Pain as Human Experience

An Anthropological Perspective
1. Auflage 1994
ISBN: 978-0-520-07512-2
Verlag: University of California Press

Buch, Englisch, 224 Seiten, Trade Paperback, Format (B × H): 154 mm x 226 mm, Gewicht: 356 g

Reihe: Comparative Studies of Health Systems and Medical Care

Chronic pain challenges the central tenet of biomedicine: that objective knowledge of the human body and mind is possible apart from subjective experience and social context. Sufferers, finding that chronic pain alters every aspect of life, often become frustrated and distrust a profession seemingly unable to explain or effectively treat their illness. The authors of this innovative volume offer an entirely different, ethnographic approach, searching out more effective ways to describe and analyze the human context of pain.

How can we analyze a mode of experience that appears to the pain sufferer as an unmediated fact of the body and is yet so resistant to language? With case studies drawn from anthropological investigations of chronic pain sufferers and pain clinics in the northeastern United States, the authors explore the great divide between the culturally shaped language of suffering and the traditional language of medical and psychological theorizing. They argue that the representation of experience in local social worlds is a central challenge to the human sciences and to ethnographic writing, and that meeting that challenge is also crucial to the refiguring of pain in medical discourse and health policy debates.

Anthropologists, scholars from the medical social sciences and humanities, and many general readers will be interested in Pain as Human Experience. In addition, behavioral medicine and pain specialists, psychiatrists, and primary care practitioners will find much that is relevant to their work in this book.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio

Brodwin, Paul

Good, Byron J.

Kleinman, Arthur

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Philosophie Moderne Philosophische Disziplinen Philosophische Anthropologie
• Medizin | Veterinärmedizin Medizin | Public Health | Pharmazie | Zahnmedizin Medizinische Fachgebiete AINS Schmerzmedizin & Schmerztherapie
• Sozialwissenschaften Ethnologie | Volkskunde Ethnologie Ethnomedizin
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Humanbiologie Physische Anthropologie, Paläoanthropologie, Evolutionäre Anthropologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter One: Pain as Human Experience: An Introduction
Arthur Kleinman, Paul E. Brodwin, Byron]. Good, Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good

Chapter Two: A Body in Pain-The Making of a World of Chronic Pain
Byron]. Good

Chapter Three: Work as a Haven from Pain
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good

Chapter Four: Symptoms and Social Performances: The Case of Diane Reden
Paul E. Brodwin

Chapter Five: Chronic Illness and the Construction of Narratives
Linda C. Garro

Chapter Six: "After a While No One Believes You": Real and Unreal Pain
jean E. Jackson

Chapter Seven: Pain and Resistance: The Delegitimation and Relegitimation of
Local Worlds
Arthur Kleinman

Epilogue
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Byron]. Good, Arthur Kleinman,
Paul E. Brodwin

CONTRIBUTORS
INDEX

Über Autor(innen)

Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good is Associate Professor of Medical Sociology at Harvard Medical School. Paul E. Brodwin is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Byron J. Good is Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School. Arthur Kleinman is Professor of Medical Anthropology and Psychiatry at Harvard University.