The Problem of Social Suffering and the Suffering of Sociology

Following the seminal publications of The Weight of the World (1999) by Pierre Bourdieu and colleagues along with the edited collection of essays published under the title of Social Suffering , the concept of "social suffering" has acquired currency in contemporary social science as a means to refer us to lived experiences of pain, damage, injury, deprivation and loss. With reference to social suffering researchers aim to draw critical attention to how subjective components of distress are rooted in social situations and conditioned by cultural circumstance. Here a focus is brought to the social processes and cultural conditions that both constitute and moderate the experience of suffering. It is held that social worlds comprise the embodied experience of pain and that there are often occasions where individual experiences of suffering are also manifestations of social structural violence and political oppression. By recording cultural idioms of distress, researchers aim to unmask the human social condition in contexts of extreme adversity.

European Journal of Social Theory, 2001

Sociological Forum, 2012

Despite a recent increase in attention within the social sciences, suffering remains for the most part outside of the purview of sociologists. In this essay, I explore the possibilities for a sociology of suffering by briefly interrogating suffering in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in the Lower Ninth Ward, the epicenter of the hurricane and the federal levee failures.

The British Journal of Social Work

The world continues to lurch from crisis to crisis. Amidst environmental decline, growing disparities in wealth and social dislocation, a minority of the world’s population ironically prosper while the silent majority struggle to maintain basic standards of economic and social well-being. Social workers are compelled to respond to societal issues such as these but need theories to make sense of disparities in lived experience and life outcomes. Responding to this necessity, some social work scholars have drawn on Pierre Bourdieu’s meta-theory to explain social injustice and guide anti-oppressive practice. While this growing corpus of work is encouraging, further critical appraisal of Bourdieu’s work is required. In this article, we identify a gap in Bourdieu’s meta-theory: the relative inattention to human affect and how it connects with his formative concepts of ‘habitus’, ‘field’ and ‘capital’. This focus on human affect is salutary given its centrality in social work practice. To...

The practice of ‘live sociology’ in situations of pain and suffering is the focus of this article. An outline of the challenges of understanding pain is followed by a discussion of Bourdieu’s ‘social suffering’ (1999) and the palliative care philosophy of ‘total pain’. Using examples from qualitative research on disadvantaged dying migrants in the UK, attention is given to the methods that are improvised by dying people and care practitioners in attempts to bridge intersubjective divides, where the causes and routes of pain can be ontologically and temporally indeterminate and/or withdrawn. The paper contends that these latter phenomena are the incitement for the inventive bridging and performative work of care and live sociological methods, both of which are concerned with opposing suffering. Drawing from the philosophy of total pain, I highlight the importance of (1) an engagement with a range of materials out of which attempts at intersubjective bridging can be produced, and which exceed the social, the material, and the temporally linear; and (2) an empirical sensibility that is hospitable to the inaccessible and non-relational.

Dois Pontos, 2022

In this paper, I defend that the concept of systemic suffering represents a useful tool for social criticism. I first make some preliminary methodological remarks (1) and present different meanings that have been attributed to the concept of social suffering (2). I then suggest that we adopt the concept of systemic suffering instead (3). The next step consists in showing how this form of suffering is connected to the existence of non-material aspects that contribute to social reproduction and that can be defined as systemic doctrines (4). Finally, I offer some remarks on possible strategies for criticizing systemic suffering (5).

RECIIS, 2011

Suffering, a complex and multifaceted process that has been debated across different areas of knowledge, is an experience that has accompanied man since his earliest existence. This article aims to introduce the contribution of anthropology to this debate, focusing on the social dimension of the affliction, which has been called, more specifically, social suffering. Starting with an exposition of concepts relating to health problems, it is suggested here that suffering is social, not just because it is caused by or occurs in specific social conditions, but because, as a whole, it is an embodied social process in historical subjects. The paper is based on an ethnographic case of the indigenous people of Rio Grande do Sul, in southern Brazil, and discusses three aspects of social suffering: (1) the authorized or contested appropriations of collective suffering, (2) the medicalization of life and suffering in relation to public policies. Finally, the difference between the recognition of a health problem and a process of social suffering is highlighted, the latter being characterized by the inseparability of physical, psychological, moral and social dimensions of discomfort. It should be emphasized that the contributions of anthropology include the provision of theoretical and methodological tools that allow us to ask, by engaging with the subjects and considering their history and social situation, how suffering is produced and recognized and the political and ethical implications of these different types of recognition.

Many authors have argued that all studies of socially specific modalities of human action and experience depend on some form of ‘philosophical anthropology’, i.e. on a set of general assumptions about what human beings are like, assumptions without which the very diagnoses of the cultural and historical variability of concrete agents’ practices would become impossible. Bourdieu was sensitive to that argument and, especially in the later phase of his career, attempted to make explicit how his historical-sociological investigations presupposed and, at the same time, contributed to the elaboration of an ‘idea of the human being’. The article reconstructs Bourdieu’s path toward this philosophical anthropology, starting with his genetic sociology of symbolic power, conceived as a form of critical theory (latu sensu), and concluding with an account of the conditio humana in which recognition (‘symbolic capital’) appears as both the fundamental existential goal through which human agents strive to confer meaning on their lives and the source of the endless symbolic competition that keeps society moving. The agonistic vision of the social universe that grounds his sociological studies returns in his philosophical anthropology under the guise of a singular synthesis between Durkheim’s thesis that ‘Society is God’ and Sartre’s idea that ‘hell is other people’.