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“Everything That Really Matters”: Social Suffering, Subjectivity, and the Remaking of Human Experience in a Disordering World*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2011
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When William James launched into the Gifford Lectures of 1901, he admitted to his Edinburgh audience a certain feeling of trepidation. Those lectures, which he would later publish as The Varieties of Religious Experience, evoked in James a sense of consternation because, as he remarked on the occasion, he was neither a theologian, nor a historian of religion, nor an anthropologist. “Psychology is the only branch of learning in which I am particularly versed,” James pleaded.
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References
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50 I am grateful to Gerald Bruns, Professor of the Humanities at Notre Dame University, for suggesting the term “threat of the loss of the human,” which is the theme of the Roger Allan Moore Lecture that he will deliver at the Harvard Medical School in the spring semester of 1998. Also relevant to this essay is Bruns's article, “Loose Talk about Religion from William James,” Critical Inquiry 11:2 (1984) 299–316.Google Scholar
51 Investing in Health (World Development Report; Washington, DC: World Bank, 1993).Google Scholar
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53 The literature suggesting this point as it relates to suffering comes from a number of directions, as I have illustrated above. Other examples include Lester, Rebecca, “Embodied Voices: Women's Food Asceticism and the Negotiation of Identity,” Ethos 23 (1995) 187–222CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Miles, Margaret R., “Voyeurism and Visual Images of Violence,” The Christian Century 101 (March 21–28, 1984) 303–4Google Scholar; McKevitt, Christopher, “To Suffer and Never to Die: The Concept of Suffering in the Cult of Padre Pio da Pietrelcino,” Journal of Mediterranean Studies 1 (1991) 54–67Google Scholar; and Hollan, Douglas and Wellenkamp, Jane, Contentment and Suffering: Culture and Experience in Toroja (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).Google Scholar For a provocative discussion of changes in collective experience and subjectivity that take place dramatically in events of political violence, see Tambiah, Stanley J., Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).Google Scholar
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