Paper short abstract:

What does it mean to ‘survive’ traumatic experiences? How do trauma survivors’ experiences challenge the concept of ‘recovery,’ and what might recovery mean? And what might anthropology offer in these interstices of advocacy, policy, and clinical practice?

Paper long abstract:

This presentation considers the methodological challenges posed in trying to understand survivors’ lived experiences of traumatic events. While much anthropological work has tended to focus on the challenges and politicisation of memory, and particularly from the perspective of clinicians, this survivor-led research considers experiences of trauma as necessarily complex and fragmented – offering a different perspective of the movement from experience to memory and later interpretation. Complementarily, this presentation reflects on the challenges of harm and retraumatisation in the process of asking survivors to share experiences of trauma.