IN THE KNOW:

Abstract

Grappling with the longstanding philosophical question of how we might know the pain of the other, this essay sheds light on how knowledge of pain caused by violence marks our claims to community. The inquiry is based on ethnographic fieldwork among clinical staff in a torture rehabilitation clinic in Denmark and zooms in on the tangible as well as subtle ways in which their work with victims of torture comes to mark the sociality of the clinic. Ultimately, the chapter asks what it means to know the pain of, in, another body when that form of pain is born out of violence and what this means for the human form of life.