Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Sarah Coakley -- Opening remarks: pain and experience / Arthur Kleinman. Response: enabling strategies-a great problem is not enough / Anne Harrington -- Deconstructing pain: a deterministic dissection of the molecular basis of pain / Clifford J. Woolf -- Setting the stage for pain: allegorical tales from neuroscience / Howard L. Fields. Response: is pain differentially embodied? / Anne Harrington. Response: pain and the embodiment of culture / Elaine Scarry. Discussion: is there life left in the gate control theory? Discussion: the success of reductionism in pain treatment -- Palliative or intensification? pain and Christian contemplation in the spirituality of the sixteenth-century Carmelites / Sarah Coakley -- Pain and the suffering consciousness: the alleviation of suffering in Buddhist discourse / Luis O. Gómez. Response: the incommensurable richness of "experience" / Arthur Kleinman -- Response: the theology of pain and suffering in the Jewish tradition / Jon D. Levenson. Discussion: the "relaxation response" Can it explain religious transformation? Discussion: reductionism and the separation of "suffering" and "pain". Discussion: the instrumentality of pain in Christianity and Buddhism -- Voice, metaphysics, and community: pain and transformation in the Finnish-Karelian ritual lament / Elizabeth Tolbert -- Music, trancing, and the absence of pain / Judith Becker. Response: music as ecstasy and music as trance / John C.M. Brust. Response: thinking about music and pain / Kay Kaufman Shelemay. Discussion: the presentation and representation of emotion in music. Discussion: neurobiological views of music, emotion, and the body. Discussion: ritual and expectation --

Pain and humanity in the Confucian learning of the heart-and-mind / Tu Weiming. Response: reflections from psychiatry on emergent mind and empathy / Laurence J. Kirmayer -- Painful memories: ritual and the transformation of community trauma / Jennifer Cole. Response: collective memory as a witness to collective pain / Stanley Tambiah. Discussion: pain, healing, and memory -- Among schoolchildren: the use of body damage to express physical pain / Elaine Scarry -- The poetics of anesthesia: representations of pain in the literatures of classical India / Martha Ann Selby. Response: doubleness, mātam, and Muharram drumming in South Asia / Richard K. Wolf. Discussion: the dislocation, representation, and communication of pain -- On the cultural mediation of pain / Laurence J. Kirmayer. Discussion: the notion of face -- The place of pain in the space of good and evil / Nicholas Wolterstorff. Response: the problem of action / Charles Hallisey -- Afterword / Sarah Coakley.