Social Suffering

Muitos trabalhos recentes acerca da violência sugerem que, quando se contempla a violência, atinge-se uma espécie de limite da capacidade de representar. Em geral apresentados sob o signo do “horror”, eles nos fazem pensar como seres humanos podem ter sido capazes de atos tão hediondos, em tão grande escala, como em Ruanda ou na ex-Iugoslávia. A violência da Partição da Índia, em 1947, fornece um tropo de horror comparável na historiografia da Índia.

Social suffering has been studied in several circumstances by Brazilian researchers, usually associated with socially excluded people who are victims of violence and chronic poverty. Special attention has been given to its effects on women's and children's bodies. In this work, we deal with the Medical Anthropology concept of social suffering, especially from the works of the Indian anthropologist Veena Das, searching for a dialogue between social suffering, health, and gender questions. Her conceptions about mental imagery and women's daily resistance to hegemonic discourses under violence and social suffering support a new perspective on women's body use and care. We conclude that such modality of women's resistance in Veena Das' view can be useful to conduct studies and social interventions concerning Brazilian women submitted to suffering and inequality. Listening to young and poor Brazilian women speak about the way they can (not) control their destiny and define life projects could offer clues to intervene in health promotion contexts. Under imaginary movements that lead to language use and body care, these practices could bring meaning to social processes that have uncertainty and incompleteness as human marks.

""In this experimental ethnography set against the background of nighttime encounters in the rough streets of Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, Veissière explores how such transnational characters as gringos, street kids, mulatas and putas are at once co-constructed, negotiated, and reinvented through the legacy of Conquest and the global inequities of late-capitalism. Theorizing the desires that drive these encounters—desire for love, sex, money, horizons, happiness—as forms of colonial violence and sincere emancipatory strategies, Veissière’s gaze travels outward across the Atlantic and the historical violence of Empire, and turns back inward to revisit the violence of his own White colonial desire.
http://www.lit-verlag.de/isbn/3-643-90080-7""

This introduction lays out some of the theoretical underpinnings of the notion of 'infrastructural violence'. We begin by considering infrastructure as an ethnographically graspable manifestation, before then moving on to highlight how broader processes of marginalization, abjection and disconnection often become operational and sustainable in contemporary cities through infrastructure. We then show how the concept of ‘infrastructural violence’ can nuance our analyses of the relations between people and things that converge daily in urban life to the detriment of marginalized actors, while also proposing a normative reflexivity that can provide a concrete means through which to talk, imagine and build towards greater regimes of quality and collective benefit. Finally, we conclude with a summary of each of the contributions to this special issue.

""France is now facing a major social transition. During the 90s and at the beginning of the 2000s, the country was transformed by a new politics of modernisation and the impact of globalisation. It is the end of the so called “French exception”. In this conjuncture, the unprogrammed meeting of a social expectation (telling the roughness of the social change, the disrespect of concrete person) and the psychoanalytical discourse (Lacanian) had shaped a provisionnal, but deep, consensus with the phenomenological and critical category of social « suffering ». This was a way to tell the « civilization and his discontents » (in Freudian terms) and identify new « social pathologies » (in Honneth terms), in particular a spate of suicides.
My paper aims at addressing, in this case study, the tension between the social production of psychosocial distress and the social construction of a critical discourse in order to define and identify a social etiology. Specifically, in terms of what is gain and what is loss within this « moral economy » of social suffering in France : how do we think today in treating people ? With what kind of unequal distribution of attention and sentiment ?
Within a political anthropology of mental health and the moral economy perspective (An ERC Research program directed by Didier Fassin), I want to compare three seats of this general tension between psychiatric epidemiology and the suffering discourse : the social work of homlessness (i.e. the social suffering), the care of adolescents (i.e. the suffering of adolescents), the care of worker (i.e. the suffering in the workplace). Based on a multi-sited ethnography where psychiatrists are implicated, I study a number of proposed solutions to the problem of the impact of social change on mental health.

Keys words
France, mental health, distress, social suffering, psychosocial risk management, political anthropology of mental heath, moral economies""