Vigdis Broch-Due

Producing nature and poverty in Africa

Development donors have supported thousands of environmental initiatives in Africa over the past quarter century. The contributors to this provocative new collection of essays assess these projects ...

Trauma, Violence, Memory: Reflections on the Bodily, the Self, the Sign, and the Social

The genealogy of ‘trauma’ has its origins in Greek medicine but has come to be wedded to Western modernity through psychoanalysis and neuroscience. From being a wound, trauma became a metaphor for surfaces of signification of body and mind. Hovering over the traumatic impact has been the whole question of memory and meaning. Broch-Due explores how ‘trauma’ is continuously produced anew as a powerful gestalt between the domains of the bodily, the social, the self, and the sign—themselves invested with cultural meanings that must be framed locally. She ends her essay from the unruly margins of Kenya, developing an alternative analysis of trauma by drawing on the concepts of ‘liminality’ and ‘rites of passage’, demonstrating that vintage concepts in anthropology have an untapped potential which can push a theorizing more sensitive to the diverse experiences of trauma.

Violent Reverberations: An Introduction to Our Trauma Scenarios

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 shape changing 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.