Structural Violence & Social Suffering – Detailed Lecture Notes

Overview of Today’s Session

• Explored two inter-related core ideas in (medical) anthropology: Structural Violence and Social Suffering.
• Connected those ideas to:
  • Dark Anthropology (Sherry Ortner)
  • Marx’s concept of Mystification
  • The medical/psychological practice of Medicalisation.
• Constant thread: How large‐scale political-economic forces mold everyday misery, disease and despair.

Dark Anthropology

• Coined by Sherry Ortner.
• Focus: harsh, brutal dimensions of lived experience ➜ power, domination, inequality, oppression.
• Works at the nexus of structure (macro forces) and subjectivity (depression, hopelessness, etc.).
• Lecture framing: “necessary but not uplifting.”

Structural Violence

Historical Genealogy

• Term first appears in $1969$ (article $1969$ / Journal of Peace Research $6(3)$) by Johan Galtung.
  • Violence without a clear perpetrator; woven into institutions, laws, cultural values.
• Paul Farmer (Harvard MD/Anthropologist) popularises the term in the $1990$s.
  • Key books: Pathologies of Power ( $2003$ ), Infections & Inequalities ( $1999$ ), Re-imagining Global Health ( $2013$ ).

Farmer’s Definition

• “Social arrangements that put individuals or populations in harm’s way.”
• ‘Structural’ because embedded in political-economic organisation; ‘violent’ because they wound and kill.
• Neither individual choice nor local culture is to blame ➜ historically given, economically driven forces constrain agency.

Galtung vs. Farmer (Quick Map)

| Dimension | Galtung | Farmer |
|——|——|——|
| Visibility | Invisible, diffuse | Makes hidden injuries ethnographically visible |
| Unit of analysis | Social structures | Structures and individual bodies |
| Remedy | Peace studies | Critical global health, rights-based praxis |

Typical Forms

• Racism, colonialism, patriarchy, classism.
• Policies & laws: e.g., Canadian Indian Act $1876$; Residential Schools $19^{\text{th}}$–$20^{\text{th}}$ c.
• Labour & economic injustice: unsafe factories, precarious gig work, unemployment.
• Health disparities: TB in Inuit communities, HIV in Haiti, etc.

Social Suffering

Definition (Arthur Kleinman)

• “Human consequences of war, famine, depression, disease & torture … what political, economic & institutional power does to people.”
• Always lived in Local Moral Worlds: arenas where what is “at stake” (survival, honour, status, resistance) is judged.
• Structural violence → social suffering (causal chain).

Phenomenological Dimension

• Much suffering exceeds language; often rendered only by screams, silence, art (e.g., Picasso’s Guernica $1937$).
• Ethnography can map responses to suffering even if it cannot translate raw pain itself.

Illustrative Visuals Discussed

• Pablo Picasso – Guernica ($1937$)
  • Protest against Nazi/Italian bombing of Basque town; foregrounds direct violence.
• Käthe Kollwitz – Unemployment (~$1920$s$–$30$s$)
  • Quiet depiction of jobless father ➜ slower, “soft” structural violence.
• Skate-park bail photo & Santa Cruz “Screaming Hand”
  • Used humor/irony to contrast Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” with capitalism’s “invisible fist.”

Medicalisation & Mystification

Medicalisation

• Social process: externally rooted distress is converted into an individual biomedical disorder.
• Example: Lecturer’s friend Kurt – economic precarity → diagnosed & medicated as depression; wider social origins ignored.

Mystification (Karl Marx, $1867$ Capital)

• Ideological process that hides real social relations ➜ maintains status-quo.
• In health care: emphasis on personal responsibility (diet, exercise, pills) obscures structural determinants.

Consequences

• Social, economic, political orders left unchallenged.
• Sufferers labelled deviant, disordered, or morally weak.
• Structural problems become “individual pathologies”.

Key Ancillary Concepts & Terms

• Agency – capacity to act/decide; structural violence constricts agency.
• Symbolic Violence (Bourdieu) – domination via internalised norms; overlaps with mystification.
• Intersectionality – overlapping axes of oppression (race, gender, class) intensify social suffering.
• Useless Suffering (Emmanuel Levinas) – pain without redemptive purpose; ethical imperative to witness.

Practical / Ethical Implications

• Necessity of thick ethnographic description to reveal hidden injuries.
• Danger of voyeurism: photographing a grieving Palestinian woman seen as ethical breach.
• Researchers & clinicians must bridge scales: link biography ⟺ structure.
• Responsibility to craft policies that expand agency & dismantle harmful systems (housing, wage laws, safe consumption sites, etc.).

Connections to Previous Course Material

• Builds on earlier discussions of colonial medicine, TB among Inuit, poverty-disease cycle.
• Resonates with Foucault’s Medical Gaze ➜ locating pathology in individual body.
• Extends Bourdieu’s notions of Habitus & Symbolic Power.

Study Reminders for Exam

• Focus period = post-mid-term content only.
• Know key thinkers (Ortner, Galtung, Farmer, Kleinman, Marx) & their definitions.
• Be ready to trace example ➜ concept ➜ broader system.
• Understand critiques of biomedical individualism & how mystification operates.
• Review visual/art cases (Picasso, Kollwitz) as ethnographic/representational tools.
• Remember dates $1876$ (Indian Act), $1937$ (Guernica), $1969$ (Galtung article), $1996$ (Farmer popularises term).