The Social Production Of Physical Pain And The Social Origin Of Trauma

The movement ShangShanXiaXiang which had risen in the middle of 1950s was a social movement lasted more than 20 years which influenced several generations in China. This movement expedited a special social group which had a huge amount called the educated youth (les jeunes instruits in French). According to incomplete statistics, there are altogether 17 million people had taken part in this movement. In the end of 80s in 20th century, with the educated youth's back-to-city policy released and a series of social structure changes and economic transformations just like Reform and Opening, the special life-experiences of educated youth were dispelled and covered gradually, but the expression educated youth was kept as a historical label. At present, the social group of educated youth who had been involved in the movement ShangShanXiaXiang are all in their 50s or 60s, and lots of pains appear on their aging bodies. This study is concentrating on educated youth's generation appeal hiding behind the expressions for the physical pains. The research chose a special group of educated youth who had been sent to DaXingAnLing during the great culture revolution (which means they had suffered from both the heavy labor experience and the cold puna environment) as field, through the analysis of their life-courses combing with the social history of the development and transformation in modern China since 1949, and studied on the social production of physical pain and the social origin of trauma. Generally speaking, the production of pain includes two courses, the biological course and the social course. This study uses for reference the theories of (作田啓さくた けぃぃもち) deconstructs educated youth's generational value crisis from the dimension of value deprivation:when a man's value is deprived, he needs to know why, the failure about searching for one's meaning of deprivation could lead to value crisis, and right now the generation of educated youth are face to the miss of social recognization for their working experiences in the movement ShangShanXiaXiang. This course could be seen as the social production of educated youth's generational paining expressions. Simultaneously, I draw lessons from American medical Anthropologist Arthur Kleinman's research on Chinese people's somatization and analyze how the depressions of educated youth turn to physical pain feelings through the course of somatization, which points to the social origin of trauma. A related concept of pain is the disease; the pain could be seen as a feel but the disease could be seen as a production of modernity. The disease is constructed in the society and is endowed with lots of metaphors when people search for the diseases' origins. Take the educated youth for an example, the pain on their bodies are not just limited to this generation, but those pain feelings are endowed with a historical and social dimension through the educated youth's confide of pain, which means their appeals for deprivations of values and living chances turn to the appeals for deprivations of healthy rights, because the confide for physical pain has more justifications and less danger for political alienations in Chinese society. Glen. H. Elder puts forward when the social structure has been impacted by social transformations; many social groups would be influenced and the influences would be transferred through the family relationships. Therefore, the research on life-course has great importance. In this article I try to establish a model of the educated youth's generational pain appeals through analyzing the collections of oral histories and through working on the intergenerational relation in interviewees'families under the dimension of social history. And the significance of this study is more than just analyzing the situation of the educated youth generation; through the same path of analyzing pain's social production we can initiate a new field which has the objects as historical scar in medical sociology.