Daedalus articles from January 1996

Daedalus archives from January 1996

Preface to the issue "Social Suffering."(Editorial)
January 1, 1996... SOCIAL SUFFERING IS NOT A TERM in common use today; it does not figure in the subject indices of even the most sophisticated data banks; it is not an expression conventionally used by the mass media. There are no scholarly journals specifically...

Introduction. (analysis of social suffering)
January 1, 1996... SOCIAL SUFFERING, THE TOPIC OF THIS ISSUE of Daedalus, brings into a single space an assemblage of human problems that have their origins and consequences in the devastating injuries that social force inflicts on human experience. Social...

The appeal of experience; the dismay of images: cultural appropriations of suffering in our times.
January 1, 1996... SUFFERING IS ONE OF THE EXISTENTIAL GROUNDS of human experience; it is a defining quality, a limiting experience in human conditions.(1) It is also a master subject of our mediatized times. Images of victims of natural disasters, political...

About suffering: voice, genre, and moral community. (how literature represents suffering)
January 1, 1996... WHAT CAN THE STUDY OF LITERATURE tell us about suffering? It is, of course, an impossible question, a sinkhole, a yawning chasm that dissertation directors warn against. It is also a question that opens up special difficulties because debates in...

The alarmed vision: social suffering and Holocaust atrocity.
January 1, 1996... UNTIL WE FIND A WAY OF TOPPLING THE BARRIER that sequesters mass suffering in other regions of the world from the comfort and safety we enjoy far from its ravages, little will be done to rouse the attention of our political or professional...

Language and body: transactions in the construction of pain. (mourning rituals conducted by women in India)
January 1, 1996... IN REPEATEDLY TRYING TO WRITE the meaning(s) of violence against women in Indian society, I find that the languages of pain through which social sciences could gaze at, touch, or become textual bodies on which this pain is written often elude...

Comments on Veena Das's essay "Language and Body: Transactions in the Construction of Pain."
January 1, 1996... THIS ESSAY LEAVES ME WITH A SENSE not only of achieved depth but of inexhaustible tact, of simplicity and attention in the face of unencompassable devastations of spirit. With no thought of doing it justice, I will trace a line or two of Veena...

Political widowhood in South Africa: the embodiment of ambiguity.
January 1, 1996... WIDOWHOOD SWEEPS WOMEN into a liminal phase in which the woman's tie to the departed spouse is publicly reenacted: "The widow in mourning having lost her spouse and yet still considered married is in a special kind of ambiguous, transitional...

The pane of sorrow: public uses of personal grief in modern China.
January 1, 1996... All those who trade on sorrow Must Join together like cabbages Must find the only possible way To spin the pyramid around so an four sides will be bathed by sunlight --Gu Cheng "Bulin's Last Will and Testament" TO SPEAK TOO MUCH OF GRIEF...

Destructive will and ideological holocaust: Maoism as a source of social suffering in China.
January 1, 1996... CHINA HAS WITNESSED MASSIVE SUFFERING in her modern transformation. Without exaggeration or a stretch of the imagination, an examination of the frequency and magnitude of destructiveness in China since the mid-nineteenth century may reveal it to...

Unmasking suffering's masks: reflections on old and new memories of Nazi medicine.
January 1, 1996... EVEN WITH THE PASSAGE OF A HALF CENTURY, Nazi medical science continues to exist in the consciousness of today's medical profession as the ultimate morality play of our time: a stark and terrifying moment when medicine, at its most civilized and...

Displacing suffering: the reconstruction of death in North America and Japan.
January 1, 1996... We all labor against our own cure; for death is the cure of all diseases. --Sir Thomas Browne, 1605-1682 "Urn Burial" The boundaries which divide Life and Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where...

Suffering and the origins of traumatic memory.
January 1, 1996... THE TERM "SUFFERING" HAS TWO BROAD MEANINGS as it is used in everyday discourse. First, the term identifies a disvalued state to which certain organisms are susceptible because of their biological makeup: suffering is associated with somatic pain...

On suffering and structural violence: a view from below. (how poverty influences suffering)
January 1, 1996... EVERYONE KNOWS THAT SUFFERING EXISTS. The question is how to define it. Given that each person's pain has a degree of reality for him or her that the pain of others can surely never approach, is widespread agreement on the subject possible?...