Abstract

Pain is a phenomenon that is shaped by subjectivity and takes on different meanings according to the multiplicity of experiences that place it at the center of transformative and identity processes. Pain is always what is «done» with it in its being shaped by the individual’s lived experience. Indeed, if it can decrease the individual «ability to act», it can be, at the same time, also actively «practiced»: by showing its relational, interlocutory, active dimensions, pain can actually allow one to experience new forms of individual «presence». From a medical anthropology perspective, in this article I will focus on a peculiar form of pain, that of chronic pain related to physical pathology. By analyzing the ethnographic interviews with people suffering from chronic pain carried out during my fieldwork, I will show how the «engaging» side of pain can emerge: firstly, from the patients’ non-compliance to the biomedical directives concerning the therapeutic pathways to follow; follow; consequently, from «self-medication», conceived and managed in the light of new individual projects