Bodily Translations: The Politics of Pain Expression Among Indo- Fijian Women (original) (raw)
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Medical personnel in public clinics in Fiji routinely contend that state-funded medical resources are misallocated on patients who complain of, but do not actually experience, physical pain. Frequently, these patients are identified as being Indo-Fijian women (i.e., women of South Asian origin in Fiji). In this article, I examine clinical interactions between medical staff and female Indo-Fijian patients to demonstrate how "real" and 'unreal' pain are distinguished in the clinical setting and to indicate some of the roles clinical encounters play in community processes that ascribe alternative meanings to physical pain. Focusing on how both physicians and women patients foster certain interpretations of physical pain over others, I argue that the category of 'unreal' pain, as employed by Fiji's physicians, consists of pain that medical professionals consider to be induced by psychological or physical, work-related stresses. I then show how Indo-Fijian women engage in a complementary but distinct discourse that emphasizes links between physical labor and pain and suggests that, in some cases, expressions of physical pain are as much an idiom of pride as an idiom of distress.
Pain’s Records: An Anthropological Account of Medical Documentation in South Asia
Administory, 2019
The Institute for Pain Management in Kolkata, like other modern institutions, is organised by record keeping. But the central object of its records, pain, presents a fundamental challenge to documentation. Pain is marked by a non-relational attribute that limits attempts to communicate and express it. I follow the institutional life of one patient and his struggles with health care through his documentary productions. As the paper traces clinical management of his pain, a proliferation of medical records is revealed. The forms of this documentary multiplicity, its materiality and how it enacts pain’s therapeutics are described. The challenge of pain’s communication is addressed by translating a body in pain constituted through artefacts and intersubjective relationships to a body in pain that exists almost entirely on paper. This translation proves efficacious in the eyes of doctors and patients, and is critical to the management of chronic pain in Kolkata.
Beyond Rheumatology 2022; 4 (3): e439 , 2022
In this brief article we have to start looking at the patient as a person and at the complexity of the situation he or she is handing over to us. After setting some coordinates on medical anthropology, we will try to understand how it can be of help to the rheumatologist, what new perspectives arise from the dialogue between these two disciplines. Medical Anthropology shows how every individual in every social context perceives, interprets, and deals with illness and health in a manner closely linked to personal experience and the socio-cultural environment of which he or she is a part; it recovers the old holistic paradigm of ancient and primitive and folk medicine, the reunification of soul and body, the global study of the person. In this perspective, the issue of pain emerges, particularly in rheumatology (we have to consider that in Italy there are about 4 million patients with arthrosis, the most widespread chronic degenerative rheumatic disease, about 400,000 those with rheumatoid arthritis, and at least 600,000 who are affected by other diseases of great clinical relevance, such as psoriatic arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis, lupus and scleroderma). Starting from the assumption that man is not a machine, nor is his pain the result of a series of mechanisms, we could assume that between man and his pain there is the ambivalence of the relationship that unites man to the world. Pain affects man's identity, often shattering it, thus becoming the disease to be cured. In this perspective, it can never be considered as something good, something that adds to a person's life. Pain, therefore, being a multiple reality, needs to be inserted in the relationship that the subject has with himself, the socio-cultural uses that he has assimilated, elements from which the physician cannot prescind.
Pain, Gender, and Systems of Belief and Practice
Religion Compass, 2011
In the Eurowest pain is discursively framed as something that eludes discourse and therefore is outside language. In this framing, pain, as outside language, is given a social and a historical status understood to be beyond human construction. This article is the first step in a larger project toward destablizing such a conceptualization of pain and begins by engaging feminist theorizing of body and pain. In this paper my effort is to trouble the way we think about the body and pain in the Eurowest and to examine some of the outcomes of such thinking. Thereafter, I propose a conceptualization of the body and pain that might be helpful for examining their discursive formation.
Canadian Journal Of Pain, 2020
Background. Chronic pain is a growing public health concern affecting 1.5 million people in Canada. In particular, it is a concern among the expanding immigrant population, as immigrant groups report higher pain intensity than non-immigrants. In 2011, the Indian population became the largest visible minority group, and continues to be the fastest growing. While the prevalence of chronic pain among Canadian-Indians is unknown, research has found a higher prevalence among Indian women than men in India, Malaysia, Singapore and the United Kingdom, with women reporting more severe pain. An understanding of how pain is experienced by this particular group is, therefore, important for providing culturally-sensitive care. Aims. This study explores the lived experiences of chronic pain among immigrant Indian women in Canada. Methods. Thirteen immigrant Indian women participated in a one-on-one interview exploring daily experiences of chronic pain. Results. Using thematic analysis informed by van Manen's phenomenology of practice, four themes emerged: (1) the body in pain, (2) pain in the context of lived and felt space, (3) pain and relationships and (4) pain and time. Women revealed their experiences were shaped by gender roles and expectations enforced through culture. Specifically, a 'dual gender-role' was identified after immigration, in which women had to balance traditional household responsibilities of family labour and care, alongside employment outside the home, exacerbating pain. Conclusions. This research uncovers the multifaceted nature of chronic pain and identifies factors within the socio-cultural context which may place particular groups of women more at risk of living with pain.
The Body in Pain and the Politics of Culture
Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature, 2016
In 2008, a number of Saudi Arabian doctors embarked upon a campaign to end the ancient ritual of female genital excision. Their action is surprising given the widely held opinion that Saudi Arabia is patriarchal, religiously conservative, and unconcerned about the rights of women. The more surprising aspect of the doctors' campaign was their justification, which they asserted was rooted in science: "Female circumcision is detrimental to women's sexual satisfaction." As a report in the Guardian details, "the study is part of an effort to build a collection of rigorous evidence about the long-term effects of FGM so that attitudes can be changed from within the countries where it is practiced." 1 The truth of the "scientific discovery" of the Saudi doctors dovetails with the assumptions in a popular film that is credited with changing the attitude towards female genital excision in Kurdistan. The film, "FGM: the film that changed the law in Kurdistanvideo" 2 produced in 2013, made a jarring comparison between female genital excision and neutering animals. 3 The comparison seems apt given that the ritual is particular to patriarchal cultures and religions that are characterized by rigid ideas about women's sexual expression. As Audre Lorde argues, pleasure in sex is liberating, and because a woman's discovery of the pleasures of her body liberates her emotionally and psychologically, she is considered wild and untamed. Women who discover the pleasure of their bodies are "empowered [and] dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic from most vital areas of our lives other than sex." 4 Hélène Cixous makes
Giving an Account of One’s Pain in the Anthropological Interview
In this paper, I analyze the illness stories narrated by a mother and her 13-year-old son as part of an ethnographic study of child chronic pain sufferers and their families. In examining some of the moral, relational and communicative challenges of giving an account of one’s pain, I focus on what is left out of some accounts of illness and suffering and explore some possible reasons for these elisions. Drawing on recent work by Judith Butler (Giving an Account of Oneself, 2005), I investigate how the pragmatic context of interviews can introduce a form of symbolic violence to narrative accounts. Specifically, I use the term “genre of complaint” to highlight how anthropological research interviews in biomedical settings invoke certain typified forms of suffering that call for the rectification of perceived injustices. Interview narratives articulated in the genre of complaint privilege specific types of pain and suffering and cast others into the background. Giving an account of one’s pain is thus a strategic and selective process, creating interruptions and silences as much as moments of clarity. Therefore, I argue that medical anthropologists ought to attend more closely to the institutional structures and relations that shape the production of illness narratives in interview encounters.
The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with "woman" as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. The female intellectual as intellectual has a circumscribed task which she must not disown with a flourish. -Spivak 1988a, 304 … the subaltern poses counterhegemonic possibilities from within the functioning of power, forcing contradictions and dislocations in the dominant discourse and providing sources of an immanent critique.
SymptomSpeak: Women's Struggle for History and Health in Kosovo
Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 2022
What are the linguistic dimensions of pain, and what kind of articulations arise from these painful experiences? How does the language of pain circulate, connect, and reach across histories, gendered realities, and social politics? In what ways might the language of pain act on and transform the world by shaping and changing socio-political agendas? I explored these questions among women in Kosovo and discovered a unique symptomatic language which I call SymptomSpeak. SymptomSpeak is a powerful language evoked, shared, and exchanged by women to articulate political, social, and economic grievances, to challenge societal norms, and to demand justice. The language itself consists of a detailed symptom vocabulary which is variously assembled into meaning complexes. Such assemblages shift depending on the social context in which they are conveyed and are referred to as nervoz (nervousness), me¨rzitna (worried, sad), mzysh (evil eye), and t'bone (spell). I describe in detail how women variously combine and exchange components of SymptomSpeak and, thereby, question dominant framings of reality. Thereby, my intention is to contribute to a new understanding of pain as language which straddles the fine line between socio-political commentary and illness; produces gendered political realities; and challenges the status quo through its communicative power.
On the Cultural Mediation of Pain
Pain and its transformations: The interface of biology and culture, 2007
Some of the most dramatic expressions of cultural diversity and distinction are found in the meanings of pain and suffering. Indeed, there is a long history of exoticism and cultural voyeurism built on recounting feats of endurance, self-injury, mutilation, and extremes of asceticism and privation by religious practitioners and devotees. These are often taken-by those both within and without the cultureto demonstrate the hidden powers accessible through specific spiritual practices and, in a broader and more profound way, to warrant the truth and power of the whole tradition. How can we understand the effectiveness of music, prayer, and symbolic action to alleviate pain? What are the mediators between the diverse rituals and religious practices found in most cultures and the dramatic transformations of the meaning and experience suffering? Can we build models that bridge the gulf between religious or aesthetic experience and our emerging understanding of neurophysiology? Do these models have any relevance to clinical work with patients suffering from acute or chronic pain? One approach to these questions centers on the nature of embodiment-the many ways in which human experience emerges from our bodily being-in-the-world. The bodily givens of experience described by phenomenology reflect both the physiological machinery of the body and its cultural shaping through ongoing interaction with others across the lifespan. Physiology underwrites the stories that