All in Your Head by Mara Buchbinder

All in Your Head by Mara Buchbinder

Although pain is a universal human experience, many view the pain of others as private, resistant to language, and, therefore, essentially unknowable. And, yet, despite the obvious limits to comprehending another's internal state, language is all that we have to translate pain from the solitary and unknowable to a phenomenon richly described in literature, medicine, and everyday life. Without denying the private dimensions of pain, All in Your Head offers an entirely fresh perspective that considers how pain may be configured, managed, explained, and even experienced in deeply relational ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a pediatric pain clinic in California, Mara Buchbinder explores how clinicians, adolescent patients, and their families make sense of puzzling symptoms and work to alleviate pain. Through careful attention to the language of pain - including narratives, conversations, models, and metaphors - and detailed analysis of how young pain sufferers make meaning through interactions with others, her book reveals that however private pain may be, making sense of it is profoundly social.

Buchbinder's ethnography not only contributes substantially to our understanding of the social uses of explanations, it also exposes how the cultural meaning of these explanations depends on the language that is used and the social and cultural context in which it is deliveredSomatosphere

Mara Buchbinder is Assistant Professor of Social Medicine and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Anthropology at UNC--Chapel Hill. She is coauthor of Saving Babies? The Consequences of Newborn Genetic Screening.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780520285224
ISBN 10	0520285220
Title	All in Your Head
Author	Mara Buchbinder
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of California Press
Year published	2015-06-05
Number of pages	256
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.