Abstract
This book goes beyond “social context” and suggests that pain, one of the most central of human affects and body experiences, is a commodity trafficked across a bio-cultural complex extending beyond the human into the realm of abstract market forces. Pain is a perfect commodity for the affective economy. It is at once organic, subjective, neurochemical, abstract and infinitely malleable. The cultural pain neuromatrix offers a new framework through which to conceptualise and implicate disparate elements of life in the propagation of the demand for pain relief, and to help us understand life in pain.
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References
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Habib, A. M., Okorokov, A. L., Hill, M. N., Bras, J. T., Lee, M. C., Li, S., et al. (2019) Microdeletion in a FAAH pseudogene identified in a patient with high anandamide concentrations and pain insensitivity. British Journal of Anaesthesia, 123(2), e249–e253
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Fitzgerald, J.L. (2020). Conclusion. In: Life in Pain. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5640-6_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-5640-6_8
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