Susanna Trnka Discusses Her New Book
Auckland-based anthropologist Susanna Trnka is featured in an online interview about her new book, State of Suffering.
Strong is Thomas Strong, lecturer in the department of anthropology at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He has previously held teaching and/or research posts at the University of Helsinki, the University of California, San Francisco, the University of Wisconsin, and (oddly enough) the American Academy of Ophthalmology. His publications include essays on the symbolism of blood and body in the U.S. and elsewhere, new cross-disciplinary work on kinship, and ideas of culture loss and bodily detumescence amongst the Dano-speakers of Papua New Guinea's eastern highlands province. His on-going research in PNG concerns transformations in sociality, gender relations, and personhood following the mid-twentieth-century repudiation of the traditional men's cult in the upper Asaro valley. His other interests include 'brand' as an ethnographic and analytic concept, HIV/AIDS (especially in the U.S. gay male community), and celebrity/fame.
Thanks, Strong. A marvelous interview, indeed. I did, however, find myself flashing back to a phrase I heard from Vic Turner, “community of suffering,” and thinking how much the conversation, especially the bit about discontinuous time or time suspended evoked for me the liminal period in rites of passage.
I find myself wondering how the idea that pain is inherently isolating became the dominant trope in current theory. Especially given that the alternate trope, shared suffering as the foundation of group identity, is the basis of, for example, military boot camp and, for another example, both Israeli and Palestinian self-definitions of the peoples in question.
Report this comment