Pitch, picture, power: The globalization of local suffering and the transformation of social experience

Veena Das's work on suffering suggests that the appropriate approach to the subject is one that grounds research in social experience. To honor this pitch of anthropology, I examine the global mediatization of the trauma of political violence and its moral implications. I also describe the professional appropriation of suffering that transforms political economic conditions into medical realities. Because social experience is itself undergoing a profound alteration in the present period of disordered capitalism, the very phenomenological conditions that we have assumed as an ‘existential’ basis for responding to human misery are also being ominously transformed.