Pain and its transformations the interface of biology and culture

• Other Authors: Coakley, Sarah 1951- (Editor), Shelemay, Kay Kaufman (Editor)
• Format: Book
• Language: English
• Published: Cambridge, Mass Harvard University Press 2007
• Subjects: Pain > psychology; Spirituality > psychology; Adaptation, Psychological; Cultural Characteristics
• Online Access: Click Here to View Status and Holdings.

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, partic...

Table of Contents:

• Opening remarks: pain and experience / Arthur Kleinman
• Deconstructing pain: a deterministic dissection of the molecular basis of pain / Clifford J. Woolf
• Setting the stage for pain: allegorical tales from neuroscience / Howard L. Fields
• Palliative or intensification? pain and Christian contemplation in the spirituality of the sixteenth-century Carmelites / Sarah Coakley
• Pain and the suffering consciousness: the alleviation of suffering in Buddhist discourse / Luis O. Gómez
• Voice, metaphysics, and community: pain and transformation in the Finnish-Karelian ritual lament / Elizabeth Tolbert
• Music, trancing, and the absence of pain / Judith Becker
• Pain and humanity in the Confucian learning of the heart-and-mind / Tu Weiming
• Painful memories: ritual and the transformation of community trauma / Jennifer Cole
• Among schoolchildren: the use of body damage to express physical pain / Elaine Scarry
• The poetics of anesthesia: representations of pain in the literatures of classical India / Martha Ann Selby
• On the cultural mediation of pain / Laurence J. Kirmayer
• The place of pain in the space of good and evil / Nicholas Wolterstorff
• Afterword / Sarah Coakley