Rethinking Pain and Body in the Context of Everyday

Abstract

This article seeks to interrogate the common understanding of pain as an “extraordinary” event and rethink it in the context of the everyday. By critically engaging with the idea of pain as “negative” and “exceptional” that emerged with the advent of modernity, I intend to argue for the ordinariness of pain. I do so by bringing in three distinct contexts; pain in the practice of bayam (exercise), pain in asceticism, and religious pain to argue for the place of pain in the everyday. By bringing in my ethnographic fieldwork in the bayam samitis (traditional gymnasiums) and akharas of Kolkata, India, I argue that in the practice of bayam, pain becomes an everyday engagement with the body and remains crucial to its cultivation. The ethnographic works of Patricia Lawrence and Jane Derges in the warzone of Sri Lanka, I argue, bring in the everyday means of resisting violence through the embodiment of religious pain. Lastly, by employing Peter Van De Veer‘s understanding of ascetic pain and Glucklich’s (2001) sacred or religious pain, I argue that pain remains integral to the formation of ascetic subjectivity. Thus, these three distinct contexts raise the possibilities of understanding pain outside the negative connotations it has carried since modernity and make us delve into pain in ordinary everyday lives and circumstances.