Abstract

This special issue aims at analyzing the experience of pain, highlighting the active role of sufferers when they encounter it. Even when pain originates from a chronic disease or an accident, the experience of the protagonist cannot be reduced to a passive presence. Living pain imposes reactions, negotiations and the (re)production of cultural values, indicating the engaging side of pain. Similarly, pain can be embraced as a conscious experience or a component of events with which the individual accepts to deal whit in order to get to something else. Through an anthropological perspective, the ethnographies composing this collection address the difficulties of accounting for pain and the liminal aspect of it. Understanding pain as an embodied, sensitive and emplaced experience, the contributions explore pain as liminal, processual and transformative, involving the subjects as engaged co-producers of the «being-in-pain» experience.