants’ worldview (Schmitt, 2017). In order to enable high quality data analysis and to guard against subjective bias, inter-coder agreement was ensured by obtaining verbal consensus from four research collaborators, three of whom were fluent in Portuguese. This comprised documentation of the research process, a comprehensive coding system in a codebook, and a group-based interpretation process based on intense discussion (Steinke, 2008). For brevity, the original quotations are omitted.¹

Results

All informants primarily referred to the topic of the historical trauma they have been experiencing, however, without explicitly referring to this expression. The political struggle for Indigenous rights and the resistance against parties interested in exploiting their property was a daily concern for many informants. The consequences of colonization and marginalization resulting in social injustice seemed to be of high importance and were always mentioned first. Personal experiences of severe adversity were only mentioned as the respondents’ trust in the authors increased. Many referred to depression-like symptoms, alcohol abuse, and cases of suicides in the family. Frequently used metaphors that related to their experienced adversity included, for instance, feeling “imprisoned,” “blocked,” “branded,” “marked,” or “empty.” A further commonly shared expression was to “live a constant fight,” which is “heavy” and resembles a “battle” that has even been referred to as a “cultural massacre.”

We categorized the metaphorical concepts, focusing on adaptive responses to these severe adversities, including their broader narratives and practices, according to nine generic themes: resistance and battle, unity and connection, spirits and magical thinking, life as a journey, regaining a state of balance, perception of time, change of perspective, organic transformation, and personal development.

Resistance and battle

The most frequently encountered metaphorical concepts were resistance and battle in relation to the fight for Indigenous rights. To be or to stay strong, to stay firm, to show firmness, have strength or determination were the main metaphors used to speak of positive ways of responding to the cultural war. One woman commented that she felt strong because she had her people, for whom she was fighting. A male participant asserted that one needs to be more rigid than life to withstand the adversities. Another young man who had lost both of his parents explained that experiencing adversity means not giving up, always run after [the good things in life] and trying to prevail. To illustrate his determination to carry on a positive attitude in life, he told a tale about a bird with a broken wing, explaining that the more the bird persevered in trying to use the wing, the better its wing healed until he could fly again.

Many participants reported feeling strengthened by the experience, commenting that they were determined to defeat, conquer, fight, confront, be warriors, be victorious, and to face their Indigenous identity without fear. “Sometimes, when we win a battle, we lose 10,” “I feel stronger now,” or “our culture makes us strong,” were expression used by our informants. A male respondent said: “We have to overcome and gradually return to what we used to be. […] But to do better.” Another man noted that, having overcome adversity, he felt like a rock that nobody could destroy—firm, strong, and solid. This strength made him feel like a new person, someone who could support [endure] a bit more than before. A young female leader noted that one gains strength from “knowing that our trunk and roots are the Pitaguary,” highlighting the importance of one’s awareness of the ancestors and history. Similarly, another woman asserted that “establishing a good relationship with other people is like accumulating weapons, accumulating something that you can use in the future.”

Unity and connection

Connection to the community and culture and their unity were other metaphorical concepts frequently used by respondents. The identification with their “own people” had been an important factor in their persistent struggle to regain Indigenous rights. Political meetings of the community and ritual dances called Toré took place several times a week. As one woman noted: “Our relationship to our people strengthens us. It leads to this alliance, this chain.” She commented that at times people in the community are thinking so much about the wellbeing of the whole community that they forget to think of themselves. The connectedness of the community was also illustrated by another woman’s comment that “Our community is like an anthill. We are united like the ants. If you step on an anthill, all the ants stand up.” Another woman compared the community to bamboo trees in the forest. She noted that although they might get hurt by the thorns of the other trees, they would sustain each other and that they are happy together, because the Pitaguary live and move in the wind together, just like the bamboo trees. Several participants pointed out the importance of having the community as a safe haven during hardship. One man explained: “When I feel heavily burdened I can anchor myself to my people and have a moment of tranquility next to them.”

Spirits and magical thinking

Almost all respondents referred to their faith in God, whom they called Pai Tupã, and their strong sense of spirituality, which gave them a profound connection with their natural surroundings. The Pitaguary regarded the spirits of the ancestors and the dead as important sources of strength. These spirits, called Encantados, were referred to as entities of light and served as guardians and guides. They were known to have a human or animal-like appearance and were often treated as family members or god-like authorities that would help to cure people in ritual ceremonies. One woman spoke of having experienced a period of paralysis with no known cause. During a “spiritual surgery,” as they referred to a particular healing ritual, the medicine man Pajé entered a dissociated state of consciousness and incorporated a spirit’s identity and was thus able to cure the woman. Rituals such as this often take place in the forest and open spaces nearby, where the Pitaguary recharge themselves. They claim to “take the strength from the stones, from the trees, and from the land,” as one woman put it.

Strong figurative language was used in most of the narratives; the Pitaguary likened themselves to animals and plants with magical power. Many explained that they would base their behavior on their observations of nature. One of the respondents explained, for example, how they followed the wolf pack in defending other members of the group if they were attacked. Another participant explained that the magic of the moon, the sun, and the stars would enable her to overcome adversity. Others compared the adversity they faced with severe weather. One man said that “Having overcome adversity is like the calm after a storm, you know, tranquillity.”

Life is a journey

Elements of nature were also used in expressions related to the concept of life as a journey. One participant likened life to the flow of a river: “… whether it is going around a mountain, descending waterfalls or merging with other rivers, there will always be a way to deal with adversity.” Similar metaphors included passing, advancing, continuing, looking forward, and keep on going or moving. One man shared remarkably: “We will always have to follow our path. We knock over walls, walk over walls, walk over nails, on rocks, but we always have to tread our path.” Overcoming adversity was often described as breaking down barriers, overcoming obstacles, climbing stairs, or moving on together. Two women referred to a saying that “when you fall, you shake off the dust and get over it and then you are ready to move on.” Another respondent asserted that “if we do not have any hardship in life, we will always be stuck.” Referring to the political situation and the invasion of Indigenous territory, one woman stressed that she was looking forward to the day she would be able to look back on this difficult situation and be sure that it was over.

Regaining a state of balance

Another metaphorical concept was the desire to regain a state of balance after an adversity. This was referred to in two different ways: first, being in equilibrium with nature and spirits implied a state of wellbeing. This equilibrium was obtained by forging a strong connection to nature by meditating or by performing a ritual. A male leader explained that his intention was “to find a personal equilibrium in order to balance out the [his] group.” He added that the group has been trying to maintain this equilibrium by focusing on its culture, customs, and spirituality. A second understanding of the balance metaphor refers to our respondents’ acceptance of both the good and bad in life. One woman said: “Overcoming adversity means following a direction and learning that to gain something, sometimes you have to lose something as well. You always have to give up one thing to grasp the other.” Similarly, another elderly woman noted that “Conquest is never without difficulties. There is no work without challenge. There are no good things without barriers.”

Perception of time

A further concept was the time metaphor, which implied patience and great confidence in self-healing processes. It is the understanding of the Pitaguary that time does not simply pass by; several respondents argued that time can construct, organize, improve, restore, and relieve someone of the burden of adversity. One male participant referred to the saying that “Time will manage things by clearing the difficulties away,” seemingly personifying time as a God-like authority. Similarly, a female respondent commented that “Although we suffer, we have to wait. Because time is the lord of everything. It puts everything in its place and provides all proper rewards.” Another aspect of overcoming adversity raised by the time metaphor is the gratification of knowing that one is able to give continuity to things that the ancestors have left on earth. Two women commented that despite the adversity they faced, “one day we will be able to write our own story.”

Change of perspective

One metaphor implying positive adaptation to adversity is that of the changed or new perspective on life. Several respondents spoke of seeing things differently, more clearly, or having an extended vision [broader perspective] after experiencing adversity. One may need to take a different view in order to see a way to overcome an adversity. In a related comment, one woman stated that “You must find the beauty within adversity because, however bad it may be, there is always a bird singing.” Another woman explained: “In a house, there are various doors, but there are also windows. If you are able to open a window, you may see that on the other side there is another world.” Experiencing adversity itself may, moreover, lead to a change of perspective. Another woman pointed out that “Seeing the world differently means seeing that life goes on. I think, as soon as we can discern [recognize] this, we are able to change.”

Organic transformation

An important category of metaphors was related to the concept of renewal and transformation in the aftermath of adversity. Expressions were subsumed into the category organic transformation, which encompassed recovering, regaining, restoring, and restructuring. In this regard, one woman noted, “Every day we renew, renew after every deception […] you go all the way down the well, and then you return renewed.” A similar notion was expressed in that the respondents’ spirit would renew. The woman who underwent the spiritual surgery, as stated above, explained that she had a change of spiritual matter, such that “the person that is speaking today is not the person who spoke last year.”

Many respondents referred to the properties of trees, indicating that renewal also means growth. One young man affirmed that “everything in life is continuous […] one needs to accept the drought because after winter the tree will renew.” Similarly, an elderly woman pointed out: “Recovering from adversity is like a tree that is watered. It keeps growing and becomes beautiful. I think that my recovery is just like that. Like a tree that gets green and blossoms. I am imagining my tree flourishing, full of fruits.” One woman invoked, again, the bamboo analogy during a community meeting by explaining how the bamboo tree holds a lesson to them: “They grow up very high into the sky. They are very strong because they are rising together on their way to the sky. Let’s be the bamboo, let’s grow together until we reach the sky, to be strong.”

Personal development

Metaphors of apprenticeship and appreciation for life were assigned to the category of personal development. One respondent likened the adversity to new situations and emphasized that “every new situation that we are not used to is like an apprenticeship and makes our people stronger.” Another woman pointed out that “every day we learn a bit more, we become stronger and we grow. Our mind, our heart and our spirit grow.” Many respondents referred to their elders, called troncos velhos (old trunks), towards whom they were thankful for having taught them how to withstand severe adversities. Other participants referred to a belief that they were being tested by God. One participant stated, “I think that many of the difficulties we are going through are God’s way of testing us, to find out what we are capable of.” The concept of learning a lesson in life was illustrated vividly by a young woman who likened herself to a free eagle: “Getting out of the adversity is like leaving the nest. You have learned how to fly. This flight is one of such great liberation […] because you will never again return to the same nest.” Later she elaborated, “You may even return [to the same nest], but if you ever need to deal with the same adversity, you will know how to leave. So you have gained a lot.” Some of the participants expressed gratitude for what they had gone through, although they had been overwhelmed by adversity at some point. One woman said “I think that everything I have been through […] today I am happy because I managed to get through all of it,” and another explained “today, now that the adversity has passed, I feel like a river, flowing into something bigger.”

Discussion

This study has suggested a way of categorizing metaphorical expressions associated with adaptive responses to severe adversity that are common to members of the Indigenous Pitaguary community. Here we situate these metaphors in their broader socio-cultural context and offer a heuristically guided interpretation by compiling our findings into an ontological framework.

We follow Kirmayer and Ramstead (2017) in distinguishing between primary metaphors and context-specific cultural narratives. We agree with Kövecses’ (2015) argument that primary metaphors are linked to bodily sensations and we suggest, therefore, that the first distinction to be drawn should be between metaphors related to embodied perceptions of resilience and those relating to growth. Embodied resilience metaphors observed among the Pitaguary include expressions implying continuity of life (path and time metaphors), the desire for equilibrium (balance metaphors), and attempts to maintain the status quo (resistance; staying strong). Embodied growth-related expressions included metaphors implying an aspiration to gain something from adversity or to experience positive change (battle, become strong, change of perspective, organic transformation, and personal development). The upper part of Figure 1 shows the metaphorical images linked to each of these two primary categories (resilience-related and growth-related).

Figure 1.

Shared metaphors, narratives, and practices related to adaptive responses to severe adversity among the Indigenous Pitaguary (adapted from Kirmayer & Ramstead, 2017).

Although these embodied metaphors emerged from a specific cultural context, many of these expressions may be similarly found in other parts of the world (Kövecses, 2010). There is an overlap between the categorization of metaphors in this study and our previously published review (see Meili & Maercker, 2019). However, the narratives in which the metaphors are embedded appear to be culture-specific. We suggest a differentiation of cultural narratives into three broader dimensions centered on collectivity, the natural world, and cosmology. These three dimensions give rise to ontological self-concepts (Kirmayer, 2007), namely, the sociocentric, ecocentric, and cosmocentric perspectives.² Such reference to specific worldviews was also encountered in numerous reports on Indigenous communities in other parts of the world (e.g., Cloud Ramirez & Hammack, 2014; Groh, 2018; Nystad, Spein, & Ingstad, 2014; Salzman, 2018). Our report of culture-specific worldviews contributes the perspective of an Indigenous community in Latin America to this body of evidence. The narratives may, therefore, be understood as being “Indigenous-specific” with special features shedding light on the Pitaguary’s specific understanding of how to overcome adversity.

Collectivity and the sociocentric self-concept

The sociocentric understanding of the self represents the first of three main culture-specific dimensions of self. In most of the narratives, we heard the self described with reference to community, family, and the broader social network. The mode of narration is mostly polyvocal; conditions, developments, and practices are referred to from a pluralistic perspective (Kirmayer, 2007). Analogies with the collective characteristics of bamboo trees, ant colonies, and wolf packs show clearly that the Pitaguary place the wellbeing and interests of the community before those of the individual. Shared metaphors, such as that of the family as a safe haven or fellow members of the community as allies in a collective battle, imply that the dominant values of the Pitaguary are collectivism, interdependence, and cooperation, and these values give them security and stability. The collective identity of the Pitaguary is reminiscent of the classical concepts of collectivism (as opposed to individualism) and interdependence (as opposed to independence) (Hofstede, 1980; Triandis, 1995). The Pitaguary are a community subjected to state suppression and there are parallels between their experience and the experience of transgenerational survivors of historical trauma, including other Indigenous peoples in other parts of the world, as several studies have shown (Brave Heart et al., 2011; Crawford, 2014; Hartmann & Gone, 2014). Although most of our respondents had only been affected by political suppression indirectly, recovery from transgenerational transmission of collective and historical trauma seems to be a pressing concern to the community, as others have also reported (Fossion et al., 2014; Hill et al., 2010; Kirmayer et al., 2009). Attributing significance to the community’s cultural heritage, strengthened bonds, and harmonious relationship with others not only acts as a source of strength for the community as a whole but also helps individuals to recover. The collective fight is, therefore, a means of strengthening community resilience, as others have demonstrated (e.g., Allen et al., 2014; Kirmayer et al., 2009).

Natural world and the ecocentric self-concept

Narratives focused on the natural world give rise to the ecocentric concept of the self that constitutes the second ontological dimension of self-concept among the Pitaguary. Many respondents drew on tales and myths in which the self is described through references to the environment, the ecosystem, and nonhuman persons (Kirmayer, 2007). This animistic worldview implicitly expresses a longing for harmony and exchange with nature. Parallels and notable analogies revolve around their connection to Mother Earth and their strong desire to stay in balance with nature and the spiritual world. For this community, renewing their connection to land and place by means of rituals and maintaining a strong relationship with their environment are important pillars of their strategy for coping with severe adversity. Moreover, by comparing human progress through life with the natural flow of a river, as described above, the respondents seem to be embracing the notion of a continuous, self-organized flow of natural ups and downs of varying intensity that ultimately balance each other out. This attitude is strongly reminiscent of Buddhist philosophy, which holds that one should aim for a resilient mindset that is imperturbable and that enables one to accept suffering, thus preparing one for adversity (Tweed & Conway, 2006). As well as suggesting an emphasis on resilience, the ecocentric perspective can also pertain to growth-related expressions, as exemplified by the many metaphors relating to organic transformation, such as those referring to the growth and the movement of bamboos.

Cosmology as a cosmocentric self-concept

The third ontological dimension of self-concept among the Pitaguary is the cosmocentric concept of the self, where the self is described by reference to ancestral lineage, gods, spirits, and other supernatural entities (Kirmayer, 2007). The myths and tales of the Pitaguary contained metaphors relating to support from the spirits and their role in recovery processes, highlighting their belief in a cosmic order and their polytheism. The Pitaguary make frequent references to their cosmology in discourse and it is equally prominent in social interactions and collective behaviors and rituals. Although the rituals do not always have a direct verbal metaphorical meaning they may be regarded as non-linguistic metaphors that are expressed through symbolic representation (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999). Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argued that the essence of metaphor lies in understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another; thus, ritual practices and collective enactments may be understood as doing one kind of thing in the terms of another. Taking this approach makes it clear that the Pitaguary’s syncretic religious ceremonies and practices allow individuals to act out their cosmology and serve to strengthen their sense of collective identity. During rituals, the spirits may elicit altered states of consciousness, enabling individuals to incorporate other identities. By fostering self-transcendence, this form of stress regulation may function as a form of self-healing, as others have suggested (Seligman, 2014; Valla & Prince, 1989; Ward, 1989).

Limited evidence for the egocentric self-concept

From an egocentric perspective, the self is described in terms of personal biography and personal choices and accomplishments—this kind of self-narrative was shown to be somewhat unusual among the Pitaguary. Egocentric self-narratives are often univocal and may refer to the values of individualism, materialism, monotheism, autonomy, and achievement (Kirmayer, 2007). Although some of our respondents’ metaphorical expressions were related to personal development, most of their metaphors relating to apprenticeship, transformation, and renewal clearly showed that self-fulfillment was invariably fostered by developing and maintaining a strong connection to the community, nature, or the spiritual world. Thus, for the Pitaguary, growth-related perceptions seem to depend on one’s position in a social, ecological, and cosmological system and are not a purely individual matter, as tends to be the case in Euro-American cultures (Splevins et al., 2010).

There are several other reasons why respondents may have undermined an egocentric perspective of the self during the interviews. First, we found it difficult to elicit personal stories of severe adversity; many of our respondents spoke about overcoming personal adversity in a somewhat detached way and preferred to talk about collective problems. Participants may have become more comfortable talking in personal terms if the researcher had been able to stay longer in the field and establish closer relationships with them. Second, individual experience of severe adversity may not be given the same importance as the rupturing of the Indigenous peoples’ social system that has taken place. This rupture may have resulted in a general shift of attention from personal to community concerns. Third, negative personal emotions and affective states may be stigmatized, and there may be a social taboo against revealing emotional problems (Corrigan, 2004; Koschorke, Evans-Lacko, Sartorius, & Thornicroft, 2017). It is reasonable to assume that in an interdependent community every individual has a responsibility to contribute to the wellbeing of the group by fulfilling a specific role and working within the social system. An individual problem may be perceived as a burden on the community and as a reprehensible form of parasitism.

Limitations

Three main limitations are affecting our interpretation of metaphorical concepts. First, the use of metaphors varies between individuals from the same culture and also within individuals, depending, for example, on their state and on the interviewer’s influence. In this regard, the generalizability of qualitative data is not given, as the metaphorical concepts highlighted in this study are limited to the individuals of the specific study group. Second, the interviews explored adversity in a fairly broad sense, encompassing not just life experiences that were utterly devastating, but also less severe adverse life events. The notion of severity is subjective, and it was left to participants to decide what qualified as “severe adversity.” Although this generally permits for a broader, bottom-up, and open-ended approach to better understand cultural perspectives on overcoming adversity, further research may be strengthened by specifying the type and severity of adversity. Third, due to the broad variety and overlap of expressions, it was difficult to draw a clear distinction between metaphorical categories and between the narrative dimensions. We argue, however, that it is precisely this conceptual vagueness that enables a shared local understanding of adaptive responses to severe adversity to develop.

Conclusion

This field study aimed to explore the metaphorical concepts used by the Indigenous Pitaguary community to describe adaptive responses to severe adversity and to achieve a contextualized understanding of them, based on their culture-specific ontology. We encountered a variety of metaphorical concepts associated with both resilience and growth. Primary metaphors are mostly based on bodily sensations and may be universal, but the larger narratives enriched by them—most of which related to collectivity, the natural world, and cosmology in the case of the Pitaguary—were specific to their Indigenous culture and related to different ways of conceiving the self.

Our findings have implications for cultural psychiatry and cultural-clinical psychology. We argue that it is essential to understand the socio-cultural context in which adaptive responses to severe adversity take place and to refrain from imposing globalized views about the best way to deal with adversity. In line with previous reflections on the role of cultural factors in mental health (e.g., Whitley, 2014), our results highlight the importance of understanding responses to adversity that come from outside the egocentric—i.e., individualistic, so-called “Western”—perspective. We suggest that the community and socio-political factors that influence responses to adversity should also be considered, as well as the positioning of the individual within the ecosystem and religious and traditional beliefs that fall outside the bio-medical perspective on mental health. Metaphorical expressions used in culture-specific narratives may be a valuable asset for those seeking to adapt interventions and assessments to specific socio-cultural contexts. In the interest of bringing about improvements in mental health research and clinical management of mental health problems, we encourage researchers and clinicians to consider making use of culture-specific metaphorical narratives to improve the treatment of individuals from non-Western cultural backgrounds by making it more culturally appropriate.

Supplemental Material

TPS890435 Supplemental Material - Supplemental material for Metaphors and cultural narratives on adaptive responses to severe adversity: A field study among the Indigenous Pitaguary community in Brazil

Supplemental material, TPS890435 Supplemental Material for Metaphors and cultural narratives on adaptive responses to severe adversity: A field study among the Indigenous Pitaguary community in Brazil by Iara Meili, Eva Heim, Ana C Pelosi and Andreas Maercker in Transcultural Psychiatry

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We thank the study participants for their generosity in sharing their stories. Rosa Pitaguary was the Indigenous research facilitator. We are grateful to Patricia Limaverde from the State University of Ceará (Universidade Estadual do Ceará—UECE) for facilitating the process of ethics approval. We also thank the individuals who contributed to discussions during preparation of the manuscript: Johannes Quack, Karin Rechsteiner, Patricia Almeida, and Milena Truniger.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Iara Meili was funded by the Psychology Fund at ETH Zurich, the Baumann Family Foundation, and the Foundation of the works of C. G. Jung.

Ethical approval

All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. Ethical clearance was obtained from the Commission of Ethics in Research of the State University of Ceará (Reference Nr. 56074416.0.0000.5534), according to the Brazilian National Commission of Ethics in Research (Comissão Nacional de Ética em Pesquisa - CONEP).

Informed consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

Notes

ORCID iDs

Iara Meili

Eva Heim

Iara Meili completed her PhD at the Division of Psychopathology and Clinical Intervention at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research focuses on qualitative approaches to understanding mental health problems in the broader field of cultural-clinical psychology. She has mainly studied idioms of distress and metaphors on trauma, posttraumatic growth, and resilience from an Indigenous perspective and has conducted ethnographic field research among a Brazilian Indigenous community and a Swiss rural community.

Eva Heim, PhD, co-leads the working group cultural-clinical psychology at University of Zurich (UZH), in collaboration with Andreas Maercker. She is the Principal Investigator of a randomised controlled trial (RCT) with Albanian-speaking immigrants in Switzerland. This RCT aims to test whether cultural adaptation enhances the acceptability and effectiveness of an internet-based self-help intervention called Step-by-Step, developed by the World Health Organization (WHO). Dr. Heim also currently works as a WHO consultant in Lebanon. She is the trial coordinator of an RCT to test the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of Step-by-Step among Syrian refugees and other people residing in Lebanon, in close collaboration with the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health.

Ana C Pelosi obtained her PhD in Linguistics and Psychology from the University of Leeds, United Kingdom. She has a post-doctoral training in experimental psycholinguistics from the University of Santa Cruz, California, USA, in cooperation with Raymond Gibbs. She is a retired associate professor from the Federal University of Ceará, Brazil where she still acts as collaborator of the Post-Graduate Programme in Linguistics. At present, she is a senior visiting professor of Santa Cruz do Sul University, RS, Brazil. Her research interests include semantic categorization and metaphor studies from a cognitive-discursive perspective.

Andreas Maercker, PhD, MD, is Professor and Chair at the Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Switzerland, and a leading international expert in psychological trauma consequences and post-traumatic stress disorder. He directed several basic and treatment research programs on traumatized populations in Germany and Switzerland. His research and clinical practice covers trauma survivors from different periods of life, traumatic experience of human-made or disaster origins, and from different countries or continents. From 2011 to 2018 he chaired the working group “Specific stress-associated disorders” for ICD-11 revision by the World Health Organization.

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