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Abstract

To describe and analyze how narratives are produced in a clinical space, we developed an investigation in a third level healthcare hospital in the Metropolitan Area of Mexico´s Valley (Cifanep). We are guided by a socio-cultural frame of reference that enables the understanding of the narrative as structures that give an account of the self and the other in a co-production of meaning, thus demonstrating the importance of intersubjectivity. Articulated to this we appeal to the concept of strip of activity to make visible a sequence of events considered as an intersubjective, interpretive, and significant context that organizes the experience.  With such coordinates my contribution in this work arouses from a reflexive and dialogical ethnography carried out in that strip of activity defined by the medical consultation. In this, routine behaviors constituted by norms, values and an asymmetry are reproduced that, in an institutional manner, expose in tension two different rationalities - doctor / patient. Ethnography highlights the narrative flow that articulates between observation, listening and field notes, the forms of interaction that reveal medical consultation as a clinical ritual and border space.