Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective

Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective
ISBN-10
0520075129
ISBN-13
9780520075122
Category
Medical
Pages
228
Language
English
Published
1994-11-14
Publisher
Univ of California Press
Authors
Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Paul Brodwin, Byron Good

Description

"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.

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