TAVSHEDENS PRAKSIS OG LIDELSENS PROSA

Resumé

The subject of this article is suffering –

how it is borne and how it is explained –

by people in very different circumstances.

The author begins by recounting a young

Sierra Leonean woman’s story about her

wartime suffering and her postwar

situation. He then turns to consider the

kind of suffering “at a distance” liberal

Westerners are wont to experience when

confronted by the pain, distress, and

misery of others, and finding ourselves at

a loss to do anything about it. Finally, the

author returns to discuss the way Sierra

Leoneans address the suffering of war,

offering a critique of the way suffering is

commonly construed in the affluent West.

The article contemplates how Western reactions

to the suffering of others tend to

involve a narcissistic focus on one’s inner

feelings and thoughts, including one’s

feelings for and intellectual reflections on

the plight of others. In contrast, the

Kuranko in Sierra Leone are less prone to

fantasise rescue or salvation, or hope for

a world in which there is no pain and

rather respond to the suffering with

resignation and silence. Such silence may

be a way of healing and reconciliation, and

not a way of evading or repressing an

issue. The anthropology of suffering

should therefore evade the Western

tendency of excessive verbalising. It can,

argues the author, only do justice to

suffering by examining each situation as

if there were no universal measure against

which to judge it, only various points of

view that must be taken into account in

exploring it.