Introduction: An Anthropology of Absence

Abstract

After losing his arm in the battle of Santa Cruz de Tenerife in 1797, Lord Nelson took the pain he felt in his missing limb to be a “direct proof of the existence of the soul” (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1998: 1604). What Lord Nelson had experienced was a phenomenon first identified by the physician Silas Weir Mitchell in the late nineteenth century as “phantom pains”. During the American Civil War, Mitchell treated and studied soldiers with nerve injuries and post-traumatic disorders, who described to him the experience of sensing their amputated limbs (Wade 2003: 518). Since then, phantom pains have been medically defined as the painful sensation of missing limbs, i.e. a sensuous experience of something which is materially absent. However, even before Mitchell’s studies and coining of the term, pain felt in missing limbs and the sense that an amputated limb is still attached to the body had been elements in philosophical treatises. Rene Descartes, for instance, argued that sensations in amputated limbs testify to the unreliability of the senses (Wade 2003: 518-520).