Workers' compensation and the governance of pain

This article examines the medico-legal systems of workers' compensation. It is divided into three parts, the first taking an historical perspective to locate the first workers' compensation laws, the circumstances which led to their implementation, and their consequences in terms of the shift from individual fault to industrial risk. In the second part, the discursive practices of medico-legal knowledge-power typically found in workers' compensation systems are examined, especially the principles and clinical practices that are deployed to 'police' the boundaries of such schemes and to mitigate costs. Part three then summarizes the effect of neo-liberal governmentality and its underlying economic rationality as it attempts to regulate, by means of the artifice of liberty, the behaviours of firms and workers. Workers' compensation deserves analysis for the special technical and insurantial problems it entails, given its complex triangular insurance relation (involving the insurer, the firm, and the worker), its deployment of medical, economic and actuarial knowledges, and its production of special problems and uncertainties surrounding the governing of a class of persons incapacitated for productive work.     

Notes on body pain and truth in medieval Christian ritual

Anthropologists who study exotic religions tend to analyse rituals as systems of symbolic communication. This article offers an historical analysis of particular medieval Christian rituals directed at establishing the Truth, especially those in which physical pain is employed. Its primary interest is in the disciplinary conditions and effects of such rituals, and not in their symbolic meaning.