In this article, the author urges anthropologists to stop ignoring culture’s presence
in social life and to take a more contextual approach to pain and culture in order
to challenge the emergent cultural essentialism in health care literature. The study
is founded on six months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted at postoperative
pain units and surgical wards in Danish and Italian hospitals in 2003 and 2004.
The author employs Bruno Latour’s concepts to analyse the dynamic process
of acute pain management and illustrates how culture and pain are merged in
the clinical setting. Scientific paradigms, drugs, self-reporting scales, human resources,
monitors, guidelines, habits, and cultural beliefs all shape the way people
respond to pain. Thus, actor-network theory proves itself as an alternative, useful
tool for understanding the way cultural stereotypes equally affect pain behaviour,
pain treatment and the pain experiences.
 
