Travelling Narratives in Ecologies of Trauma: An Odyssey for Memory Scholars

This article discusses cultural trauma as a concept that is fraught with category mistakes or engenders overly strong distinctions between individual and collective levels. Working from a broader memory studies-perspective, it argues that a combination of research on the "extended mind" with the conceptual repertoire of actor-network theory is well-suited to address "trauma in culture" as a relational process involving biological, mental, social, and material entities as "mnemonic actors." Trauma emerges from a "flat ontology of memory." Understanding narrative templates as mnemonic actors, the article shows how the "odyssey" translates traumatic memory across time, from individuals to groups as well as across identity-categories.