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- Convenors:
-
Goran Dokic
Markus Hoehne (University of Leipzig)
Send message to Convenors
- Discussants:
-
Susie Kilshaw
(University College London)
Peter Loizos (London School of Economics)
- Format:
- Workshops
- Location:
- 102
- Sessions:
- Friday 29 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Ljubljana
Short Abstract:
The workshop explores the medical and the socio-cultural aspects of trauma. It looks at the dynamics existing between medical practitioners, health systems and (inter-)national structures dealing with trauma, as well as how individuals process traumatic experiences within diverse cultures of trauma.
Long Abstract:
'Trauma' is increasingly used to capture experiences of violence in (post-)conflict societies. Victims, survivors and perpetrators are most often diagnosed as suffering from 'post-traumatic stress disorder' (PTSD), but also Gulf War Syndrome (GWS) and other local manifestations. However, if science is viewed as rooted in a particular cultural tradition, the generalised applicability of its criteria becomes debatable. Against this backdrop, our workshop confronts trauma in its medical, social and cultural facets in two sessions.
The first session 'medicalisations of trauma' addresses the relationships between local efforts of medical practitioners, health systems, and (inter-)national governing structures. In this dynamic, various actors negotiate experiences and discourses of trauma. Several stakeholders and discourses are involved in diagnosis and categorisation of illness, all of which exert influence on the newly emerging conceptualisations and formal systems of support. National health care systems, international aid organisations, branches of the international medical community as well as the local political landscape are all part of this interplay.
The second session investigates how actors handle traumatic experiences within different 'cultures of trauma'. This notion emphasises that cultural variations are likely regarding the ways of dealing with events categorised as "traumatic" and that the social factor of massive traumatisation will additionally impinge on the processing of such experiences. The focus here is on expressions which are collectively accepted to form the basis of specific trauma narratives, but also on individuals whose accounts do not concur with dominant trauma discourses and who face marginalisation.
Applicants are requested to indicate the session, to which they wish to contribute.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 29 August, 2008, -Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the spatial and emplaced nature of traumatic experience and its relationship to memory and healing, both individual and collective, through the lens of Stolen Generation’s experiences. The return to a former institution for Aboriginal children by a group of Aboriginal women provides the ethnographic backdrop for this piece.
Paper long abstract:
Returning to the site of trauma has been deemed a powerful enabler of healing for many survivors of trauma. Revisiting and confronting the site of suffering and pain allows survivors to speak to traumatic experience, carving out of the force of trauma a more coherent narrative about survival, hope, and healing. Much of the writing about trauma points to the difficulties for survivors of trauma of mediating between the extreme and the everyday, and in so doing unpacks the complexity of the temporal dimensions of traumatic experience. Very little of the literature speaks to the spatial and emplaced nature of traumatic experience. Trauma is often inscribed in the physical place, and survivors of trauma frequently see a particular site as embodying their traumatic experiences. This paper begins with the recognition of how spatially anchored traumatic experience can be, and speaks to the potency of the 'return' to the site of former institutions, which are 'wounded spaces' (Deborah Bird Rose, 2004) for members of Australia's Stolen Generations. Accompanying a group of Aboriginal women to the site of the institution in which they lived for most of their lives after being removed from their parents and communities, allowed insight into how difficult the negotiation between the individual and collective experience of trauma is. This paper concludes that revisiting the site of trauma anchors the story of trauma to a place and materializes what is also an emotional and psychological struggle, allowing the survivor's narrative of trauma to become inscribed in a tangible space.
Paper short abstract:
This contribution attempts a medical anthropological discussion on an ‘Atlas of Torture’. Can the discourse connect the visual with the narratives of victims? The content and photography, under discussion, is collected since 1996 in a ‘scarring from torture’ project by the Medical Examination Group of Amnesty International, Amsterdam.
Paper long abstract:
How telling are scars? Can photographs support the evidence of torture? In the restrictive socio-political context of Fortress Europe, Amnesty International (Netherlands) organized since 1978 volunteering medical clinicians to give affidavits, when asylum was denied to victims by the immigration authority and extradition threatened. One salient stipulation of Dutch procedure is that medical expertise is to play no role. The looking away from torture can only be explained by denial. This paper reviews cooperation between Human Rights and Medical NGO's, collecting photographs for an 'Atlas'. The rationale of client oriented photography is described and the visualization as a tool of documentation for medical purposes is analyzed.
Scars are body memory and signifiers of pain and suffering, impossible to understand without context. The medical clinical practice meets difficulties in representing victims confronting asylum procedures. Some tortures leave physical evidence, but many do not, and all victims have significant mental and emotional scars, they want to forget and avoid speaking about. In procuring safety and healing, however, their story is all they have. We want an appropriate medical setting linking visual ethnography with a medical and anthropological approach. What perspectives can be applied towards the narrative; what photograph is a striking one; how does one get to the point; how should the photograph be made and described with the assistance of victims? The social and ethical aspect of retraumatization and misrepresentation is important. Why are pictures interesting in relation to torture? How are they politicized?
Paper short abstract:
Due to living in a context of prolonged armed conflict, people in Gulu district have been exposed to extreme wartime events and very poor living conditions. In their dire circumstances, they mainly talked about their many physical complaints. This raises the question of how children cope with their emotional suffering; interventions implemented, and how to evaluate those interventions.
Paper long abstract:
This study analysed why children exposed to extreme war-related events were reluctant to discuss their emotional suffering or only shared it through somatic complaints. A survey and qualitative ethnographic methods were employed to assess perspectives of children aged 9-16 years in 2004-2005 about common illnesses they experienced and their quests for therapy. Key informants included 2 psychiatrists, 5 nurses, 5 clinical officers, 2 paediatricians, 15 counsellors, 28 primary school teachers, and 13 clinic owners. They were regularly interviewed to assess medicines commonly used for complaints symptomatic of psychological suffering.
Children and adult interviewees were reluctant to share their suffering. This could be because they were silenced through downplaying/trivialising their experiences. People we counselled by telling people in distress about the others' or counsellor's own comparatively worse experiences, which they had managed to 'work through'. Complaints symptomatic of emotional suffering were diagnosed as, malaria and hysteria. Victims of gender based violence were blamed for what happened instead of holding perpetrators accountable. People who did not share their mental distress were rewarded with praise. Sufferers of emotional distress therefore only narrated experiences with somatic complaints, including stomach aches, sleeplessness, disturbances by cen (evil spirits), and nightmares. They used ready to access pharmaceuticals called medicines of sleep, analgesics and atika plants (Labiate species) to minimise their suffering.
Professional and indigenous approaches in dealing with emotional suffering contributed to the silencing of this suffering and its subsequent presentation in legitimised somatic idioms. Presenting emotional suffering as aches and pains led to over-use of pharmaceuticals, medicalising psychosocial problems.
Paper short abstract:
The objective of this paper is to examine the double construction of gender, and of the gendered category of suffering that takes place in practices of psychosocial assistance offered to female relatives of torture survivors, political prisoners and widows of martyrs.
Paper long abstract:
Since the Occupied Palestinian Territories oscillate between being a pre-, post-, or simply a regular war zone it hosts a vast number of institutions, local and international organizations that work to ameliorate the suffering brought about by the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The number and relative size of these institutions have expanded significantly since the 1990es. The so-called psychosocial services of counseling, individual and group therapy have become integral to the approaches of a vast array of such institutions. The majority of these institutions are either funded or co-funded by international donor agencies within the area of humanitarian aid.
These institutionalized attempts of amelioration provide an interesting site for the anthropological inquiry into cultural constructions of suffering since they are produced and negotiated in a dynamic interaction between local practice and global discourses of healing, suffering and victimhood.
Conceptualising psychosocial services as social practice, the paper argues that this form of social practice constructs suffering as a gendered category/phenomenon. The paper suggests that gender as a social category is constructed in the particular therapeutic encounters. This, the paper proposes, is due to the dynamic relation between a national narrative around the suffering of wives of the national heroes and on the other hand a therapeutic discourse that conceptualise the very same women as only secondary victims of torture or as secondary victims of the traumatisation perceived to occur after the imprisonment or event of torture of their husbands has taken place.
The questions this paper seeks to address are:
Which categories of gender and of suffering are constructed in the therapeutic encounter, and,
How do the afflicted women themselves experience, negotiate and ameliorate their suffering in a complex context consisting of a meta-narrative of collective, Palestinian affliction and local and internationally constructed narratives of psychological suffering or traumatisation?
Paper short abstract:
In this paper I explore the effects of the recent introduction of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) into the post-conflict discourse of Croatian psychiatry. In the contested arena of postsocialist transformations the work of Croatian psychiatrists is conditioned by both national and international bureaucratic and corporate structures. The result is a dynamic clinical reality in which medical practitioners reproduce, transform and resist dominant medicolegal narratives about the effective treatment of PTSD.
Paper long abstract:
In recent years Croatian psychiatrists have been faced with a significant increase in the number of reported cases of various types of war-related disorders. PTSD, in particular, is spreading among the population of veterans from Croatia's Homeland War that lasted from 1991 to 1995. Currently, there are over 32,000 individuals diagnosed with the disorder. As a relatively new addition to the postsocialist discourse of Croatian psychiatry, PTSD is a clear example of the process whereby emotional distress is converted into a politicized biomedical entity. Starting with the diagnosis and categorization of the disorder, several stakeholders and discourses are involved, all of which exert influence on the newly emerging conceptualisation and formal systems of support. In the process of reification of emotional suffering individual bodies are given a victimized identity that is now dependent on state provisioning. To explore the effects of this process I am raising the following questions: 1) how is the need for institutional treatment of psychological trauma introduced; 2) how are Croatian war veterans encouraged to communicate their traumatic experiences through the institutional framework of PTSD; 3) how is the conventional narrative about the effective treatment of PTSD reproduced, transformed, and resisted by individual practitioners; and 4) how do postsocialist political and economic conditions and the introduction of the specific classification of PTSD influence the institutional treatment of psychological trauma?
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the effects of thirty years of war on a small Tamil community in the north of Sri Lanka. Through the transformation of a well-known religious ritual, many Tamil youths articulate the experience of violence both for themselves and their village comminity.
Paper long abstract:
This paper examines how youths - many of whom were imprisoned and tortured during the war, have transformed a well-known ritual that has seen a dramatic increase since occupation of the northern Jaffna peninsula, by Sri Lankan government troops in 1996. The ritual, previously exclusively an act of religious devotion to a popular Tamil Hindu God: Murugan, has been transformed into a demonstration of strength and youthful challenge within an unstable atmosphere of 'no war, but no peace' that exists throughout the north of Sri Lanka. In this instance, toleration of ritual pain is contrasted with the externally imposed pain and suffering of war, which is articulated not only for the self, but also the entire village community.
This diverges with the work of the international aid agencies operating across the northern peninsula, where concepts and notions of 'trauma' conflict with local interests in relation to efficacy as well as safety. This is posited against a backdrop of silence and fear where open articulation of traumatic experience incurs huge risk; problematic in the practice of counselling and other talking therapies as the continuing mainstay of many international assistance programmes.
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the forms of affect conjured up by monastic sites existing under the threat of violence. Taking an ontological rather than epistemological perspective, it explores trauma as a quality of 'things' – mental or physical artefacts - rather than as an abstraction, ultimately separate from the material world.
Paper long abstract:
In Kosovo and Montenegro, it is not uncommon for Orthodox monasteries to have been sites of violence for generations, and some of this continues into the present. Such landmarks 'store' and 'exude' traumatic experiences and (in the case of Kosovo) attempts to erase the memories they evoke by destroying them create further trauma. This paper looks at the affective registers through which Serbian Orthodox Monastics living under siege in such monasteries 'tame' what might be described as traumatic events. Rather than taking an epistemological view of trauma, viewing it as a category of experience that can only be fully made sense of through verbalisation and conversion into coherent representations, I take an ontological view, looking at 'trauma' as an attribute of 'things' (be it mental, physical or geographical) whose simple presence is capable of creating and reproducing certain structures of affect and thought. The informants of this paper often take traumatic things as self-referential, simply 'things to think with', in the context of an ontology that accords a central role to suffering and triumph.
Paper short abstract:
The paper deals with the role of traumatic memories for individual and collective identity construction in post-civil war Somaliland. It focuses on a biographical case study of an actor who at the same time ‘profits’ and suffers from having been exposed to violence and trauma.
Paper long abstract:
Individual experiences of violence in the wake of state repression and civil war inform processes of collective identity formation. This point is demonstrated in an in-depth biographical case study set in Somaliland, the breakaway republic in northern Somalia. The case study shows how a person may both exploit and suffer from past experiences of violence. Having been a guerrilla and having lived through a difficult period when no effective government was in place provided my informant with a treasury of experiences and social capital that have served him well in the streets and offices in the capital city of Hargeysa. At the same time, a part of his memories remains "unspeakable" and - from a Western perspective - can be assumed to form a body of "traumatic memories." This corresponds to the wider social and political processes at work in Somaliland, where narratives of violent oppression and resistance in the past inform social reconstruction and the building of a national identity in the present. Experiences of violence both catalyze and legitimate social and political change. Yet, after decades of civil war, during which it was often difficult to distinguish between "perpetrators" and "victims," it is clear that unspeakable aspects of past encounters with violence continue to affect social relations. Identity in such contexts is located between narration and silence.