The Afterword from esteemed sociologist Eric Woods connects the essays and explores their significance for the broader fields of sociology, behavioral science, and trauma studies.. In this collaboratively authored work, five distinguished sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of "cultural trauma"—and on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility.
Looking at the "meaning making process" as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence, they outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies, including the Nazi Holocaust, slavery in the United States, and September 11, This book deals with triumphant and tragic heroes, with victims and perpetrators as archetypes of the Western imagination.
A major recent change in Western societies is that memories of triumphant heroism-for example, the revolutionary uprising of the people-are increasingly replaced by the public remembrance of collective trauma of genocide, slavery and expulsion. The first part of the book deals with the heroes and victims and explores the social construction of charisma and its inevitable decay.
Part 2 focuses on a paradigm case of the collective trauma of perpetrators: German national identity between and After a time of latency, the legacy of nationalistic trauma was addressed in a public conflict between generations. The conflict took center stage in vivid public debates and became a core element of Germany's official political culture.
Today public confessions of the guilt of the past have spread beyond the German case. They are part of a new post-utopian pattern of collective identity in a globalised setting. In this book Jeffrey C.
Alexander develops an original social theory of trauma and uses it to carry out a series of empirical investigations into social suffering around the globe.
Alexander argues that traumas are not merely psychological but collective experiences, and that trauma work plays a key role in defining the origins and outcomes of critical social conflicts. He outlines a model of trauma work that relates interests of carrier groups, competing narrative identifications of victim and perpetrator, utopian and dystopian proposals for trauma resolution, the performative power of constructed events, and the distribution of organizational resources.
Alexander explores these processes in richly textured case studies of cultural-trauma origins and effects, from the universalism of the Holocaust to the particularism of the Israeli right, from postcolonial battles over the Partition of India and Pakistan to the invisibility of the Rape of Nanjing in Maoist China. In a particularly controversial chapter, Alexander describes the idealizing discourse of globalization as a trauma-response to the Cold War. Contemporary societies have often been described as more concerned with the past than the future, more with tragedy than progress.
The author examines narratives that illustrate the fracture of upper-class identity, including well-known examples of the Lost Generation—Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, and Vera Brittain—as well as other less typical cases—George Mallory and JRR Tolkien—to demonstrate the effects of the First World War on British society, culture, and politics.
This essay will investigate this issue by applying three contradictory trauma theories by Jeffrey Alexander, Piotr Sztompka and Cathy Caruth to Becker's film and examining whether the film successfully recollects German identity. If so, does the movie, according to Judith Herman's definition of trauma resolution, simultaneously help to resolve a specific East German cultural trauma that has been in a state of latency for more than thirteen years?
Ron Eyerman explores the formation of African American identity through the cultural trauma of slavery. Jeffrey C. Alexander brings together new and leading contributors to make a powerful and coherently argued case for a new direction in cultural sociology, one that focuses on the intersection between performance, ritual and social action. Performance has always been used by sociologists to understand the social world but this volume offers the first systematic analytical framework based on the performance metaphor to explain large-scale social and cultural processes.
Inspired by the theories of Austin, Derrida, Durkheim, Goffman, and Turner, this is a path-breaking volume that makes a major contribution to the field. It will appeal to scholars and students alike. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Trauma is a comprehensive guide to the history and theory of trauma studies, including key concepts, consideration of critical perspectives and discussion of future developments.
It also explores different genres and media, such as poetry, life-writing, graphic narratives, photography and post-apocalyptic fiction, and analyses how literature engages with particular traumatic situations and events, such as the Holocaust, the Occupation of France, the Rwandan genocide, Hurricane Katrina and transgenerational nuclear trauma.
Forty essays from top thinkers in the field demonstrate the range and vitality of trauma studies as it has been used to further the understanding of literature and other cultural forms across the world. This volume is first consistent effort to systematically analyze the features and consequences of colonial repatriation in comparative terms, examining the trajectories of returnees in six former colonial countries Belgium, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, and Portugal.
Each contributor examines these cases through a shared cultural sociology frame, unifying the historical and sociological analyses carried out in the collection. For this and other reasons, Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. As Alexander argues, certain instances of trau- Evidence from around the globe shows that past tri- ma have become the moral reference point for all umphs and traumas contribute to the construction of human atrocities. Yet the position adopted by a collective ethnic and national identities with similar speaker and the context of the utterance remain logics.
Yet many groups, along with some social sci- crucial. When speaking from a hegemonic or main- entists who study them, consider the idea that stream position, for instance, one might not mention collective identities and experiences are socially con- slavery from the 16th to the 19th centuries or the structed repulsive.
This book investigates social mass killings of Armenians in the earlyth century, constructions by treating cultural trauma as a condi- but it would be impossible to neglect the Holocaust. If the trauma is suc- Central to the investigation is the moral interplay be- cessfully represented and mediated as a threat to the tween whom you represent, a victim or a perpetrator, whole group, it is enough to remember it, even if the and with whom you identify.
Collective suffering and trauma itself occurred hundreds of years ago. It is in discrimination are important adhesives for many this sense that Ron Eyerman discusses the centrality groups. Collective identities are constructed in rela- of slavery as a collective trauma in the formation of tion to other groups, and certain traumatic historical an African American identity.
In the USA, analogies events can be used to create identities. By focusing exclusively on remote historical against individuals that are not publicly recognized. Piotr Sztompka also investigates a national context by relating experiences of cultural trauma to developments in postcommunist Polish society. Martins, John Peters, and Terence Turner. The idea that a common past is an LES W. FIELD adhesive for nationalism and ethnicity is not new, University of New Mexico, Department of nor is the idea that traumatic experiences shape our Anthropology constructions of identity.
Today, therefore, it is im- portant to emphasize that such constructions can be highly political. This book lar- pervasive and inescapable that many anthropolo- gely ignores how group members handle alternative gists not directly involved or attached to the main foci and interpretations of trauma in relation to protagonists detached themselves from the debate.
They were indifferent to efforts to make sense of Gender deserves further attention. This is a very important book and I addressed group traumas relate to more often cited am impressed by the accomplishments of Borofsky ones.
Asking these Yanomami may be one of the most thoroughgo- questions would promote greater balance between ing dialogical and dialectical anthropology texts to analyzing constructions of collective identities in re- appear in recent years.
0コメント