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"Man always walks between precipices, and whether he likes it or not, his most authentic task is to know how to maintain balance" José Ortega y Gasset. "These essays, without exception, have been written in recent years like seeds scattered in a strong wind. They have appeared here and there in journals, edited volumes, and encyclopedias: I wish to bring them together in one space and fix them in the amber of the scholar. The essays represent - not only through my contribution - the desire to write a cultural critique of biomedicine and the attempt to develop a social theory of the experience of suffering" Arthur Kleinman. One of the most influential and creative scholars in medical anthropology takes stock - in this collection of essays - of his intellectual odyssey. Arthur Kleinman, an anthropologist and psychiatrist, has studied in Taiwan, China, and North America. A professor at Harvard University, he draws on his bicultural and multidisciplinary background to propose alternative strategies that can relate medicine and society. In this book, Kleinman explores the boundary between medical, social, health-related problems, and social change. The author studies the body as a mediator between individual and collective experience, discovering that many health problems - for example, the trauma of violence or depression resulting from chronic pain - are less individual medical problems than, rather, interpersonal experiences of social suffering. He proposes an ethnographic approach to moral practice in medicine, embracing the infrapolitical context of illness, social institutions, responses to illness, and the space that the ethnographic approach itself finds in medical ethics. (Cover: Andrei Tarkovsky, "Nostalghia", 1983. Andrei Tarkovsky International Institute. Florence).