Chronic pain in phenomenological/anthropological perspective

Katherine J. Morris

pp. 167-184

in: Dermot Moran (ed), The phenomenology of embodied subjectivity, Berlin, Springer, 2013

Abstract

This essay is a kind of prolegomenon to an anthropologically informed phenomenology of chronic pain, and has the wider purpose of establishing the potential fruitfulness of a deeper dialogue between phenomenology and anthropology. On the one hand, although a number of the medical anthropologists who have studied chronic pain have, to some degree, actually been influenced by phenomenology, on the whole this influence is rather thin. On the other, phenomenology, as these anthropologists observe, generally pays scant attention to culture. Both parties to the conversation, I argue, have something to offer and something to gain. Medical anthropologists may learn that phenomenology has more to offer than simply a general directive toward attending to "patient experience' and a critique of the "medical body'; phenomenologists may learn to acknowledge and elaborate cultural, social and political modes of bodily expressivity, and may even come to see the radical possibilities of cultural critique in their theoretical critiques of "objective thought'.