A Passion for Society by Wilkinson Iain; Kleinman Arthur;

Author:Wilkinson, Iain; Kleinman, Arthur;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press

THE HUMANITARIAN SOCIAL IMAGINARY AND THE CHALLENGE TO CARE

What is social life, and how should it be rendered as an object for study? To what extent should matters of moral feeling be involved in this? How should our moral feelings about human suffering be taken as a guide to social understanding? How should we act on such understanding? For those engaged in research and writing on social suffering, these are all ongoing questions of critical concern for which there are no final or satisfactory answers. Our sensitivity to problems of human suffering, particularly insofar as it involves us in vexed questions of moral meaning and in frustrated debates over the bounds of the moral responsibilities we bear toward others, is taken as a means to awaken human social understanding. Insofar as we are culturally disposed to feel for the suffering of others, it is assumed that we are also primed to think about how social life is met at the level of human experience; or rather, that we are hereby enabled to recognize how social life takes place as an enactment of substantive human values. The study of social life is understood to involve us in experiences, contexts, and connections that greatly matter for people and is thereby an intrinsically moral activity. It binds us in moral commitments to understanding people in terms of what makes their lives hold prime meaning and value in real-life settings of danger and uncertainty. Social inquiry is a high-stakes activity. It is a form of moral epidemiology; not only does it broker with the values by which we are disposed to relate to one another as human beings, but also with those enshrined in our depictions of the social situations in which humanity takes its shape. It concerns the assignation of value to humanity; and for the sake of upholding the value of humanity, it must always be left open to question, revision, and review.

Where priority is given to social suffering as a means to study society, the provocation of humanitarian conscience is taken both as a sounding of social alarm and as a call to place conditions of social life radically in question. On this understanding, by charting the history of the portrayal of human suffering as a humanitarian concern,45 we are also documenting the enlivening of social consciousness and social conscience. Humanitarian impulse inspires the conscious realization of “the social” both as an object for critical reflection and as a matter for care; and in this regard, a “humanitarian social imaginary”46 has a vital role to play in the nurturing of our social understanding.47

It is very likely that any movement to ally projects of social investigation with humanitarian concern will invite criticism over the extent to which these are left operating as a form of bourgeois class condescension or as naively duplicitous props for political elites set on regarding people’s suffering as no more than an unfortunate side effect of social arrangements that should otherwise be portrayed as largely benign.48 There is

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