Paper short abstract:

Pain has been described as real to the sufferer, absent to the observer. Can an ethnography of the senses open up a field of intersubjective understanding between sufferer and ethnographer? This paper draws from ethnographic fieldwork at a hospital pain clinic in Greece, to address this issue.

Paper long abstract:

Does participant observation, social anthropology's distinctive research method, meet its limits in the study of pain? Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork currently underway at a Hospital Pain Clinic in Southern Greece, this paper addresses the implications of the question above. Despite the expanding literature on medical anthropology, relatively limited attention has been paid to pain. Pain is an experience which is deeply individual while at the same time it is culturally and historically constituted. It constitutes a field of encounter and negotiation between the sufferers, their families, physicians and nurses, the insurance bureaucracies. In this complex nexus of relations, dynamics, practices and meanings important questions are raised both for the method of participant observation and for the place of the ethnographer in the field. If, pace Scarry, pain is an experience which overwhelms the person in pain but is absolutely absent to the observer, then what and how does the ethnographer observe? In this case of observing the un-observable, can the ethnography of the senses and emotions open up a field of inter-subjective understanding between sufferer and ethnographer?