Reverence for suffering: medical anthropology beyond bodily devastation.

Abstract

Over the past few decades, it has become common for medical anthropologists to provide vivid and graphic descriptions of bodily suffering in their work. In this commentary, the author offers some critical reflections on this mode of writing. Emerging from the author's response to the descriptions of bodily suffering contained in Amy Moran-Thomas's recent book about diabetes, this commentary offers some reasons why medical anthropologists might want to be more cautious about describing bodily suffering in graphic forms. While anthropologists often want to incite an ethical response from their readers and encourage them to confront the effects of global patterns of inequality and injustice, this commentary suggests some reasons for caution. Not only are these modes of writing deeply connected to Christian and biomedical frames of 'seeing' suffering bodies, but they also raise longstanding moral questions about what it means to produce records of people's lives that foreground bodily devastation.