Hunger and the Hardness of Facts

Abstract

Until recently, human suffering has received sparse attention in anthropology. It is argued that this is due to the theoretical legacy of anthropology, which favours studies of whole and largely well-functioninllg social systems. The aim ofthe article is to discuss the potential ofsocial anthropology in the study of human hardship, not as something extra-social, but as an integral part of human experience. The argument proceeds through a presentation of the standard conceptions of hunger anid famine as sornething out of order, over a discussion of the human experience of pain, to a more general discussion of the assessment of the relative hardness of facts. It is argued that the apparent 'softness' of anthropological studies of hardship is due to a social construction of hard and soft facts, and of hard and soft sciences, which is obsolete. In recent years anthropology has been met with a new challenge of understanding and writing about other people's sufferings. The methodological and ethical problems posed by this challenge have not yet been sufficiently tackled by anthropologists. This article is an attempt to address some aspects of this particular cluster of problems by relating them to the general epistemological concerns of anthropology in the 1990s.1 The discussion proceeds through three stages. First, I discuss some hard facts of hunger and famine as particular cases of human suffering. However brief, the discussion serves to set the scene for the more general points to be made later. Second, I shall discuss the human experience of hardship, such as the feeling of hunger and the sensation of pain, with the aim of reintegrating hard material facts with apparently soft emotional and conceptual ones. Third, I want to address the overarching epistemological problem inherent in assessing the 'hardness of facts'

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