The Trauma Conundrum
The concept of ‘trauma’ weaves together clinical and cultural practices, which immediately shapes it into an attractive object of knowledge for anthropology. Trauma in its contemporary configuration embraces a series of social phenomena of different content, complexity and scale, thus posing analytical challenges on both epistemological and existential levels. Most significantly, the specific culture that ‘trauma’ grows out of is a generic Western modernity, and the wide array of ideas, practices and controversies the condition trails clearly reflect this grounding in a post-enlightenment milieu. While the etymology of ‘trauma’ dates back to antiquity simply denoting a wound on the skin, its significance and great potential for shapeshifting first emerged with the frantic pace of modernity across Europe and the USA during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Indeed the expansion of trauma into all walks of life and its new psychological mooring in the mind would be impossible without modernity, not only intellectually but also technologically and politically. Trauma-writ-large tracks together with the industrialization of violence, and they are both characterized by a speedy and spectacular visibility of a modern make. These blown-up versions, however, side-track the slower modes of atrocities and suffering seeping through marginalized spaces, which typically remain out of sight of global attention. As will become evident reading this volume, ‘trauma’ always speaks its historical moment and cultural modulation and invokes different temporalities and modalities.
And yet, this very specificity of trauma discourse has currently been swept aside in public imagination and replaced with a standardized repertoire made for global consumption of trauma victims, symptoms, sufferings, forms of authorized memorialization and medicalized therapy. In this thinly conceived universal semiotics of trauma, speech overshadows enactment. The general motion is toward ‘breaking the wall of silence’ by downplaying the performative, visceral and embodied memory of violence, which has of course been the standard response ever since the Cartesian gesture developed away from the body and toward the mind. This Western technology of the self travels along well-trodden trajectories imprinted during a long imperial history, seeking to colonize the mind of the ‘other’ through a vocabulary stretching from ‘pacify’, ‘civilize’, ‘christianize’, ‘modernize’—all modulations of a shared desire of Western powers to create a new and more fit personhood out of diverse masses of poor, primitives and heathens, both in the slum of the metropolis and abroad in the (post)colonies. This request for ‘personal development’ has all along been part and parcel of a more general charter to transform the world according to Western military, economic and political interests. While the focus in the past was on the ‘primitive’ subject and what was deemed as outdated livelihoods, hygiene, beliefs and governance, the attention has now moved on to the interior of the ‘suffering’ subject in need of cure.
Such a subtle shift from a patronizing to a pathologizing attitude is simultaneously a turning inward from the social to the individual, thus making a generous space for the traumatic to flourish. During new waves of globalization occurring in the twenty-first century, trauma has crafted itself onto an ever-expanding apparatus of interventionist agendas and standardized programs in the name of development and human rights (or war reparations), which are aimed at the alleviation of poverty and suffering worldwide. A whole trauma industry has grown up in the wake of these intimate intrusions in the name of the ‘the good’; a host of pharmaceuticals, therapists, talk shows, self-help manuals, tribunals, memorials and tailored tourist packages have capitalized on the resource avenues opened up in the wasteland of violence and pain. Judith Kay Nelson (2013:19) succinctly sums up its planetary ubiquity:
Trauma theory has become a universalizing force classifying and regulating the diverse lived experience of violence, suffering and commemoration. ‘Trauma’ has thus inserted itself into the most distant communities on the globe where many locals have been coached to ‘walk-the-walk and talk-the-talk’ as words have it, but not without ambiguity and contradictory effects as this volume succinctly demonstrates. From different ethnographical perspectives, all of our chapters call for renewed attention to the particular limits of universalizing axiomatic language and interpretative frames. Interventions in the name of ‘trauma’ share with all similar interventions, such as ‘poverty’, ‘governance’ or ‘climate’, that they are formulated through Western lenses. When exported to foreign places, they thus show a high propensity of clashing with localized ideas and practices, thereby producing a host of unintended consequences and hybrid forms. Together, the contributions of this volume analyze the multiple articulations of the local and global arenas in an effort to understand how specific trauma thinking, prescriptions and politics have shaped local conditions, and how the ‘target’ groups’ understandings of their own world in turn have (re)shaped dominant trauma scripts and vested them with new meanings, imaginaries, bodily practices and material implications.[t]here is trauma of all kinds—war, violent crime, oppression, political repression, natural disasters—both down the street and around the world, and with today’s media coverage and global accessibility, increasingly there is little difference between the two locations.
It is precisely in these peripheral and marginal settings—not so much in terms of geography but of semiotics and the somatic—that the paradoxical nature of ‘trauma’ as a generic phenomenon comes into full play. This is because the accuracy of any violent act is always ensnared in error as it were; there can simply be no direct and unmediated recall. Bombarded with an immense amount of stimuli from the exterior and interior world, human perception and recollection has by necessity to pick out, condense and re-present physical and somatic experiences, relying on encryption, distortion and censorship as well as the filtering of language, sensorium and social expectations. The blow is mediated by memory, and memory is mediated by what is meaningful in ‘word’ and ‘flesh’ within the cultural context where the violent act occurs. And yet, there is always a limit to meaning in any signification system, a navel of sorts, a liminal point that cannot be interpreted and where meaning simply fails. Here we are at the enigma of trauma; for despite being deeply embodied, it remains essentially elusive, and this ephemeral quality is precisely what allows trauma to reverberate so violently and widely. However, the experiential effects of trauma differ cross-culturally not solely across bodies and minds but also with the workings of time, memory, narration and re-enactment.
The Pace of Violence
To pay attention to the temporal dimension of violence is crucial in order to appreciate why trauma may simmer in the deep structures of the body and only surface in the subject with time passing, sometimes even lingering on for generations to come. We live in an era that privileges the immediate and spectacular—military attacks, explosions, earthquakes, beheadings, torturing, mutilations—all of which produce visually attention-grabbing fatalities that can be easily captured through the camera lenses and widely publicized in an instant on the Web. In the coverage of the perpetually ongoing wars that are fought at the edges of Euro-American states, predominantly in the Middle East and Africa, the spectacularization of violence waged against enemies is typically cast as necessary to safeguard the civilizational integrity of the Western world (Badiou 2012; Zagato 2015; Zulaika 2009). In her book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag argues that insofar that the photography freezes the viscerally ineradicable impact of a transgressive act, the image side-tracks not only the complex causes of violence but also the full extent of its causalities, whether swift or protracted. This fetishism of the present erases from public consciousness other temporalities of violence and suffering, thus making it harder to grasp trauma in its many modalities.
Coining the term ‘slow violence’, Rob Nixon alerts us to ‘a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales’ (2011:2). Using environmental degradations as his prime example in the forms of toxic drift, oil spills, ravaged habitats, land mines, genetic mutation, greenhouse gasses and such like, Nixon reworks the earlier notion of ‘structural violence’. This concept was once defined by Johan Galtung as the massive chain of causes that may materialize in acts of personal violence but which also constitute violence in itself, such as economic inequality, political oppression, unequal morbidity, racism and sexism, just to mention a few debilitating conditions. These forms of muted violence at work in multiple, differential fields may each be imperceptible and piecemeal, but through accumulation over time, often push those subjected into marginalization and poverty. While Galtung (1969) was of the opinion that ‘structural violence is silent, it does not show—it is essentially static, it is the tranquil waters (1969:170)’, Nixon, in contrast, chooses to foreground ‘questions of time, movement, and change, however gradual (p. 4)’. In other words, we are confronted by a production of violence as a multiplicity that, by definition, is sensitive to process, context and form as also argued by the contributors to the volume Violence and Belonging (Broch-Due 2005).
In our context, this emphasis on the temporal dynamics of violence is especially pertinent for certain modalities of trauma that continue to move through tissue, blood, bones and minds of those afflicted. A prime example is the nightmares haunting combatants after the arena of war itself has ended, later showing up as the diagnoses of ‘shell-shock’ or posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Thinking of violence as accumulative is also useful in comprehending the less spectacular, but sometimes equally devastating, events that take place behind closed doors experienced by victims of domestic abuse, which is often a long-drawn and incremental harming. Most succinctly, the notion of slow violence helps us to theorize better forms of collective trauma, such as the Holocaust, where the perpetrators not only built up its terror exponentially against Jews for decades before the genocide but also where the originary trauma continues to be passed on down the generations and embodied in new forms. Last, but not the least, if we think trauma through both time and space, we get a vista into landscapes of destructions located on the opaque periphery—ghetto, slum, island, savannah, desert, tropical forest, ‘poor nation’, ‘third world’—that remain outside the orbit of concern and compensation from the privileged center (see Chap. 6).
The reason why Nixon wants us to focus more scholarly attention on ‘the temporalities of place’ is because slow violence works silently, insidiously and out of sight, creating milieus fertile of fear and trauma. Among those particularly hard hit are marginal groups whose very existence is being threatened, their environs turned into wastelands, their livelihoods destroyed by external forces slowly eating themselves into the backbone of society—such as toxic pollution, deforestation, protracted wars or the gradual appropriation of large tracts of land. The resulting dislocation may take the shape of being either pushed out of place altogether or forced to remain in place but inhabiting the crust of a soil that rots and erodes under one’s feet, gradually turning into a barren expanse of pure ruination. The ensuing trauma of witnessing a whole life world unravelling, sometimes built over centuries, is a collective form of suffering which remains lodged deep in memory over generations. This volume exemplifies numerous such cases.
Since anthropology feeds on being sensitive to both culture and context, it is perhaps unsurprising that seminal contributions from within the discipline are embedded in the theoretical terrain framed by both ‘structural’ and ‘slow’ violence. One example here of an early intervention into the debate of violence as a compound phenomenon is Judith Zur’s (1998) empathic account of how Guatemalan indigenous women faced multiple forms of marginalization following sustained periods of violence. Zur’s book brought to the table a focus on the historical context and the violently transformative role of war—to societies, to gender relations and to cultural horizons (see also Broch-Due 2005). Furthermore, Valentine Daniel (1996) has written eloquently about the inexpressibility of pain, terror and torture, showing how such transgressive acts are felt at the limits of the personal, violating both the physical and social skin. Because of this, he argues, practices memorializing violent and traumatic events may be tightly constrained by the social conventions set out by the culture in question.
Similar sensitivities to practices of violence and the legacies of trauma, however conceived and problematized, have been treated by anthropologists concerned with various forms of intergenerational transmission of violence and trauma (see, e.g., Feuchtwang 2011; Argenti and Schramm 2010), the longue durée impact of colonial violence on formations of memory and lingering trauma (see, e.g., Bertelsen 2016; Nelson 2009; Argenti 2007; Cole 2001), the ways in which trauma-inducing violence is entrenched in the domain of the colloquial and everyday lives (see, e.g., Das 2007; Das et al. 2000), the tensions between ethical, political and cultural forms of representation and enactment of trauma (see, e.g., Maček 2014; Kwon 2006, 2008; Daniel 1996; Felman 2002; Scheper-Hughes 2002; Honwana 1999) and, lastly, various forms o...