Back from the edge of existence: A critical anthropology of trauma

How do local responses to trauma articulate with understandings of subjectivity, personhood, and meaning making? What therapeutic mechanisms seem to be at play? And how can the analytic lenses of anthropology help us understand—and maybe even facilitate—processes of recovery? In engaging these questions, the papers in this Special Issue lay the groundwork for what we might call a critical anthropology of trauma that bridges the divide between micro-level and macrolevel analyses of radical ruptures from the everyday. As several of the authors note, what we now call trauma is hardly a new topic for anthropologists, who have long paid special attention to events that push people to the very edges of their own existence, as well as the various ways they find their way back, often radically transformed (e.g., Crapanzano, 1985; LeviStrauss, 1963; Obeyesekere, 1984; Rosaldo, 1989; Spiro, 1987; Turner 1967). Such edge-of-existence experiences hinge on what Scarry (1985) calls the unmaking and remaking of worlds. Pushed to the very precipice of physical and/or psychological annihilation, the bonds that tether a person to the everyday world become stretched, distorted, and even torn; sometimes irreparably so. Such a state of ontological alienation is profoundly distressing. To regain their footing, people often turn to culturally available practices, symbols, and structures to help reorient them to the world. Anthropologists have used exegeses of such processes as the foundation for theories of the work of culture (Obeyesekere, 1990). By the mid-1990s, anthropological engagements with such edge-of-existence experiences had turned away from questions of psychological process and towards an examination of the social life of the category of such experiences; “trauma” as a cultural construct becamemarked as a distinct object of study (Young, 1995).Works in this vein are less concerned with underlying psychological mechanisms of trauma as with the social and cultural processes through which some experiences are recognized as “traumatic” and others are not, what this reveals about local understandings of moral responsibility, and the pathways by which recovery is imagined.