Pain and Its Transformations

The Interface of Biology and Culture

Edited by Sarah Coakley

Edited by Kay Kaufman Shelemay

    1. Introduction
    Sarah Coakley

    2. Opening Remarks
    Arthur Kleinman

    Response from Anne Harrington

    Part I: Pain at the Interface of Biology and Culture

    3. Deconstructing Pain--A Deterministic Dissection of the Molecular Basis of Pain
    Clifford Woolf

    4. Setting The Stage For Pain: Allegorical Tales From Neuroscience
    Howard Fields

    Response from Anne Harrington: Is Pain Differentially Embodied?

    Response from Elaine Scarry: Pain and the Embodiment of Culture

    Discussion: Is There Life Left in the Gate Control Theory?

    Discussion: The Success of Reductionism in Pain Treatment

    Part II: Beyond "Coping": Religious Practices of Transformation

    5. Palliative or Intensification? Pain and Christian Contemplation in the Spirituality of the 16th-Century Carmelites
    Sarah Coakley

    6. Pain and the Suffering Consciousness: The Alleviation of Suffering in Buddhist Discourse
    Luis Gómez

    Response from Arthur Kleinman: The Incommensurable Richness of "Experience"

    Response from Jon Levenson: The Theology of Pain and Suffering in the Jewish Tradition

    Discussion: The "Relaxation Response": Can it Explain Religious Transformation?

    Discussion: Reductionism and the Separation of Suffering and Pain

    Discussion: The Instrumentality of Pain in Christianity and Buddhism

    Part III: Grief and Pain: The Mediation of Pain in Music

    7. Voice, Metaphysics, and Community: Pain and Transformation in the Finnish Karelian Ritual Lament
    Elizabeth Tolbert

    8. Music, Trancing and the Absence of Pain
    Judith Becker

    Response from John Brust: Music as Ecstasy and Music as Trance

    Response from Kay Shelemay: Thinking About Music and Pain

    Discussion: The Presentation and Representation of Emotion in Music

    Discussion: Neurobiological Views of Music, Emotion, and the Body

    Discussion: Ritual and Expectation

    Part IV: Pain, Ritual and the Somatomoral: Beyond the Individual

    9. Pain and Humanity in the Confucian Learning of the Heart-and-Mind
    Tu Weiming

    Response from Laurence Kirmayer: Reflections from Psychiatry on Emergent Mind and Empathy

    10. Painful Memories: Ritual and the Transformation of Community Trauma
    Jennifer Cole

    Response from Stanley Tambiah: Collective Memory as a Witness to Collective Pain Discussion: Pain, Healing, and Memory

    Part V: Pain as Isolation or Community? Literary and Aesthetic Representations

    11. Physical Pain and the Ground of Creating
    Elaine Scarry

    12. The Poetics of Anaesthesia: Representations of Pain in the Literatures of Classical India
    Martha Ann Selby

    Response from Richard Wolf: Doubleness, matam, and Muharram Drumming in South Asia

    Discussion: The Dislocation, Representation, and Communication of Pain

    Part VI: When Is Pain Not Suffering and Suffering Not Pain?: Self, Ethics and Transcendence

    13. On the Cultural Mediation of Pain
    Laurence Kirmayer

    Discussion: The Notion of Face

    14. The Place of Pain in the Space of Good and Evil
    Nicholas Wolterstorff

    Response from Charles Hallisey: The Problem of Action

    15. Afterword
    Sarah Coakley

  • Cover: Pain and Its Transformations
  • A photo of the author

Photo of Kay Kaufman Shelemay by Bachrach Photography

Sarah Coakley is Edward Mallinckrodt, Jr., Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School.

Kay Kaufman Shelemay is G. Gordon Watts Professor of Music and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.