Abstract
Building on interdisciplinary research on pain as a complex process that involves multiple domains of experience, this chapter develops the concept of ‘painscapes’ to situate pain ontologies beyond binary frameworks based on distinctions between mind and body, physical and social, real and imagined. Painscapes are situated pathways that link public health, state bureaucracies, and people’s lives; they connect individual and collective knowledges and dispositions, events and narratives, and refract pain through the lines that entangle medical, psychosocial, and political domains of practice. Reading the volume’s contributions, the chapter proposes a post-phenomenological framework to foreground the role of devices, photographs, media, and communication infrastructures to articulate the significance of relational worlds in experiencing and communicating pain.
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Notes
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A systematic review estimates that the prevalence of chronic pain in the United Kingdom is 43%, affecting 28 million people. See Fayaz, A., P. Croft, R. M. Langford, L. J. Donaldson, and G. T. Jones. “Prevalence of Chronic Pain in the UK: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Population Studies”. BMJ Open 6, no. 6 (June 1, 2016). This systematic review of and meta-analysis of population studies includes studies of conditions ranging from Fibromyalgia to chronic neuropathic pain and types of chronic widespread pain. Other studies estimate that 20% of people globally live with pain and that a further 10% is diagnosed with a chronic pain condition each year; see Goldberg, Daniel S., and Summer J. McGee. “Pain as a Global Public Health Priority”. BMC Public Health 11, no. 1 (2011): 1–5.
- 23.
For example, between financial problems and the intensification of pain, see Rios, R., and A. J. Zautra. “Socioeconomic Disparities in Pain: The Role of Economic Hardship and Daily Financial Worry”. Health Psychol 30 (2011).
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Wilkinson, Iain, and Arthur Kleinman . A Passion for Society: How We Think About Human Suffering. California Series in Public Anthropology (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2016), 95. See also Burgess, Diana J., David B. Nelson, Amy A. Gravely, Matthew J. Bair, Robert D. Kerns, Diana M. Higgins, Michelle van Ryn, Melissa Farmer, and Melissa R. Partin. “Racial Differences in Prescription of Opioid Analgesics for Chronic Noncancer Pain in a National Sample of Veterans”. The Journal of Pain 15, no. 4: 447–455.
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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958). Wisttgenstein refers to pain in paragraphs 243 to 315.
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Jurecic, Ann . Illness as Narrative (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012).
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Jurecic , Illness as Narrative, 5.
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Frank, The Wounded Storyteller.
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Jain, Sarah S. Lochlann. Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
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Jain, Malignant, 66.
- 34.
The cognitive dissonance derived, for Jain , from competing truths held in tandem, holding together ‘the factual and the might-well-have-been-or-still-be-otherwise-if-only counterfactual’ (Ibid., 4).
- 35.
For example, the assumption that long-term pain naturally leads to disability is at odds with first-person perceptions of pain experience. See Manderson , Lenore, and Carolyn Smith-Morris . “Introduction: Chronicity and the Experience of Illness”. In Chronic Conditions, Fluid States: Chronicity and the Anthropology of Illness, edited by Lenore Manderson and Carolyn Smith-Morris (New Brunswick, NJ; London: Rutgers University Press, 2010). See also Gonzalez-Polledo, Elena. “Chronic Media Worlds: Social Media and the Problem of Pain Communication on Tumblr”. Social Media + Society 2, no. 1 (2016): 2056305116628887.
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Das , Affliction.
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Berlant, “Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal,” 296. See also Strathern, Marilyn. “The Whole Person and Its Artifacts”. Annual Review of Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2004): 1–19.
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Jackson, Jean. ““After a While, No One Believes You”: Real and Unreal Pain”. In Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective, edited by Arthur Kleinman , Paul Brodwin, Byron Good, and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, 1992; and Jackson, Jean E. Camp Pain: Talking with Chronic Pain Patients (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). See also Morris, David B. The Culture of Pain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
- 41.
See Tabor, Abby, Mark J. Catley, Simon Gandevia, Michael A. Thacker, and G. Lorimer Moseley. “Perceptual Bias in Pain: A Switch Looks Closer When It Will Relieve Pain Than When It Won’t”. PAIN® 154, no. 10 (Oct. 2013): 1961–1965. This experimental study, involving 18 naïve individuals, demonstrates that pain is perceived differently according to constantly updated contextual information, but that the environment is differently perceived at different stages of pain onset.
- 42.
Jackson , “After a While, No One Believes You”, 140.
- 43.
Ibid., 149.
- 44.
Morris, David B. “Narrative, Ethics and Pain: Thinking with Stories”. In Stories Matter: The Role of Narrative in Medical Ethics, edited by Rita Charon and Martha Montello (New York; London: Routledge, 2002).
- 45.
Morris, “Narrative, Ethics and Pain,” 200.
- 46.
Kleinman et al., Pain as Human Experience.
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Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability , Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995); Ginsburg, Faye, and Rayna Rapp. “Disability Worlds”. Annual Review of Anthropology 42, no. 1 (2013): 53–68.
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Goggin, Gerard, and Christopher Newell. Digital Disability: The Social Construction of Disability in New Media (Lanham; Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003); Rice, Carla, Eliza Chandler, Elisabeth Harrison, Kirsty Liddiard, and Manuela Ferrari. “Project Re•Vision: Disability at the Edges of Representation”. Disability & Society 30, no. 4 (Apr. 21, 2015): 513–527.
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Carel, Havi , and Ian James Kidd. “Epistemic Injustice in Healthcare: A Philosophial[sic] Analysis”. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy 17, no. 4 (Nov. 1, 2014): 529–540. As Carel and Kidd note, a person-centered approach to clinical communication is a core political contention of patient associations in the United Kingdom and North America.
- 50.
Greenhalgh, Under the Medical Gaze, 23.
- 51.
Ibid., 206.
- 52.
Morris writes: ‘the goal of narrative bioethics is to get the stories into the open, where we can examine their values, sift their conflicts, and explore their power to work on us’ Ibid., 213.
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Carel, Havi . Illness: The Cry of the Flesh (Stocksfield: Acumen, 2008), 8.
- 54.
Carel suggests: ‘Instead of viewing illness as a local disruption of a particular function, phenomenology turns to the lived experience of this dysfunction. It attends to the global disruption of the habits, capacities and actions of the ill person’ Ibid., 8–9.
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Carel and Kidd, “Epistemic justice and Healthcare”.
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Ibid.
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See Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld. “New Keys to the World of Sound”. In The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, edited by Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
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Ihde, Listening and Voice, 200.
- 62.
As do, for instance, sound and words. See Schafer, R. Murray. The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (Rochester, VT: Destiny Books, 1994). See also Motamedi Fraser, Mariam. Word: Beyond Language, Beyond Image. Disruptions. Edited by Paul Bowman (London; New York: Rowman and Littlefield International, 2015).
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See Campt, Tina. Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).
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See Ihde, Don. Postphenomenology: Essays in the Postmodern Context (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993); and Ihde, Don. Postphenomenology and Technoscience: The Peking University Lectures (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009).
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Gonzalez-Polledo, E. (2018). Painscapes. In: Gonzalez-Polledo, E., Tarr, J. (eds) Painscapes. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95272-4_1
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