Violent Reverberations: Global Modalities of Trauma (Culture, Mind, and Society)

“These essays raise the bar for projects on trauma that insist on grounding theory in seriously ethnographic, historical, and contextual case studies. The book engages the best-known writers and research in the arena of trauma and affect studies, and will gather momentum and audience because it so carefully and coherently articulates critiques, complementary case studies, and forward-looking theory.” (Steven Feld, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of New Mexico, USA)

“Trauma, a doctrine with global reach, depends on thin descriptions to illustrate its universalizing analytical framework. Grounded in culture-specific particularities, this elegant volume dissects this condition, instead offering thick descriptions of silence, narrative, security, fear, difference, and ritual laughter.” (Sverker Finnström, Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Uppsala University, Sweden)

The contributions to this volume map the surprisingly multifarious circumstances in which trauma is invoked – as an analytical tool, a therapeutic term or as a discursive trope. By doing so, we critically engage the far too often individuating aspects of trauma, as well as the assumption of a universal somatic that is globally applicable to contexts of human suffering. The volume takes the reader on a journey across widely differing terrains: from Norwegian institutions for psychiatric patients to the post-war emergence of speech genres on violence in Mozambique, from Greek and Cameroonian ritual and carnivalesque treatments of historical trauma to national discourses of political assassinations in Argentina, the volume provides an empirically founded anti-dote against claiming a universal ‘empire of trauma’ (Didier Fassin) or seeing the trauma as successfully defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Instead, the work critically evaluates and engages whether the term’s dual plasticity and endurance captures, encompasses or challenges legacies and imprints of multiple forms of violence.