Pain and Its Transformations
The Interface of Biology and Culture
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Pain and Its Transformations
The Interface of Biology and Culture
About this book
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.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter 1. Introduction
- Chapter 2. Opening Remarks: Pain and Experience
- Part I. Pain at the Interface of Biology and Culture
- Part II. Beyond “Coping”: Religious Practices of Transformation
- Part III. Grief and Pain: The Mediation of Pain in Music
- Part IV. Pain, Ritual, and the Somatomoral: Beyond the Individual
- Part V. Pain as Isolation or Community? Literary and Aesthetic Representations
- Part VI. When Is Pain Not Suffering and Suffering Not Pain? Self, Ethics, and Transcendence
- Contributors
- Figure Credits
- Index