1. Melina Vanchieri
Medical Anthropology
Essay 2, Option 1
Word Count: 1560
Circling Vultures and Paintings of Wounds: Why Does Visual Representation Matter?
Visual representation and narratives of suffering are very important themes for medical
anthropologists to study. The right visualization of illness can move society to act in a certain
way, to want to help the sufferer. This desire to help can be used by organizations to elicit
support in various projects and it can help others understand the pain or illness another person is
going through. This emphasis on visual suffering can have negative effects because it can focus
the watching audience on suffering in general and not the suffering of a specific person. It can
also impair an ill or injured person’s ability to be taken seriously when they claim that they are
suffering.
Medical anthropology takes an interest in how representations of suffering are produced
and how they are used and interpreted because representations of suffering can be used to
influence people and draw attention to issues that the producer wants people to notice. People in
Western society have a tendency to conflate a picture of a subject with the subject itself. For
example, when a person is showing a friend a family photo album they might point to a picture
of a woman and say, “this is my aunt.” The piece of photographic paper is obviously not a
woman and both of the people in this story know it. To them the representation of the woman is
accurate enough to warrant the person using it as a stand-in for the aunt herself.
This Western ability to ascribe humanity to pieces of paper comes in handy when the
producer of one such piece of paper wants to influence their audience in some way. Take for
example the photograph taken by Kevin Carter of a naked emaciated little girl trying to drag

2. herself to the nearest feeding center while a vulture eyes her from the background. This picture is
discussed in “The Appeal of Experience; The Dismay of Images: Cultural Appropriations of
Suffering in Our Times,” written by Arthur Kleinman and Joan Kleinman. On page four there is
a passage that explains the impact the photograph has had on the Western world:
The photograph has been reprinted many times, and it has been duplicated in advertisements for
a number of nongovernmental aid agencies that are raising funds to provide food to refugees.
This is a classic instance of the use of moral sentiment to mobilize support for social action. One
cannot look at this picture without wanting to do something to protect the child and drive the
vulture away. Or, as one aid agency puts it, to prevent other children from succumbing in the
same heartlessly inhuman way by giving a donation. (Kleinman and Kleiman, 4)
Kevin Carter has taken the suffering of this little girl and translated it into a medium the
Western world can understand and identify with on a deep emotional level. A description of a
starving struggling girl might elicit sympathy from a reading audience, but a photograph grabs an
audience’s attention in a much stronger way. A photograph confronts its Western audience with
a reality that cannot be ignored. If a photograph can provide an adequate stand-in for a family
member, then a Western audience would see the photograph of the girl and be compelled to help
her in any way, even if they are far from where the photograph was taken and years have passed
since it was first published. The nongovernmental aid organizations capitalize on this desire to
help by conveniently displaying it along with a request for money to go to feeding starving
people. This makes the nongovernmental organizations seem a little bit heartless making money
off of a starving girl, but they are using the image to attempt to help children like her.
The interpretation of the picture largely revolves around the audience it was meant for – a
picture meant to draw attention to a problem and elicit sympathy from a public that might not
otherwise care. The suffering girl was treated almost as an afterthought by Kevin Carter and by
the audience. When Kevin Carter found the girl, he spent 20 minutes waiting for the vulture to

3. spread its wings and when it did not, he snapped a picture and chased the vulture away. But his
good deeds stopped there as he watched the girl struggle for a while before sitting under a tree to
react to the situation. He talked to God and cried. He became depressed and wanted to hug his
own daughter. But he did not pick the girl up to carry her to the feeding station where her life
could have possibly been saved. It is almost as if the girl herself is less real than the photograph
of her suffering. Medical anthropology cares about this phenomenon because even in cases of
illness and injury, in a way the image of a suffering person has more power than the person’s
own narrative of their suffering. This phenomenon is illustrated in “Among School Children: The
Use Of Body Damage To Express Physical Pain,” written by Elaine Scarry.
The way suffering is represented matters because the image of the person’s suffering is
largely what triggers other people to react in a sympathetic way. In the case of the starving girl,
the photographic image matters because it provides a representation of the suffering that a
member of the audience might not have experienced personally which makes the audience
member more likely to want to help. This translates to a setting of illness and injury in that the
level of care and social validation an ill or injured person can sometimes depend largely on what
their suffering looks like.
In the article by Scarry, she discusses the objectification of pain as a way of making the
non-suffering person feel what the suffering person feels. The objectification of pain takes the
form of an “as if” structure: “the pain feels as if… it is as though….” The suffering person will
then describe either an external cause of pain or an internal image of body damage: “It is as if
there is a knife stabbing into my back… It is as though my skull is being crushed in a vice”
(Scarry, 12). Instead of just saying, “I am in pain,” the suffering person must give others around
them a frame of reference. A layperson can imagine what having a knife stabbing into their back

4. might feel like, so they can easily understand and sympathize with the suffering person. What
helps the suffering person even more is if they have a physical sign to show for their suffering. A
nasty burn or a broken bone sticking through the skin gives the people around the suffering
person a visual confirmation that the suffering person is indeed suffering. Scarry writes about the
assumption that bodily damage must equate with pain when she tells the story of being in an art
museum when she hears someone, presumably a teacher, tell a group of young children to sit in
from of the painting that they feel shows the most pain. The children gravitate to two paintings:
Prometheus Bound by Reubens, a picture of an eagle perched on top of Prometheus while eating
his liver from his living body, and Massacre of the Innocents by Pacecco de Rosa, an image of
wholesale slaughter of women and children (Scarry, 11). The children gravitate towards these
paintings and not, say, towards a painting of a person dying from influenza because these
pictures both show massive bodily damage. The externality of the pain makes the pain shareable
with an audience.
Herein lies the problem with a person who has a so-called “invisible illness.” An invisible
illness is a chronic condition a person suffers from that causes symptoms but is not observable to
anyone other than the sufferer, except by description. Fibromyalgia is a good example of this
kind of illness. It is a condition of chronic musculoskeletal pain that does not appear to have a
known cause or a simple cure. Other illnesses include chronic fatigue and mental illness. A
person other than the sufferer might see the sufferer’s symptoms (claims of pain, tiredness,
erratic behavior) but not understand where they are coming from. Because the sufferer’s pain is
not easily quantifiable or visible, this might lead other people to assume that the distress the
sufferer is experiencing is not legitimate distress. Perhaps the person is lazy or faking something
for attention? Scarry corroborates this statement when she says, “we have as a species an

5. astonishingly consistent record of ignoring other people’s pain if there is no body damage or no
weapon to make it visible” (Scarry, 32). If the pain is not visible or easily describable so it can be
shared, it is difficult to get others to take it seriously.
Visualized suffering can lead to the audience of the suffering person feeling compelled to
act to save the suffering person, even if their efforts to fix the problem overlook the person
experiencing the problem. Visual suffering is also important in the field of illness and injury
because the ability of a person to describe their pain in a shareable way or even to show a
physical representation of their pain can influence the level of care and support they get.
Visualization and objectification of suffering can drastically effect how suffering is seen and
dealt with in a given society.