Abstract
This essay argues that the standard generic approaches to suffering need to be contextualized and historicized. While there is a role for generic conceptions of suffering, we need to be more sensitive to the fact that suffering has changed in the course of history. Understanding different ways in which suffering has been constructed has implications for responding to suffering in the present and for how suffering might be constructed in the future.
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Notes
- 1.
The literature on suffering often reveals a pronounced localism, of the kind which applies to one’s personal pain. For example, an emphasis on morally outrageous suffering colours the literature on suffering in the American civil war. See (Gilpin 2008).
- 2.
The evidence supports the social construction of suffering. Granted that there are problems about interpreting the suffering of millions of peasants who left few records of their reflections on their experience, we do have some evidence about how Chinese peasants interpreted their suffering in recent times and also evidence about how they were re-socialised to interpret it in Marxist ideological terms by the Chinese Communist party. See (Guo 1993, p. 4; Liu 2002, p. xii).
- 3.
See (Rey 1995) which gives detailed evidence of historically variable conceptions of pain and responses to it in the Western tradition.
- 4.
For a partial anticipation on this view see the very thorough, albeit iconoclastic, study by (Campbell 2009).
- 5.
Psalm 44, 23–6.
- 6.
On one Jewish view Jesus’ career is connected to the emergence of a catastrophic Messianism for which the suffering, humiliation and death of the Messiah were part of the redemptive process—see (Knohl 2008).
- 7.
Romans 5:3.
- 8.
Matthew 5:1–12 and Luke 6:20–26.
- 9.
Opus Dei has attracted negative publicity for its contemporary advocacy of such practices, but they were much more widespread in religious orders in the past. Islam also has the notion of suffering for a righteous cause, and the idea of suffering as an instrument for realizing the greater purposes of God (Qur’an 5:35) and the Sh’iah put a related emphasis on physical suffering and accept whipping as a religiously meaningful act.
- 10.
For a different view exploring the problem of social theodicy, see (Wilkinson and Morgan 2001).
- 11.
Wilkinson (2005) reviews in detail the contributions of Marx, Durkheim Weber and Arendt. Wilkinson explores ways in which people make suffering productive for thought and action and to cases in which suffering is associated with innovation and social change.
- 12.
Bourdieu, to be fair, has a considerable sense of this, but does not entirely overcome the structural functional influences on his thought.
- 13.
For Foucault’s impact on the history of sexuality, see (Halperin 2004).
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Hudson, W. (2012). Historicizing Suffering. In: Malpas, J., Lickiss, N. (eds) Perspectives on Human Suffering. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2795-3_14
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