Pain as human experience : an anthropological perspective / edited by Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good [and others].

Format
Book
Language
English
Published/​Created
Berkeley : University of California Press, ©1992.
Description
vii, 214 pages ; 24 cm

Availability

Copies in the Library

Location Call Number Status Location Service Notes
Firestone Library - Stacks GN296 .P35 1992 Browse related items Request

    Details

    Subject(s)
    Series
    Comparative studies of health systems and medical care [More in this series]
    Summary note
    • "Chronic pain alters every aspect of life. Sufferers often become frustrated and distrust a medical profession seemingly unable to explain or effectively treat their illness. There is no single diagnosis, no "natural course" of disease even for patients with the very same pathology, and no one therapeutic approach that either explains of encompasses each individual's pain. 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." "The authors of this innovative collection 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? What is the relation between narrative and experience--between the stories told by pain sufferers and professionals and the felt experience of social life reflected and reworked by those accounts?"
    • "With case studies drawn from anthropological investigations of chronic pain sufferers and pain clinics in the northeastern United States, the authors attempt to invent new ways of writing about this language-resistant human experience. Focused on substantive issues in the study of chronic pain, their work explores 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."--Jacket.
    Bibliographic references
    Includes bibliographical references and index.
    Contents
    • Pain as human experience : an introduction / Arthur Kleinman [and others]
    • A body in pain : the making of a world of chronic pain / Byron J. Good
    • Work as a haven from pain / Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good
    • Symptoms and social performances : the case of Diane Reden / Paul E. Brodwin
    • Chronic illness and the construction of narratives / Linda C. Garro
    • "After a while no one believes you" : real and unreal pain / Jean E. Jackson
    • Pain and resistance : the delegitimation and relegitimation of local worlds / Arthur Kleinman.
    ISBN
    • 0520075110 ((cloth ; : permanent paper))
    • 9780520075115 ((cloth ; : permanent paper))
    • 9780520075122 ((paperback))
    • 0520075129 ((paperback))
    LCCN
    91014044
    OCLC
    23693396
    Statement on language in description
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