Making scenes: imaginative practices of a child with autism in a sensory integration-based therapy session

A tension in medical anthropology, as an interdisciplinary field, exists between those polar territories of the logic--and therefore grammars--of a positivist-scientific stance of biomedicine and a literary-philosophical one used to represent experience. Taking up literary-philosophical and existential perspectives from anthropology proper, I draw on an ethnographic study of a sensory-integration-based clinic to propose that imaginative practices are one arena where such tension can be worked out. Enacted narratives, as a method, reveal how imaginative practices foreground the ways in which desire and hope are integral to healing. Kenneth Burke's (1969 [1945]) theory of dramatism, particularly his scene : act ratio, provides an analytic lens to examine the imaginary play of a singular session between a child with autism and an occupational therapist. Further, an interpretive frame that tacks between the positivist-biomedical and literary-philosophical discourses excavates how making scenes is integral to a healing of belonging and its embodiment.