Pain and Its Transformations : : The Interface of Biology and Culture / / ed. by Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Sarah Coakley.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter HUP eBook Package Archive 1893-1999
• MitwirkendeR: Becker, Judith,; Brust, John C. M.,; Coakley, Sarah,; Cole, Jennifer,; Fields, Howard L.,; Gómez, Luis O.,; Hallisey, Charles,; Harrington, Anne,; Kaufman Shelemay, Kay,; Kirmayer, Laurence J.,; Kleinman, Arthur,; Levenson, Jon D.,; Scarry, Elaine,; Selby, Martha Ann,; Tambiah, Stanley,; Tolbert, Elizabeth,; Weiming, Tu,; Wolf, Richard K.,; Wolterstorff, Nicholas,; Woolf, Clifford J.,
• HerausgeberIn: Coakley, Sarah,; Shelemay, Kay Kaufman,
• Place / Publishing House: Cambridge, MA : : Harvard University Press, , [2008]; ©2008
• Year of Publication: 2008
• Language: English
• Series: Mind/Brain/Behavior Initiative
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (456 p.)

Pain is immediate and searing but remains a deep mystery for sufferers, their physicians, and researchers. As neuroscientific research shows, even the immediate sensation of pain is shaped by psychological state and interpretation. At the same time, many individuals and cultures find meaning, particularly religious meaning, even in chronic and inexplicable pain. This ambitious interdisciplinary book includes not only essays but also discussions among a wide range of specialists. Neuroscientists, psychiatrists, anthropologists, musicologists, and scholars of religion examine the ways that meditation, music, prayer, and ritual can mediate pain, offer a narrative that transcends the sufferer, and give public dignity to private agony. They discuss topics as disparate as the molecular basis of pain, the controversial status of gate control theory, the possible links between the relaxation response and meditative practices in Christianity and Buddhism, and the mediation of pain and intense emotion in music, dance, and ritual. The authors conclude by pondering the place of pain in understanding--or the human failure to understand--good and evil in history.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Opening Remarks: Pain and Experience -- Response: Enabling Strategies—A Great Problem Is Not Enough -- PART I Pain at the Interface of Biology and Culture -- 3 Deconstructing Pain: A Deterministic Dissection of the Molecular Basis of Pain -- 4 Setting the Stage for Pain: Allegorical Tales from Neuroscience -- Response: Is Pain Differentially Embodied? -- Response: Pain and the Embodiment of Culture -- Discussion: Is There Life Left in the Gate Control Theory? -- Discussion: The Success of Reductionism in Pain Treatment -- PART II Beyond “Coping”: Religious Practices of Transformation -- 5 Palliative or Intensification? Pain and Christian Contemplation in the Spirituality of the Sixteenth-Century Carmelites -- 6 Pain and the Suffering Consciousness: The Alleviation of Suffering in Buddhist Discourse -- Response: The Incommensurable Richness of “Experience” -- Response: The Theology of Pain and Suffering in the Jewish Tradition -- Discussion: The “Relaxation Response”—Can It Explain Religious Transformation? -- Discussion: Reductionism and the Separation of “Suffering” and “Pain” -- Discussion: The Instrumentality of Pain in Christianity and Buddhism -- PART III Grief and Pain: The Mediation of Pain in Music -- 7 Voice, Metaphysics, and Community: Pain and Transformation in the Finnish-Karelian Ritual Lament -- 8 Music, Trancing, and the Absence of Pain -- Response: Music as Ecstasy and Music as Trance -- Response: Thinking about Music and Pain -- Discussion: The Presentation and Representation of Emotion in Music -- Discussion: Neurobiological Views of Music, Emotion, and the Body -- Discussion: Ritual and Expectation -- PART IV Pain, Ritual, and the Somatomoral: Beyond the Individual -- 9 Pain and Humanity in the Confucian Learning of the Heart-and-Mind -- Response: Reflections from Psychiatry on Emergent Mind and Empathy -- 10 Painful Memories: Ritual and the Transformation of Community Trauma -- Response: Collective Memory as a Witness to Collective Pain -- Discussion: Pain, Healing, and Memory -- PART V Pain as Isolation or Community? Literary and Aesthetic Representations -- 11 Among Schoolchildren: The Use of Body Damage to Express Physical Pain -- 12 The Poetics of Anesthesia: Representations of Pain in the Literatures of Classical India -- Response: Doubleness, matam, and Muharram Drumming in South Asia -- Discussion: The Dislocation, Representation, and Communication of Pain -- PART VI When Is Pain Not Suffering and Suffering Not Pain? Self, Ethics, and Transcendence -- 13 On the Cultural Mediation of Pain -- Discussion: The Notion of Face -- 14 The Place of Pain in the Space of Good and Evil -- Response: The Problem of Action -- 15 Afterword -- Contributors -- Figure Credits -- Index