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Beyond the suffering subject:

toward an anthropology of
the good
Jo el Robbins University of Cambridge

In the 1980s, anthropology set aside a focus on societies defined as radically ‘other’ to the
anthropologists’ own. There was little consensus at the time, however, about who might replace the
other as the primary object of anthropological attention. In important respects, I argue, its
replacement has been the suffering subject. Tracing this change, I consider how it addressed key
problems of the anthropology of the other, but I also suggest that some strengths of earlier work –
particularly some of its unique critical capacities – were lost in the transition. The conclusion
considers how recent trends in anthropology might coalesce in a further shift, this one toward an
anthropology of the good capable of recovering some of the critical force of an earlier anthropology
without taking on its weaknesses.

Once, in the late 1980s, when I was early on in my graduate studies, I heard the
well-known psychological anthropologist Ted Schwartz speak. Among other things he
said, he observed that when he talked to psychologists about anthropology, he found
that they had no difficulty grasping the cross-cultural point, but that it was almost
impossible for them to understand the cultural one. He meant, I think, that it was easy
for him to communicate to psychologists that many aspects of human life and thought
differ from culture to culture, but that it was hard to sell them on the anthropological
claim that those cultural differences are very deep, that they touch on fundamental
aspects of human existence, and that even at such very deep levels the role of culture in
explaining the various ways human beings live is a profound one. In this essay, I see
myself as covering ground similar to that which Ted Schwartz mapped out with that
comment twenty-five years ago. I too want to talk about the importance of the cultural
point, and about the difficulty of getting it across. But my task is different from his in
one respect – for I think it is no longer just psychologists who find the cultural point
hard to fathom, but many anthropologists too. In this essay I want to explain how I
think we anthropologists have lost hold of the cultural point and the critical potential
of the notion of difference that it once allowed us to realize in our work, and I want to
consider some disparate trends in cultural anthropology at present that taken together
might allow us to regain our grip on it.
As a way in to my main topic, I want to recall an argument of Max Weber’s. In his
classic essay on objectivity, one of Weber’s key points is that, regardless of the position

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one takes on the possibility of separating empirical observations from value judge-
ments in the course of social-scientific analysis, one has to acknowledge that the choices
social scientists make about what to study in the first place, and the way they define
clear objects of study out of the ever-shifting reality of social life, are always driven by
the values they hold to be most important. Most of the time, Weber says, we are
unaware that values play this role in directing our attention and defining what we see
as available for study. Instead, we focus simply on collecting and analysing our data in
the usual ways and, as he puts it, ‘discontinue assessing the value of the individual facts
in terms of their relationship to ultimate value-ideas’ (1949: 112). But occasionally,
Weber continues,

there comes a moment when the atmosphere changes. The significance of the unreflectively utilized
viewpoints becomes uncertain and the road is lost in the twilight. The light of the great cultural
problems moves on. Then science too prepares to change its standpoint and its analytical apparatus
and to view the streams of events from the heights of thought.

And it is from these heights that we are aware that it is the light our values shine down
on the world that allows us to catch a meaningful glimpse of it at all (Weber 1949: 112).
My primary claim in this essay is that the light of the great cultural problems by
which anthropology views the world moved on in this way in the last two decades and
that there is some evidence that it might be preparing to move on again now. The shift
that first took on momentum during the 1990s began with an earlier move away from
a focus on the study of societies defined both as ‘other’ to the anthropologists’ own and
often as in some respects ‘primitive’. While the twilight of the anthropology of the other
qua other was widely acknowledged by the end of the 1980s, there was at that point still
a notable lack of self-conscious consensus about who might replace this figure as the
primary object of anthropological attention. I argue here that from the early 1990s
onward to an important extent it has been the suffering subject who has come to
occupy its spot. The subject living in pain, in poverty, or under conditions of violence
or oppression now very often stands at the centre of anthropological work. I want to
trace here the rise of this new focus and show how neatly it solves some of the problems
that anthropologists came to feel marked their work on the other. Yet I will also argue
that some of the strengths of work focused on the other – particularly some of its
unique critical capacities that were grounded in its grasp of the cultural point – were
lost in the transition. Addressing this loss, in conclusion I consider how some diverse
recent trends in anthropology focused on such topics as value, morality, well-being,
imagination, empathy, care, the gift, hope, time, and change might in the future coa-
lesce in another shift of anthropological attention, this one toward an anthropology of
the good capable of recovering some of the distinctive critical force of an earlier
anthropology without taking on many of its weaknesses. This is a lot of terrain to cover,
and I will have to move over it quickly, but I hope that even so the journey might prove
at least suggestive.1

From the savage to the suffering slot

In 1991, Michel-Rolph Trouillot published an essay entitled ‘Anthropology and the
savage slot: the poetics and politics of otherness’ (cited here as Trouillot 2003).
Although the essay is complex, it is not hard to read it on one level as making a fairly
simple observation: anthropology has from its start been stuck studying the savage, the

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primitive, and the radically other, and it needs to break out of this confining slot quickly
if it is to survive into the future. The impact of the piece was almost immediate. So
quickly was the key phrase of its title on everyone’s lips, in fact, that one had to suspect
that its appearance was one of those cases of the owl of Minerva taking flight at dusk:
the savage slot had surely already become all but uninhabitable some time before
Trouillot gave us a language by which to talk about its collapsed condition.
Why, we might ask, was the slot already in near ruins even before Trouillot wrote? By
way of an answer, we could point to the fact that throughout the 1980s a number of
anthropologists and interested scholars from other fields began to subject anthropol-
ogy to vigorous critique around its tendency to focus on the other, to misrepresent ‘the
other’, and to deny others their own voice in anthropological writing. This was the era
of Johannes Fabian’s Time and the other (1983), with its critique of the way ethno-
graphic writing denies the coeval nature of fieldwork and casts others out of the
present; of James Clifford’s (1983) critique of the way anthropologists manipulate their
representations of others to construct their own ethnographic authority; and of
Clifford and George Marcus’s Writing culture (1986), which challenged the ability of
anthropologists to say anything of empirical value about others at all. These voices were
amplified as they joined the chorus of more general trends in the social sciences and
humanities – trends inspired by Foucault and Said, among others – that came together
in the new field of cultural studies. Scholars who embraced this field or its guiding ideas
held that all claims about the otherness of persons or groups helped to foster their
domination and exploitation. Soon, ‘to other’ became a verb, and one that kept
company with other verbs like ‘to oppress’, ‘to marginalize’, ‘to racialize’, and ‘to dis-
criminate against’. It was critical waves of this sort that had already begun to batter the
walls of the savage slot by the time Trouillot wrote his essay.
Yet it is important to recognize that Trouillot does not see himself as standing with
these critics of anthropology. He thinks they overestimate the contribution of their
critical arguments to the passing of the savage slot. Moving beyond internal criticisms
of anthropological practice, he suggests that the upheaval going on within anthropol-
ogy needs to be understood in relation to broader cultural developments outside of it.
‘Our starting point’ in examining the fall of the savage, he argues, ‘cannot be “a crisis in
anthropology” [citing Clifford 1986: 3], but the histories of the world’ (2003: 26).
Trouillot argues that there are two histories of the world that are particularly relevant
in this regard. One is the history by which ‘the differences between Western and
non-Western societies’ had by the 1980s become ‘blurrier than ever before’ (2003: 9, see
24, 25). This is an ‘empirical’ history of the vanishing savage, and one that when
Trouillot wrote was beginning to be taken up both in historical anthropology and in the
anthropology of globalization. The second history Trouillot examines traces how the
savage slot came to exist as a slot in the first place, and how the ‘geography of imagi-
nation’ which created it had begun to shift under anthropology’s feet. In Trouillot’s
telling, this is a conceptual or symbolic history, a history of how the West became the
West, and of how in the course of doing so it created the savage as both its antithesis and
sometimes its promise. The changes anthropology was experiencing in the late 1980s,
he argues, were rooted in transformations in this broader symbolic organization that
defines the West and the savage, transformations by which the narratives of develop-
ment and progress that had driven Western history were beginning to lose their power
to organize our understanding of the world. It is only by recognizing these broad
cultural changes and coming to understand how the symbolic field that gave birth to

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their discipline is changing, Trouillot argues, that anthropologists can find a productive
way forward.
I have spent so much time on Trouillot because I think he was the first critical
anthropologist to take us to the mountaintop – to the heights from which we could
recognize that the passing of the savage was occurring not because, or at least not only
because, we anthropologists were making progress in self-understanding or moral
rectitude, but because the light of the great cultural problems was moving on. From the
heights of his argument, we could see that the savage, the other, was now left in
darkness (or should we say, back in darkness?) because it no longer answered to our
own culture’s most pressing concerns.
What was unclear in 1991 was where the light might settle next. Trouillot did not
answer this question. Nor did other critical or reflexive anthropologists answer it either,
for they were perhaps paradoxically too caught up in arguing against the anthropology
of the other to move effectively beyond it. And maybe it was not for anthropologists to
decide where the light should come to rest in any case – for the light belongs, remember,
to the great cultural problems themselves, not to the anthropologists who answer their
call. So, like the proverbial drunk searching for his or her lost keys under the streetlight
because that is where it is brightest, we were destined to let the light settle on its own
and then move to the spot it illuminated. And it settled, I want to argue, far from the old
patch of the savage and the other, and on a new one occupied by the figure of humanity
united in its shared vulnerability to suffering. Over the last twenty years or so, that is to
say, it has often been the suffering subject who has replaced the savage one as a
privileged object of our attention.
I have some confidence that this shift to what we might call the suffering slot has
been a real one because my own anthropological coming of age in the 1990s was very
much caught up in it. At the end of 1990, I left to carry out doctoral fieldwork among
the Urapmin, a group of approximately 390 people living in the West Sepik province of
Papua New Guinea. Swidden horticulturalists who are remote even by PNG standards
and who barely participate in the cash economy, the Urapmin look very much like the
kind of people who would fit snugly into the savage slot. Yet the fit is not perfect. Since
1977, the Urapmin have been very devoted and active charismatic Christians. Theirs is
the kind of Christianity in which all believers can hope to receive gifts of the Holy Spirit
such as those that allow one to speak in tongues, heal, and prophesy. It is also a very
demonstrative form of Christianity that insists on its relevance to all domains of life,
both public and private. It is therefore hard as an ethnographer to ignore the religion
of charismatic Christians if one happens to live amongst them, and that is as true of the
Urapmin as it is of other charismatics anywhere else in the world today.
So in the field I studied the Urapmin as Christians, and I came back from PNG early
in 1993, after Trouillot’s article had already been published. What makes my experience
relevant to my present argument is the way audiences responded to the accounts I gave
of Urapmin Christianity. Such a response was not on the surface of things easy to
predict. On the one hand, the Urapmin did not work as savages, at least for anthro-
pologists, because they were Christian2 – though, given the disappearance of the savage
slot, for many younger anthropologists this was perhaps a point in their favour. But on
the other hand, there was as yet no anthropology of Christianity into which they might
be fit so as to tell us something about the global spread of this world religion. So how
did people assimilate the Urapmin when I first began to present my work on them in
the mid-1990s?

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In order to answer this question, I should explain that there are a few features of
Urapmin Christianity that I had to mention in every paper I delivered. They provide
the basic background people needed to grasp any other data I might present or argu-
ment I might make. One such feature was the story of how all but the few previously
converted Urapmin became Christian in 1977 when a charismatic Christian revival that
was moving across Papua New Guinea was brought to their community by several local
families who had been caught up in it while studying at a bush bible college elsewhere
in their region. Almost immediately upon the arrival of these local emissaries of the
revival, people in Urapmin began to become possessed, or, as they put it, ‘kicked’, by the
Holy Spirit. They felt hot and came to understand that the Christian God really exists
and that they were sinners who needed to convert to Christianity. Within a year, all
Urapmin had had such possession experiences, or had watched others they were close
to have them, and all of them converted. They quickly came to see themselves as an
entirely Christian community. In response to what they took to be the dictates of their
new faith, they tore down the cult houses and ‘threw out’ the ancestral bones that had
been at the centre of what they came to call the religion of their ancestors, they
abandoned the taboos that had once shaped most facets of their daily lives, and they
built churches and began to pray regularly in their gardens and houses as well. Achiev-
ing salvation in what they understood to be Christian terms became their primary
individual and collective project.
Another fundamental feature of Urapmin Christianity is the way it defines salvation
as almost wholly dependent on moral self-regulation. People need to avoid sin as much
as possible and to atone through confession and ritual cleansing for sins they do
commit. The Christian moral code the Urapmin have adopted is a difficult one that not
only forbids acts such as physical violence, theft, and adultery, but also interdicts all
intense desires and strong emotions such as anger, which is never morally justified in
any circumstances, and jealousy. Given this moral emphasis on emotional regulation, it
is fitting that most Urapmin constantly monitor their hearts – the seat of all thought
and feeling – and keep careful track of all of their moral breaches.
This constant self-monitoring is supported by a final key feature of Urapmin Chris-
tianity: its strong conviction that Jesus could return at any moment, and that people
therefore have always to be morally ready for his arrival. To be caught in a state of sin
when Jesus returns, or with sins one has not confessed and cleansed oneself of, would
mean being left behind on earth as many of the people with whom one lives and who
constitute one’s family are taken to heaven. Urapmin remind each other every day, in
church and out, that because no one knows the day or the hour of Jesus’ second coming
(Matt. 24:36), people need to control their sinful natures and the stakes for succeeding
in this endeavour could not be higher. Speaking this message is what they call ‘strength-
ening each other’s belief ’. Through this strengthening discourse, they create a world in
which everyone is aware that he or she does not want to be the kind of person the
returned Jesus looks at and says, as the Urapmin sometimes put it, ‘No, not you’.
Perhaps I can provide a quick sense of what this kind of Christianity looks like in
practice by telling you very briefly about two men I lived near during my fieldwork and
came to know quite well. Timi3 was a man in early middle age. He was widely regarded
as a hard worker and was well liked. He had four young children and was very involved
in the church. Timi approached the Christian injunction against anger with great
earnestness. His father, who had died only a few years before I arrived, had been a big
man – a great leader. And being bright, skilled, and hard-working himself, Timi, who

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inherited his father’s considerable relational network, might well have replaced him.
But like a number of Urapmin men during the Christian era, Timi had forgone the
chance to become a leader because he feared that taking on such a role would ‘ruin his
Christian life’ by requiring him to get angry with those who ignored his importunings
and then to act on his anger by ‘pushing’ them to do his will, a further sin of interac-
tional violence. So Timi opted to lead a fairly quiet life, tending primarily to his family
affairs and stepping up in public mostly to contribute to strengthening the belief of
others by presenting moral jeremiads in church or public meetings.
I’ve already said enough about Timi, I hope, to make it clear that Urapmin Chris-
tianity profoundly shapes the way he leads his life. But this point was driven home to
me even more forcefully one morning when he came to my house visibly agitated. He
told me he had been up most of the night worried sick that he would be going to hell
and would be separated from his family. He had even gone to the church in the middle
of the night to pray. No one had ever mentioned doing such a thing before. In a
community with no electric light, in which sorcerers are abroad at night, and in which
people consequently mostly stay inside once the sun goes down, people would be more
likely simply to pray in their houses when they woke up at night worried about the state
of their souls. But this time, Timi felt this would not be enough – he needed to be in
church. What had him worried, he explained, is that sometimes he simply could not
help but feel angry at his children, all under age 11, when they did not mind him. On
occasion, particularly recently, he even resorted to the standard Urapmin punishment
of painfully twisting their ears. Given these lapses into anger and violence, he doubted
he had much chance of being saved when Jesus returned, and this would mean sepa-
ration from his family for eternity.
In my experience,Timi was not always so distraught,but our conversation that day gave
me some sense about how easily moral watchfulness can become moral torment for many
Urapmin. The plight of another man, Tankangnok, taught me that the feeling that one is
a moral failure destined never to see heaven can even become something verging on a
permanent condition. In 1990, Tankangnok was one of the oldest people in the commu-
nity and still, even in his late seventies, a strong and vigorous man. He had already grown
into a fierce warrior by the time the Urapmin were colonized and pacified in the late 1940s.
Though he was, like all Urapmin, a devoted Christian, he had never been possessed by the
Holy Spirit. On his reckoning this meant God did not consider him saved. The reason for
this, he was sure, was that he had been such an angry and violent man in the past. Nothing
he could do, he worried, would cleanse him of the sins he had committed in his youth or
of the aggressiveness that was in his nature. Everyone who knew Tankangnok was well
aware of his worries, for he expressed them regularly. People tried to comfort him by
pointing out that the Spirit gave people many different kinds of gifts, not just those that
took the form of possession. He had had dreams, hadn’t he? These could be gifts of the
Spirit, they suggested, proving his salvation. But on this issue Tankangnok was funda-
mentally inconsolable. It would not be a stretch to say he lived in near-constant fear of the
damnation that would await him upon his death.
These two accounts are meant to put some flesh on my rather bare-bones discussion
of Urapmin Christianity, a kind of Christianity that is wholly dismissive of Urapmin
tradition, morally strict, and pervaded by a sense of millennial expectation and appre-
hension. No matter what else I wanted to say about Urapmin, when I began to write
about them in the mid-1990s I had to tell people this much, so some account along
these lines was part of almost every discussion I had about my research.

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To return to our question about what came after the savage subject, it is interesting
to note that after I would deliver talks in which I discussed Urapmin Christianity,
people would very often tell me how sad the Urapmin were, how sorry they felt for
them as they faced the difficulties of losing their tradition and coming to doubt their
moral worth. As this happened more and more often, I realized that people told me this
because it was a way of saying they felt connected to the Urapmin, that they felt
empathically bonded to them. They did not have to reject the Urapmin as still savages
in an anthropological world that had no place for savages, nor did they have to reject
them as culturally debased Christians. Instead, they made meaningful sense of the
Urapmin as people who suffered, who were living out the trauma of colonization and
cultural loss through a constant preoccupation with the possibility of moral failure.
That is to say, my audiences found a home for the Urapmin in the suffering slot.
At the very moment I was finding that people tended to engage the Urapmin as
people who suffered, the literary critic Cathy Caruth suggested in the introduction to
her landmark 1995 edited volume on trauma that ‘in a catastrophic age ... trauma itself
might provide the link between cultures’ (1995: 11). I cannot think of a more accurate
description of what I was experiencing in presenting my work, and of how anthropol-
ogy was in the early 1990s changing its relation to those it studied from one of analytic
distance and critical comparison focused on difference to one of empathic connection
and moral witnessing based on human unity. In this move, trauma was indeed becom-
ing the bridge between cultures. With this observation, we enter the realm of very large
cultural transformations in the way the West understands its relation to the wider
world – transformations that include the rise of humanitarian and human rights
discourses and institutions in their contemporary forms as well as the emergence of the
NGO as a key feature of global social organization. While I cannot treat this whole
cultural history here in detail, I will try to sketch at least a small part of it by way of
considering how it came to bear on anthropology’s turn to the study of the suffering
subject.4
A good place to start is Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman’s 2009 book The
empire of trauma. This book bears comparison with Trouillot’s ‘savage slot’ article in
that it similarly marks a profound moment of self-consciousness about a major shift
in our key cultural problems. What comes to awareness in Fassin and Rechtman’s
book is the extent to which, in the 1990s, ‘the human being suffering from trauma ...
became the very embodiment of our common humanity’ (2009: 23). Over the last two
decades, they tell us, ‘[t]rauma had become an essential human value, a mark of the
humanity of those who suffered it and of those who cared for them’ (2009: 140). An
important part of their argument is that it is the very commonness of trauma, its
universal quality, that has made it so prominent as a lens through which to view the
world. As trauma has come to be understood in the wake of the emergence of a widely
shared cultural understanding of the shattering enormity of the Holocaust and then
the establishment of the diagnostic category of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, they
suggest, it represents ‘a suffering without borders, a suffering that knows no cultural
barriers’ (2009: 239). This is the case because in our current understanding any person
anywhere can be expected to suffer traumas of essentially the same kind in the face of
certain kinds of violence and deprivation. And because of the universal qualities of
trauma, we as observers and witnesses are secure in our abilities to know it when we
see it and to feel empathy with those who suffer it in ‘a sort of communion in trauma’
(2009: 18).

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Fassin and Rechtman are anthropologists, and their study of the development of the
notion of trauma over the last two decades is thoroughly anthropological. They provide
compelling ethnographies of psychiatric knowledge construction, medical and humani-
tarian practice, and the formation and enforcement of state and international organi-
zational policies as they have come to cohere around the traumatized subject.They do not,
however,focusonhowsufferingbecameimportantinanthropologyitself.Yetitisnothard
tosituateanthropology’sshifttothesufferingslotwithintheirstory.Ihaveinfactprobably
already said enough in this essay to have made that point in advance. But I want to add
one key observation that Fassin and Rechtman’s analysis allows us to make explicit in a
way that was not possible before. Recall that the West lost interest in the savage because
it lost a role for difference and the radically other in its intellectual life and its self-
understanding. Anthropological critics of othering felt the force of this loss early and
pressed the point home. But it was only when trauma became universal, when it came to
define a humanity without borders, that anthropologists found a foundation for their
science that allowed them to dispense with the notion of the other completely. Because
of its universalistic quality, the suffering subject appeared to anthropologists not just as
something new to study,but as a solution to a problem that had in the 1980s appeared ready
to condemn their discipline to irrelevance.
E. Valentine Daniel’s well-known article ‘Crushed glass, or, is there a counterpoint to
culture?’ (1996) allows us to catch a glimpse of the way anthropologists began to
discover the notion of the universality of suffering the rise of which Fassin and Rech-
tman trace. Based on fieldwork on the Sri Lankan civil war, this piece addresses the
violence of the conflict – violence that confronted Daniel quite powerfully in the course
of what he calls his ‘horror-story collecting’ with survivors of and witnesses to atrocity
(1996: 371). First written as a lecture in 1991, near the very beginning of the period both
Fassin and Rechtman and I are focused on, Daniel’s article offers a theoretical plea to
see violence and the suffering one endures as a victim or witness of it (Fassin and
Rechtman discuss the commensurability of these two positions at length) as something
that ‘resists the recuperative powers of culture’ by virtue of possessing a ‘culturally
unrecuperable surplus’ (1996: 365). Not only is such suffering culturally unrecuperable,
on Daniel’s account anthropologists should not try to force such a recovery of it. We
must acknowledge that it remains beyond culture so that it can

remind us that a) as scholars, intellectuals, and interpreters we need to be humble in the face of its
magnitude; and b) as human beings we need to summon all the vigilance in our command so as never
to stray toward it and be swallowed by its vortex into its unaccountable abyss (1996: 372, original
emphasis).

Daniel’s argument is noteworthy as a raw, still relatively unformed statement of the

status of violence and suffering as realities beyond culture, and hence as realities with
universal and in some ways obvious import that do not require cultural interpretation
to render them sensible.
More than this, Daniel’s article also gives us a glimpse of what the ethnography of
the suffering subject might look like. It is organized around transcriptions of narratives
provided by two brothers of what happened as they watched a gang of Sinhalese youth
murder their older brother and father during anti-Tamil riots in a northeastern Sri
Lankan village in 1983. The elder of the two surviving brothers regularly loses con-
sciousness when telling this story, as he does when speaking with Daniel. The other

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brother usually has complete amnesia about the events and denies that he was present
during them. Sometimes when waking from a nightmare or a loss of consciousness
during the day, however, he begins to recount memories of the event before falling
again into sleep. His elder brother has taped several of these episodes and given the
tapes to Daniel, who presents transcribed and edited versions of them (1996: 366-9).
These narratives are profoundly unsettling. I am sure that any of you who have read
them remember them, or at least you remember how you felt as your read them. Were
there space, I might reproduce them here. If I did, you would immediately accept
Daniel’s point that this kind of suffering and violence confronts you in your humanity
and raises issues that you cannot help but feel are beyond culture. Indeed, it is hard not
to notice that there is no particular cultural contextualization given in the telling – so
in a sense your own response can be taken as proof of this point. One could, for
purposes other than mine, try denaturalizing this response – pointing out how it is
prepared for Western readers by their own cultural understandings of pain and suffer-
ing and artfully elicited by Daniel’s considerable skill as a writer. Fassin and Rechtman
would be a great help in making an argument like this, as would Marshall Sahlins’
(1996) well-known discussion of the place of suffering in Western notions of human
nature and some of Talal Asad’s (1993; 2003) influential work on pain. But that is not an
argument I want to make here. Let us accept for present purposes that traumatic
suffering may truly be beyond culture. The point I want to make is that Daniel is
showing us a new way of writing ethnography on the basis of this understanding. This
is a way of writing ethnography in which we do not primarily provide cultural context
so as to offer lessons in how lives are lived differently elsewhere, but in which we offer
accounts of trauma that make us and our readers feel in our bones the vulnerability we
as human beings all share.
One of the most celebrated anthropological works of the last decade, João Biehl’s
2005 book Vita, provides an excellent example of a full-scale monograph built on the
kind of anthropological address to readers that I have identified in Daniel’s article. In
Vita, Biehl recounts the life-story of Catarina, a Brazilian woman suffering from an
inherited neurological disorder who is defined as mentally ill by her family and by the
state, both of whom leave her to wither in an ‘ex-human’ condition in a squalid,
privately run institution for those whom Biehl calls the socially abandoned. The book
represents the anthropology of suffering come of age. Beautifully produced and out-
fitted with many striking professional photographs displaying what Tom Csordas
(2007) in a review calls ‘a finely tuned aesthetic of misery’, the book is devoted in large
measure to exploring the suffering of Catarina as a singular person. To be sure, Biehl
has an important argument to make about how neoliberal states and their citizens
come to abandon those who cannot productively regulate themselves. But this point is
not developed in great ethnographic depth. And Catarina’s story is told as a human
one, not as a story about a someone who is in any significant respect Brazilian. There
is in fact little about the specificity of Brazilian cultural life in the book, though there
is much searing writing about the devastating effects of extreme poverty, medical
maltreatment, and social abandonment on people anywhere who are subject to them.
Like Daniel’s recounted narratives, Biehl’s telling of Catarina’s story addresses its
readers in their humanity – their ability to recognize suffering in its universal form.
Responding to this quality of the work, Arthur Kleinman, in a blurb on the back of the
book, rightly says that in it Catarina has ‘her humanity reaffirmed by the author’. I think
this is true, and I would add that her humanity is reaffirmed by the book’s readers as

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well – and that this is what the book asks of them. In its demand to be read as a book
about the humanity of a single suffering person, and in the success it has had in having
its readers meet that demand, Vita stands as a classic of a mature anthropology of
suffering.
As readers of Biehl, Daniel, and other anthropologists of suffering, we come to
realize the shared humanity that links us to others who suffer. We also realize how
profoundly human beings can fail one another, and sometimes we gain insight into
ways we might be complicit in this failure. It is clearly a hope of suffering slot anthro-
pology that these lessons might become a motive for change. Such is the promise of
work produced from within the suffering slot, and this kind of anthropology surely has
important work to do in addressing the great cultural problems of our age.
But having said this, I would also like to register how different the horizon of work
on suffering is from that which was produced from within the savage slot. Premised on
the universality of trauma and the equal right all human beings possess to be free of its
effects, suffering slot ethnography is secure in its knowledge of good and evil and works
toward achieving progress in the direction of its already widely accepted models of the
good. Savage slot ethnography, with its interest in otherness, had a different vocation.
It is often forgotten that Trouillot argued that the savage slot was not invented on its
own, but came into being only after the rise of the idea of utopia in the early 1500s, itself
an outgrowth of the then newly arisen Renaissance interest in the question of socio-
political order (see also Sacks 2007). As Trouillot puts it, from the outset ‘the Savage
makes sense in terms of utopia’ (2003: 20, original emphasis; see also Graeber 2001:
252-3). The idea of the savage has always been closely tied to the question of what might
constitute a perfect society. At its best, anthropology in the savage slot era held to this
understanding, basing itself on the promise that the discovery of other ways of living
might teach us the limits of our own, and might lead us to a vision of a world that was
better than ours in ways we could not on our own imagine. As David Schneider once
put it, ‘[O]ne of the fundamental fantasies of anthropology is that somewhere there
must be a life really worth living’ (1967: viii). Since we had to go elsewhere if we had any
hope of finding such a life, it stood to reason that it would be one that realized a good
beyond our current hopes, or that if it realized goods we did know about, it did so in
ways we did not.
With this embrace of the older anthropological idea of finding promise in different
ways of life, we return to Ted Schwartz’s cultural point: the idea that one important
thing anthropology can teach us is that there are profound differences between human
lives lived out in different cultural surroundings. Without this assumption, there would
be little value in encountering other ways of life in the hopes of gaining a critical
perspective on our own. I make this argument here, near the end of my remarks,
because I see a number of trends in current anthropology that I think are reconsidering
the power of work undertaken with the cultural point in mind. These trends are
unfolding not as a critique of suffering slot anthropology, but rather as complements to
it. In fact, many of the people whom I see as making important contributions to these
strands of contemporary anthropology also study suffering, as will be clear from some
of the citations that appear in the following section. But these kinds of work are none
the less after something slightly different than their more established predecessor. I
think this work might be brought together in an effort to construct an anthropology of
the good, and I want to spend the last section of this essay making an argument to this
effect.

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Toward an anthropology of the good

If you look around anthropology today, it is hard to miss the importance of work on
suffering. But it is also possible to spot a number of lines of inquiry that, while each still
somewhat small or even marginal in themselves, may be poised to come together in a
new focus on how people living in different societies strive to create the good in their
lives. The point of this kind of work is not to define what might universally count as
good, and its practitioners are neither so panglossian as to claim that any given society
has in fact achieved the capital G Good, nor so Pollyannaish as to imagine that societies
might achieve it on a regular basis if only we could identify what it is. Their more
modest aim is to explore the different ways people organize their personal and collec-
tive lives in order to foster what they think of as good, and to study what it is like to live
at least some of the time in light of such a project.
I have left myself very little space to lay out a vision of the anthropology of the good
here, and I am in any case at an early stage of thinking about how best to conceptualize
it. Yet I hope even a quick and preliminary account of what I have in mind might have
some value.
Let me start by repeating from my introduction a simple and undoubtedly incom-
plete list of some of the emerging topics of anthropological concern that I see as
contributing to a new focus on the good. I mentioned there studies of value, morality,
imagination, well-being, empathy, care, the gift, hope, time and change. In order to
elaborate on this list and give it some analytical structure, it makes sense to break it into
three groups.
I take anthropological work on value, morality, and well-being to belong to a first
group (see, e.g., Graeber 2001 and Robbins 2007b on value; Fassin 2012b, Laidlaw 2002,
Lambek 2010, and Zigon 2008 on morality; and Corsín Jiménez 2008 and Mathews &
Izquierdo 2009 on well-being).5 Each of these topics concerns the way people under-
stand the good and define its proper pursuit. I am also going to put imagination in this
group, because it signals the extent to which both the people we study and we as
analysts have to recognize the good as something that at least sometimes goes beyond
the given, the already there, taken for granted of social life and the world in which social
life unfolds (on imagination, see Crapanzano 2004; Lohmann 2010, and Sneath,
Holbraad & Pedersen 2009). The good in this respect is something that must be
imaginatively conceived, not simply perceived. This means that to study the good as
anthropologists, we need to be attentive to the way people orientate to and act in a
world that outstrips the one most concretely present to them, and to avoid dismissing
their ideals as unimportant or, worse, as bad-faith alibis for the worlds they actually
create. It is not that imaginings of the good cannot sometimes be set aside in practice
or put to use in ideological projects that support the continued existence of structures
of violence and suffering, but if we assume that ideals always and only get either
ignored or deployed in nefarious ways, then the anthropology of the good can never get
off the ground. There are many current signs that anthropology is moving past such
limited perspectives on people’s imaginations of value, morality, and well-being, and
research in this area – let us call it research on the cultural construction of the good –
is growing particularly quickly at present.
In the second group of trends I want to collect into the anthropology of the good I
have put the study of empathy, care, and the gift (see Hollan & Throop 2011 and Throop
& Hollan 2008 on empathy; Garcia 2010 and Stasch 2009 on care; and Sykes 2005 on the
gift). As I have constituted it here, this group is surely too small, but these three topics

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are meant to stand in for all the ways anthropologists are looking these days at how
people work to create the good in social relationships. Much of the most important
work that has already been done on the construction of the good, and on morality in
particular, examines the ways people work on themselves so as to be able to realize the
good in the creation of their moral selves, but it is equally necessary to explore the ways
they foster the good in their real social relations. We have learned so much in the last
few decades about how human beings can disregard and do violence to one another. A
fully rounded anthropology of the good will have to throw light on other ways of
relating. I take the renewed interest in the gift and in practices of care, along with the
growing interest in empathy as an aspect of all kinds of social relations, not only those
of witnessing to violence and suffering, as three indications that such an anthropology
is coming into being.
In the final group I put the study of time, change, and hope (see Deeb 2009, Guyer
2007, Robbins 2007a, and Smid 2010 for works on time that attend also to issues of
change; see Crapanzano 2004, Mattingly 2010, and Miyazaki 2004 on hope). These three
belong together because they are about the ways people come to believe that they can
successfully create a good beyond what is presently given in their lives. Recent work on
cultural models of time that see it as a medium not just for the repetition of the same
but for the accomplishment of the new joins with that on cultural models of change to
show how people are at times able to construe the realization of the good as a genuine
possibility. And sometimes such a construal finds itself worked up into a motivating
programme for approaching the future under the sign of hope. This aspect of cultural
life takes effort to study – you have to know where to look and what to listen for. As with
the construction of the good, there is a strong temptation to dismiss people’s invest-
ments in realizing the good in time as mere utopianism, to smother their hopes
analytically with what Clifford has recently called our own ‘wet-blanket “realism” ’
(2009: 241). But if part of the point of the anthropology of the good is to return to our
discipline its ability to challenge our own versions of the real, then we have to learn to
give these aspirational and idealizing aspects of the lives of others a place in our
accounts. As Douglas Rogers has nicely put it, it is a matter of some theoretical
importance to insist that ‘for our understanding of human social and cultural life,
striving matters’ (2009: 32).
The construction of notions of the good, the attempt to put them into practice in
social relations, and the elaboration of models of time and change that support hopes
for success in such endeavours – taken together, these areas of study give us a map for
an anthropology of the good that highlights places anthropologists have already
learned to locate. My hope is that if the light of the great cultural problems shines just
a little more brightly on this terrain, we might be able to draw a route that connects
them all, and that in doing so we might add a new way of doing anthropology to those
we already have.
The point of developing this new kind of anthropology would not be to displace the
anthropology of suffering, which will continue for the foreseeable future to address
problems we need to face. It would be to help realize in a distinctively anthropological
way the promise suffering slot anthropology always at least implicitly makes: that there
must be better ways to live than the ones it documents.
Let me take a moment in conclusion to return to the Urapmin, to add just the
smallest touch of concreteness to what has been an abstract final discussion. Earlier, I
noted that in the mid-1990s people reacted to my presentations of Urapmin life by

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defining the Urapmin as people who suffered. I understood why one might respond to
the Urapmin this way, and I came to recognize that, in step with the times, I must have
in some unintentional ways helped to foster this response in the way I presented my
material. But I never felt that this interpretation of the Urapmin situation was true to
my experience of Urapmin lives. I would sometimes reply that I did not think the
Urapmin were sad or suffering so much as they were struggling, working to construct
a liveable world on the other side of their experiences of contact and colonialism –
experiences that made their previous way of life appear to them hopelessly inadequate.
The moral concerns that their Christianity pushed to the forefront of their awareness
gave them, I would come to suggest, a language in which to argue about how best to
construct a new liveable world, and their millenarianism gave them a complex temporal
frame that supported both their near- and long-term hopes for succeeding in their
efforts. Against this background, though their struggles were not easy, the Urapmin
showed no signs of feeling defeated by them. Timi and Tankangnok, like most other
Urapmin, were fully engaged in these struggles – Timi through his commitment to
strengthening the belief of others and Tankangnok in the way he often led by example
in matters of community work. The worries Timi and Yagapnok both felt about the
state of their souls fuelled not withdrawal from but further engagement in Urapmin
social life and its collective attempt to live in a way that would ensure the attainment of
heaven for everyone in the community. I think there are lots of places where people live
their personal and collective lives in similar terms – pitched forward toward what they
take to be a better world. The better worlds they imagine and their ways of trying to get
to them surely differ in significant ways – and I think Ted Schwartz’s cultural point
meant to remind us how important it is to learn from these differences. It is my hope
that an anthropology of the good can take up that project, helping us do justice to the
different ways people live for the good, and finding ways to let their efforts inform our
own.

NOTES
I took the first steps toward working out the argument of this article in one long and very helpful
conversation with Tanya Luhrmann, another with Jukka Siikala and Harri Siikala, and a third with Holger
Jebens. Many conversations along the way with Rupert Stasch have also been critical to its development. I
thank them all for their help in getting this argument off the ground. A discussion of Trouillot’s work with
Joe Hankins, David Pedersen, and Rupert Stasch also helped me to launch into the writing, and a discussion
of an early draft with these colleagues as well as Nancy Postero and Guillermo Algaze was likewise crucial in
the writing process, as was a discussion with the TPO group at the University of California, San Diego. I have
also been lucky enough to present the article to a number of audiences along the way. It was first given as a
Plenary Lecture at the Society for Psychological Anthropology Biennial Meeting in 2011, and then later that
year as a Munro Lecture at the University of Edinburgh and a Keynote Lecture at the Finnish Anthropological
Society Annual Meeting. Vigorous responses in all those venues were crucial to the development of the
argument, and I thank Doug Hollan, Magnus Course and Maya Mayblin, and Timo Kaartinen for their
respective invitations to give these lectures. Responses from groups at Scripps College, the Culture Medicine
and Psychiatry group at Stanford, Reed College, the University of Cambridge, and the University of Copen-
hagen also contributed significantly to the final form of the article and I thank in particular those who
arranged for those talks: Anthony Shenodah, Tanya Luhrmann, Courtney Handman, James Laidlaw, and
Morten Pedersen and Lotte Buch Segal. Finally, I thank JRAI editor Matthew Engelke and four anonymous
reviewers for their very helpful critical comments. Having had so much help with this article, I feel even more
compelled than one usually does to note that not everyone mentioned agrees with all the points I make here,
and any outright errors are of course my own responsibility.
1
Even as the terrain I hope to cover is a large one, I should make it clear that I do not mean to suggest that
it encompasses all of anthropology over roughly the last thirty years. My remarks aim at an exploration of

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what I think is a very important stream of the discipline over that time, but there is no effort or claim to take
note of every significant development during that period. Having said this, I should also mention that a
majority of the peer reviewers of this article felt that the history of the anthropology of suffering it traces is
primarily a North American one. In some respects this is a valid reading. But I have decided against
modifying ‘anthropology’ with ‘North American’ throughout the piece for two reasons. The first is that I
think that the deepest issues the essay treats – for example the tension between universalism and difference
in contemporary anthropology – are broadly relevant in the discipline, and that they have arisen outside of
North America as well, though perhaps sometimes in different forms in different places. The second reason
is that even as I can accept that my account can be read at least in some respects as a North American one,
I am not sure it is only that. If one takes a broad view of the nature of suffering, I think the focus on it has
been more widespread. Thus, for example, Henrietta Moore (2011: 68-71), in a wide ranging discussion of
contemporary theoretical developments in anthropology, and the human sciences more generally, has
worried over the ways studies of ‘modernity/globalization/neoliberalism’ evidence an ‘overwhelming analytic
focus on participation through exclusion, alienation and abjection’ (2011: 71). Furthermore, it is possible that
the issues treated here have become important outside of North America, but at least initially in different
scholarly settings. Fassin makes an argument along these lines, noting that the boom in discussions of
‘suffering, trauma, misfortune, poverty, and exclusion’ during the 1990s took off in the United States in
‘literary criticism and medical anthropology’ but in France in ‘sociology and psychology’ (2012a: 5). His point
would lend support both to the claim that my own account has a North American inflection and to one that
holds that it deals with issues that are none the less very prominently in play in many other places as well.
2
To avoid any misunderstanding on this point, I should stress that I am writing about a time before the
study of Christianity became mainstream in anthropology. From the vantage-point of the present, as
responses to my argument have sometimes indicated, it can be hard to recognize how difficult anthropolo-
gists once found it to treat a group of people such as the Urapmin as at once meaningfully Papua New
Guinean (or, in the terms of my argument here, meaningfully occupying the savage slot) and meaningfully
Christian (see Bialecki, Haynes & Robbins 2008; Cannell 2006; Robbins 2003).
3
I use pseudonyms for my informants to preserve anonymity.
4
Two works that have decisively shaped my own understanding of the wider cultural history I cannot
explore in detail here are Samuel Moyn’s The last utopia: human rights in history (2010) and Didier Fassin’s
Humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present (2012a). Both books would be good starting-points for the
development of a more extensive argument along the lines I have quickly set down in this paragraph.
5
Throughout this concluding section, references are meant only to point to a few representative selections
of growing bodies of literature. They are not meant to be exhaustive in the style of a review article.

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Au-delà du sujet souffrant : vers une anthropologie du bien

Résumé
Dans les années 1980, l’anthropologie a cessé de se concentrer sur les sociétés définies comme radicalement
« autres » par rapport à celle de l’anthropologue lui-même, sans toutefois savoir quoi mettre à la place
comme principal objet d’étude. L’auteur affirme ici que, à bien des égards, ce thème de remplacement est
le sujet souffrant. En remontant aux sources de ce changement, il examine la manière dont ont ainsi été
abordées des questions-clés de l’anthropologie du lointain, tout en suggérant que certains points forts des
travaux antérieurs, notamment certaines de leurs capacités propres à la critique, ont fait les frais de ce
changement. En conclusion, l’article examine comment les tendances récentes de l’anthropologie
pourraient fusionner en donnant un nouveau changement de direction, cette fois vers une anthropologie
du « bien » qui pourrait retrouver un peu de la force critique de l’anthropologie ancienne sans hériter de
ses faiblesses.

Joel Robbins is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of the book
Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society (University of California
Press, 2004) and co-editor of the journal Anthropological Theory.

Social Anthropology, Free School Lane, Cambridge CB2 3RF, UK. Jrobbins@weber.ucsd.edu

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