A Passion for Society: How We Think about Human Suffering

322 Pages·2016·2.206 MB·English

by  Iain Wilkinson, Arthur Kleinman

Praise for A Passion for Society
“ A Passion for Society is a stirring rejection of the cult of dispassion in mod-
ern anthropology and sociology and a brisk rehabilitation of attempts to
link fellow-feeling to pragmatic (and, yes, humanitarian) eff orts to lessen
the suff ering of others. This defense of caring and caregiving revives old les-
sons and off ers new ones, burnishing the example of great social theorists
and of almost-forgotten ones. Iain Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman are not
trying to win an argument, although they do, but rather to off er a hopeful
and humane intellectual basis for what is, fundamentally and unapologeti-
cally, a moral stance: against indiff erence and cynicism and inaction, and
for their opposites. This fi erce book is both balm and compass.”
— Paul Farmer, MD, PhD, Harvard Medical School, Partners In Health, The
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
“ The world is stuff ed full of unbearable human misery. Every day billions of
people in the world fi nd themselves living in tragic desperation. What is to
be done? How can a social science deal with this best? In this challenging,
committed, and original study, Wilkinson and Kleinman provide a history
and appreciation of the study of social suff ering and urge us to place this at
the heart of understanding society by putting compassion and practical
care at its core. Critical of the formalism, distance, and coldness of both
academic life and social science, the book creates new dialogues. It deserves
to become a landmark in redirecting social science to work more passion-
ately to make the world a kinder place.”
—Ken Plummer, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Essex University
“ In their analysis of ‘the problem of suff ering,’ Wilkinson and Kleinman pro-
vide a thoroughly convincing argument for a new approach to social theory
and social research practice—one that is compassionate, interventionist,
and globally oriented, and thus better able to address the pressing issues
that defi ne our age.”
—Alan Petersen, Professor of Sociology, Monash University
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california series in public anthropology
The California Series in Public Anthropology emphasizes the anthropologist’s
role as an engaged intellectual. It continues anthropology’s commitment to
being an ethnographic witness, to describing, in human terms, how life is
lived beyond the borders of many readers’ experiences. But it also adds a
commitment, through ethnography, to reframing the terms of public
debate—transforming received, accepted understandings of social issues with
new insights, new framings.
Series Editor: Robert Borofsky (Hawaii Pacifi c University)
Contributing Editors: Philippe Bourgois (University of Pennsylvania),
Paul Farmer (Partners In Health), Alex Hinton (Rutgers University),
Carolyn Nordstrom (University of Notre Dame), and Nancy Scheper-Hughes
(UC Berkeley)
University of California Press Editor: Naomi Schneider
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A Passion for Society
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A Passion for Society
how we think about
human suffering
Iain Wilkinson and
Arthur Kleinman
university of california press
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University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university
presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by
advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural
sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by
philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more
information, visit www.ucpress.edu.
University of California Press
Oakland, California
© 2016 by The Regents of the University of California
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilkinson, Iain, 1969– author.
A passion for society : how we think about human suff ering / Iain
Wilkinson and Arthur Kleinman.
pages cm. — (California series in public anthropology ; 35)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-0-520-28722-8 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-520-28723-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn 978-0-520-96240-8 (ebook)
1. Suff ering—Social aspects. I. Kleinman, Arthur,
author. II. Title. III. Series: California series in public
anthropology ; 35.
bf789.s8w476 2016
155.9′3—dc23 2015035014
Manufactured in the United States of America
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible
and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on
Natures Natural, a fi ber that contains 30% post-consumer waste and
meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997)
(Permanence of Paper).
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Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1. The Origins of Social Suff ering 25
2. In Division and Denial 55
3. A Broken Recovery 80
4. Learning from Weber 112
5. The Praxis of Social Suff ering 141
6. Caregiving 161
Conclusion 189
Notes 207
Bibliography 257
Index 293
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Preface
He wept as he spoke, making his words sound choked and broken. An eld-
erly Shanghainese now, he had come from a desperately poor, tiny village in
Anhui Province. A friend of a friend, he was telling me how the Great Leap
famine of 1960 had destroyed his family: one death from starvation follow-
ing another. And how he himself had run away with two cousins to a
Shanghai suburban town, where he had survived only to be caught up half a
decade later in the mass violence of the Cultural Revolution. “My life was
bitter,” he said. “I had to endure great hardship. This was not a problem just
for me: many, many fared the same. We felt, in our bodies, we saw terrible,
horrible things. When I think back, I wonder how I survived. Even now, all
these years later, I am carrying with me this grief.” (Interview with Arthur
Kleinman, Shanghai, 2006)
A small, elderly American woman now, with lively eyes and a charming but
constrained expression, she quickly became solemn as she read from the
books she had written about her experience in the Auschwitz death camp:
bare, unadorned prose and saddening poetry conveyed the systematic
brutality and inhuman horror of her Holocaust life. (Arthur Kleinman,
conversation with Judith Sherman, Harvard University, 2013)
Both of these witnesses lived through now iconic times of mass violence.
Their painful memories conjure not just their own, but widespread social
vii
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viii preface
suff ering. If that collective experience of death, starvation, injury, forced
displacement, and despair sounds like history, then read today’s newspa-
per, watch the nightly news, or better yet speak with refugees in your com-
munity who came from one of the dozens of wars, civil confl icts, fl oods,
earthquakes, or epidemics that are devastating human communities in
the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And then speak to the
poor, marginal, and broken families in Europe and America who are living
the eff ects of structural violence in unemployment, inadequate schooling,
substance abuse, mental illness, and chronic stress-related physical condi-
tions. They too are experiencing social suff ering—what Hannah Arendt
referred to as “the social problem.”
This modern sensibility that human misery, no matter how deeply inte-
rior in the individual, is often a collective experience resulting from large-
scale societal forces that in turn break neighborhoods, villages, networks,
and families emerged out of the concern of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century European and American thinkers with what human beings have
had to endure. These early pioneers of social inquiry were, as we still are
today, moved to witness and respond by doing something to assist not just
individuals caught in desperate conditions, but whole populations, com-
munities, and society at large. They understood that the sources and con-
sequences of what was the matter were part of society itself, so that the
interventions also had to be social.
These humanitarian witnesses and critics, who exposed social suff ering in
order to remedy human conditions were philosophers, novelists, poets, jour-
nalists, and reformers. Out of their eff orts to question, understand, change,
improve, and heal social worlds come what we now call social science, whose
origins, then, are to be found in a shared conviction that the root causes of
human misery lie in social conditions and that social theories, research, and
policy are needed for societal reform to improve human futures.
The tendrils transmitting the founders’ passion for practices of care to
transform society infl uence medical anthropologists like Jim Yong Kim,
currently president of the World Bank, and Paul Farmer, a leading fi gure
in global health, who together developed a community-based model of
accompaniment for treating AIDS and multi-drug-resistant tuberculosis
among the poor in Haiti, Rwanda, Lesotho, Peru, and Siberia and who
struggled to control the 2014 Ebola epidemic in West Africa by means of
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