'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
|
|
'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'
|
|
|
Adelaide Festival of Ideas: traumascapes
« Previous |
|Next »
|
|
|
July 7, 2007
One of the most interesting session at the Adelaide Festival of Ideas was on trauma---What societies can do when trauma becomes the norm-- given by Maria Tumarkin It raises the whole question of reconcilation as a response to trauma ---reconciliation as a form of healing for the traumatic wounds that indigenous people have suffered from white colonialism.
Tumarkin argued that social trauma---Port Arthur --- is best dealt with by community not by psychiatrists and psychologists, as these medicalize trauma. Tumarkin thinks in terms of traumascape, which she defines as a timeplace materially and discursively bound by traumatic repetitions. Hence Port Arthur--but also the aboriginal experience of British colonialism, as was continually mentioned throughout the Festival.
She says traumascape needs unpacking, which she does as follows:
To unpack, if only partially, the notion of a ‘traumascape’, it is necessary to examine first its two main ingredients — trauma and place. ‘“Place” is one of the trickiest words in the English language’, writes Dolores Hayden, ‘a suitcase so overfilled one can never shut the lid’....Similarly, as Cathy Caruth argues, ‘the phenomenon of trauma has seemed to become all-inclusive’,... ‘a category … so powerful that it has seemed to engulf everything around it ...’...In a sense, both trauma and place are, to use Robert Coles’ idiom, ‘the purest of cliches’.... Coles uses the term to refer to tropes of memory and identity and their stranglehold over the twentieth century’s western thought, but his ruling stands in our case as well.
She adds:
What do places do to us? Scholarship on place attachment and place identity presents places that we inhabit as bedrocks of our identities as well as storehouses for individual and collective memories.28 Indeed, the notion of ‘place’ is defined against the notions of space and landscape by the virtue of ‘place’ always being invested with meaning and impregnated with memory. The self is fashioned, reconfigured and maintained through ‘place’, whether it be an actual place of identification and attachment or symbolic locales where identities and memories are stored and performed.
So how do we think about trauma? Tumarkin says that until the end of the nineteenth century, the term ‘trauma’ was used to refer exclusively to physical injuries and wounds. Only in 1860s and 1870s when the after-effects of railway accidents and disturbing symptoms in soldiers on active duty demanded urgent specialist engagement, was the term trauma expanded to include mental or neurological injury.
In talking about psychic trauma now, it is vital to make a distinction between an event and an experience. In other words, a flood is an event which is experienced as traumatic by victims’ families, witnesses, local residents, visitors in the area and so on. Psychic trauma is located in the immediate experiencing and the subsequent grieving, remembering and re-telling of a particular event (flood), series of events or a process. As immediate experience is confined to individuals, to talk about shared psychic trauma is neither to talk about a specific event, not about its immediate experience, but to talk about coming to terms with such an event through processes of grieving (or ignoring), remembering (or forgetting) and re-articulating (or denying).
to be continued.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Gary, One of the most interesting and fruitful methods I have come across in dealing with collective trauma,is the Process Work described and practised by Arnold Mindell in his book Sitting in the Fire