The Politics of Pain: Gaining Status and Maintaining Order Through Ritual Combat and Warfare

Abstract

In The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry famously argued that performances of pain are displays of agency used to construct and maintain social hierarchies. Scarry wrote that pain, as a social force, has “real” meaning for the person experiencing it. Anthropologists, especially bioarchaeologists, have thought extensively about performative violence and its use to subdue resistance among witnesses of torture. Yet, few have focused on the intentional injury of elites themselves and how this suffering is often on display. Taking the notion of purposeful pain as its subject, this paper explores the wounded bodies of elites in a large ceremonial site called Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. We first summarize ethnographic examples where leaders chose to fight in ritual, performative contexts, exploring how elites cross-culturally become ‘publically-pained.’ Then we compare other bioarchaeological case-studies where elites appear to have survived traumatic injury. We reconstruct ideologies about bodily violability as a way to explore the politics of purposeful pain in each case. Chaco Canyon, like these other socially stratified groups (Chumash, Maya, and Wanka) illustrate how leaders at various scales use their bodies to maintain social order. Embodying the ‘body politic’ idea suggested by Scheper-Hughes and Lock, leaders unmake social unrest, and ensure social order, through fleshy mediums. An understanding of purposeful pain calls for further investigation of intentional injury as a marker of status both past and present.