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, 2001.
Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma Alexander, Jeffrey C; Giesen, Bernard; Sztompka, Piotr ...
COLLECTIVE TRAUMA AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY,
02/2004
Book Chapter
Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever ...and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.
As we develop it here, cultural trauma is first of all an empirical, scientific concept, suggesting new meaningful and causal relationships between previously unrelated events, structures, perceptions, and actions. But this new scientific concept also illuminates an emerging domain of social responsibility and political action. It is by constructing cultural traumas that social groups, national societies, and sometimes even entire civilizations
The Trauma of Perpetrators Alexander, Jeffrey C; Giesen, Bernard; Sztompka, Piotr ...
COLLECTIVE TRAUMA AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY,
02/2004
Book Chapter
No construction of collective identity can entirely dispense with memory. Memory supports or even creates the assumption of stability, permanence, and continuity in distinction to the incessant ...change of the phenomenal world and, thereby, sets up a horizon, a frame, a space of possible pasts. This space is constituted by the reference to past traumas or triumphs. There is no way to imagine a land beyond the liminal horizon of triumph and trauma. The constitutive reference to triumph or trauma can be spoken out or silenced; it is always there, enabling us to represent and present the past as our
Cultural Trauma Alexander, Jeffrey C; Giesen, Bernard; Sztompka, Piotr ...
COLLECTIVE TRAUMA AND COLLECTIVE IDENTITY,
02/2004
Book Chapter
In this chapter I explore the notion of cultural trauma in the formation of African American identity from the end of the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement. The trauma in question is slavery, ...not as institution or even experience, but as collective memory, a form of remembrance that grounded the identity-formation of a people. As has been discussed elsewhere in this volume and as will be further developed here, there is a difference between trauma as it affects individuals and as a cultural process. As cultural process, trauma is linked to the formation of collective identity and the
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