SUFFERING CHILD - AN EMBODIMENT OF WAR AND ITS AFTERMATH IN POST-SANDINISTA NICARAGUA

This article considers how the ripple effects of war and its aftermath are embodied and lived even after being mediated by time, space, and social status. Through a case study of a Nicaraguan boy and his natal family, I argue that the legacy of war, structural violence, and endem ic poverty are chronic and lingering and emerge from internationally a nd locally produced traumatogenic social relations. I use a phenomenol ogical approach to distress to minimize the clinical tendency to patho logize individual sufferers, and to illuminate the destructive capacit ies of politically and historically produced conditions of social ''no rmal abnormality.'' The continuum of lived experience of social suffer ing is poignantly articulated by a member of one of society's most vul nerable sectors, a ten-year-old child.