PÅVIRKER KULTUREN SMERTEN? Om voldsomme udbrud og diskrete rynker i panden

Resumé

In this article, the author urges anthropologists to stop ignoring culture’s presence

in social life and to take a more contextual approach to pain and culture in order

to challenge the emergent cultural essentialism in health care literature. The study

is founded on six months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at postoperative

pain units and surgical wards in Danish and Italian hospitals in 2003 and 2004.

The author employs Bruno Latour’s concepts to analyse the dynamic process

of acute pain management and illustrates how culture and pain are merged in

the clinical setting. Scientific paradigms, drugs, self-reporting scales, human resources,

monitors, guidelines, habits, and cultural beliefs all shape the way people

respond to pain. Thus, actor-network theory proves itself as an alternative, useful

tool for understanding the way cultural stereotypes equally affect pain behaviour,

pain treatment and the pain experiences.