Suffering and Sentiment

Download or read book Suffering and Sentiment written by Jason Throop and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2010-02-08 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suffering and Sentiment examines the cultural and personal experiences of chronic and acute pain sufferers in a richly described account of everyday beliefs, values, and practices on the island of Yap (Waqab), Federated States of Micronesia. C. Jason Throop provides a vivid sense of Yapese life as he explores the local systems of knowledge, morality, and practice that pertain to experiencing and expressing pain. In so doing, Throop investigates the ways in which sensory experiences like pain can be given meaningful coherence in the context of an individual’s culturally constituted existence. In addition to examining the extent to which local understandings of pain’s characteristics are personalized by individual sufferers, the book sheds important new light on how pain is implicated in the fashioning of particular Yapese understandings of ethical subjectivity and right action.