Citation

Quesada J. Med. Anthropol. Q. 1998; 12(1): 51-73.

Affiliation

Department of Anthropology, San Francisco State University, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1998, American Anthropological Association, Publisher John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

9527974

Abstract

This article considers how the ripple effects of war and its aftermath are embodied and lived even after being mediated by time, space, and social status. Through a case study of a Nicaraguan boy and his natal family, I argue that the legacy of war, structural violence, and endemic poverty are chronic and lingering and emerge from internationally and locally produced traumatogenic social relations. I use a phenomenological approach to distress to minimize the clinical tendency to pathologize individual sufferers, and to illuminate the destructive capacities of politically and historically produced conditions of social "normal abnormality." The continuum of lived experience of social suffering is poignantly articulated by a member of one of society's most vulnerable sectors, a ten-year-old child.

Language: en