Suffering: A Sociological Introduction (review)

Iain Wilkinson seeks to initiate remedies to the comparative underdevelopment of suffering as a topic within sociology. I received this book with hopes that it might be the core text around which to organize a course on sociology of suffering. I was disappointed. Wilkinson offers some interesting observations and a few genuine insights, but for me he fails to transcend the considerable limits of the genre of academic writing that this book represents.

Wilkinson begins with the significant observation that sociology's lack of attention to "'the problem of suffering' per se" leaves the discipline with "a diminished account of the social reality of human experience" (viii). The problem is not simply research but also writing: "Outside sociology, scholars have worked hard to develop styles of writing that aim to involve readers in a fuller sense of what happens to people in situations of great personal distress" (viii). If Wilkinson had explored those styles of writing and detailed how suffering resists representation, that would have made a more cohesive contribution.

What Wilkinson attempts is a "ground clearing" exercise (10, 160), which is fair enough, given the diversity of literatures on suffering. The problem is that the ground is highly uneven, in the sense that writing begins from different starting points in the author's own experience and proceeds according to diverse disciplines and genres. The effect of Wilkinson's reviews of these writings is not to clear the ground so much as to level it. Too little attention is paid to the quality of intervention that pervades much writing on suffering. Writers are often responding to particular historical moments — of suffering or the state of research or both — and they address particular audiences. Wilkinson's own genre is weakest on taking time to appreciate the significance of such differences. Suffering represents a trend in publishing to seek the broadest possible audience, thus requiring that what authors originally presented as particularities be reframed as universals. For example, Wilkinson rightly devotes considerable attention to Hannah Arendt's writing on evil. But he tells readers nothing about Arendt's own history, or the historical moment of the Eichmann trial in 1963, or that Arendt was writing for The New Yorker and what that publication venue meant at that time. Thus, Arendt's specific intervention becomes a universal pronouncement, to be read among any number of other scholars who also are presented with minimal attention to where they came from, whom they were writing for, and what sort of intervention they believed to be necessary at that time.

Wilkinson's substantive treatment of suffering revolves around three themes. First, he reviews a mass of literature from detailed considerations of what Marx, Durkheim, and Weber said about suffering through Arendt and the "social suffering" writers, mostly medical anthropologists, represented by Arthur Kleinman. Second, the social suffering literature is understood by its commitment to showing what suffering "actually does" (82) to those who suffer. Third, Wilkinson's own research interest seems most concerned with representations of suffering in mass media, the topic of his last chapter and the centre of his modest proposals for further research.

Full disclosure requires noting that my reading started badly. A long quotation (on page 17) from my own writing is distorted by a significant misquotation — an extra not inserted — and that did not increase my confidence. I found the book is to be at its best in the fourth chapter, when Wilkinson analyses why Arendt self-consciously chose to write about the Holocaust in a cool, rational language, as opposed to the more emotionally charged writing of the social suffering group. I wish Wilkinson had provided examples of these authors' actual writing, to show what he was talking about. But examples would have involved the kind of details that the book seeks to avoid. Lacking the writers' words and their descriptions of actual suffering, their names stand as sign values representing texts that are elsewhere and simply assumed to be important. Marx, Durkheim, and Weber receive the most extensive quotation.

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