ABSTRACT
In recent years, the concept of ‘social suffering’ has been widely adopted in social science as a means to refer us to lived experiences of pain, damage, injury, deprivation, and loss. Here it is generally understood that human afflictions are encountered in multiple forms and that their deleterious effects are manifold; but a particular emphasis is brought to bear upon the extent to which social processes and cultural conditions both constitute and moderate the ways in which suffering is experienced and expressed. With reference to ‘social suffering’ researchers aim to attend to the ways in which subjective components of distress are rooted in social situations and conditioned by cultural circumstance. It is held that social worlds comprise the embodied experience of pain and that there are often occasions where individual suffering is a manifestation of social structural oppression. ‘Social Suffering’ also serves as a label for an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that combines
the social sciences, humanities, and medical science in an attempt to understand how suffering is made part of people’s experience, and how in turn they are liable to respond to this (Kleinman et al. 1997). In the sociology of health and medical anthropology this is associated with efforts to broaden the biomedical conceptualization of pain so that recognition is brought to the ways in which both the experience of pain and a person’s responsiveness to its ‘treatment’ are moderated by cultural conditions and social contexts (Bendelow 2006; Delvecchio Good et al. 1992). It is also featured as part of a critical engagement with conventions of health care practice that aims to make these more attuned to the social distresses borne by people under the experience of mental and physical suffering (Kleinman 1988, 2006). Under these terms, a broader conception of ‘health’ tends to be incorporated within critical debates relating to the quality of people’s working environments and living conditions. Particularly in the contexts of French sociology and psychology, the focus on ‘social suffering’ is used to highlight the cumulative miseries of ordinary life that are perennially marginalized within arenas of political debate; or rather, are ‘explained away’ as unfortunate and unavoidable ‘side-effects’ of social life in capitalist societies (Dejours 1998; Bourdieu et al. 1999; Renault 2008). The concern to ‘bear witness’ to the experience of ‘marginality’, and especially the plight of the poorest sections of society, has also drawn many to place problems of ‘social suffering’ at the centre of the attempt to draw public attention to the experience of people living in developing societies. Here the documentation of experiences of people suffering from diseases of poverty is taken up as a means to engage in
public debate over the structural conditions that systematically reproduce the material and social deprivation of the so-called ‘Third World’ (Farmer 1997, 1999, 2005). Indeed, the advocacy of human rights and humanitarian social reform is made explicit in many instances where ‘social suffering’ is deployed as a descriptive tool and/or analytical device for conveying the human consequences of the physical violence, emotional distress, and social deprivation experienced in contexts of war, civil conflict, and totalitarian abuse (Das 1995, 2007; Scheper-Hughes 1992, 1997, 1998).
