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pc408.session_3.pptxTrauma, Terrorism, Catastrophes and Pastoral Care
Prof. Cedric Johnson
PC 408
Spring 2017
Cultural Trauma
What is a “carrier group”? What role do they play in the trauma process? Who serves as carrier groups in American society?
The carrier groups capacity to signify a cultural trauma is contingent upon what 3 factors?
What are the 5 phases of recovery from cultural trauma? Name one challenge inherent in each phase?
Does chattel slavery re-present a cultural trauma for America? How or how not?
Holocaust
Genocide and seizure of First Nation peoples
Rwanda genocide
September 11th Tragedy
What is cultural trauma?
Traumatic status is attributed to real or imagined phenomena, not because of their actual harmfulness or their objective abruptness, but because these phenomena are believed to have abruptly, and harmfully, affected collective identity.
Cultural Trauma
What is at stake is the collective’s identity, its stability in terms of meaning…Only if the patterned meanings of the collectivity are abruptly dislodged is traumatic status attributed to the event.
Cultural Trauma
Thrust into environments which are at odds with their previous life-world, these traumatic experiences disrupt the structures that inform the group’s self-understanding.
Shared values and norms, accepted ideas and beliefs, narrative forms, symbolic meanings and frames of discourse can all be undermined.
Cultural Trauma
Cultural trauma is not merely the result of a group experiencing pain.
Traumatic status must be attributed to the event; the event must be “signified” as traumatic.
Collective actors must signify the painful event as a fundamental cultural threat.
Cultural Trauma Process
In any culture there are “authorized” persons who give voice not so much to their own ideas and interests, but rather articulate ideas to and for others.
These “carrier groups” are central in representing the interests and claims of the affected to the wider public.
It is a socially constructed, historically conditioned role, that refers more to what individuals do than who they are.
They have particular discursive talents for articulating their claims – “meaning making” – in the public sphere.
Carrier groups
These socially-sanctioned “meaning-makers” deliberate in the public arena, signifying and symbolizing events.
May be elites, academics, religious leaders, hip hop artists, novelists, movie-makers or emerge from other segments of a society.
What are some implications for the provision of pastoral care and counseling?
Carrier groups
1) Nature of the pain – what actually happened.
2) Nature of the victim – to whom did it happen; what group of persons was affected by this pain?
3) Relation of the trauma victim to the wider audience – to what extent does the wider group see any relation to the affected group.
4) Attribution of responsibility – who injured the victim? Who caused the trauma.
The Trauma Signification Process
This representational process creates a new master narrative of social suffering.
The Diary of Anne Frank played a vital role in the signification of the Holocaust as a cultural trauma.
The Trauma Signification Process
The signification of cultural trauma to the collective depends upon the carrier group’s capacity to (re)frame the particularities of the event.
This is contingent upon (1) the symbolic resources that are available, (2) the constraints and opportunities afforded by the structures of power within a society, and (3) the interpretive competence of the carrier group.
There may be incidents with strong traumatizing potential, but either: (1) the symbolic resources to adequately interpret the event are unavailable, (2) the carrier groups lack the interpretive capability to signify the incident, or (3) the structures of power explain away, rationalize, deconstruct, reinterpret or repress the memory of the event.
The Trauma Process
Mediating structures tilt the signifying process in powerful ways, expanding or narrowing representations, creating or denying the factual and moral basis for civic repair.
Mass media allows traumas to be dramatized and competing interpretations to gain persuasive power over others.
Governmental power can both facilitate, hinder and shape the signification process.
Mediating Structures
Remembrance
Representation
By the Carrier Group
Reconstruction
Commemoration
Routinization
Stages of Recovery
Existence of the necessary psychological distance that remembering a collective traumatic event requires.
The collective past is central to the maintenance of group identity, part of a collective memory.
It is source material, a collective resource for a distinct aesthetic, used as a weapon in the struggle for cultural recognition.
Remembrance
As cultural traumas are re-presented, there will be a re-imagining of the group’s identity as they re-member the traumatic events.
How is the past to be represented, in whose interests, and for what purposes?
Trauma is resolved only when the survivor develops new structures of meaning.
Representation/Reconstruction
“Lessons” of trauma become objectified in monuments, museums, and historical artifacts.
New collective identity will be rooted in sacred places and structured in ritual routines.
Necessary accumulation of social resources in order to undergo commemoration activities.
Supportive socio-political conditions.
Commemoration
By allowing members of wider publics to participate in the pain of others, cultural traumas broaden the realm of social understanding and provide avenues for new forms of social incorporation.
Insofar as memorializations are not created, the traumatic suffering has either not been persuasively narrated or has not been generalized beyond the immediately affected population.
Commemoration
“If collective memory is rooted in a potentially traumatic event…it may take a generation to move from group memory to public memory. Sometimes it may take longer; sometimes it may never happen at all.”
Public Memory
The trauma process can become subject to technical, sometimes desiccating attention of specialists who detach affect from meaning.- “triumph of the mundane”
Intended to remember and commemorate, efforts to institutionalize the lessons of the trauma may eventually prove unable to evoke strong emotions, the sentiments of betrayal, and the affirmations of sacrality that were powerfully associated with it.
Routinization
Without the means to influence public memory, blacks were left to form and maintain their own collective memory.
12 Years a Slave: slavery has moved outside group memory to challenge the borders, the rituals and sites, of public memory.
Has slavery become part of America’s collective memory?
Slavery & Public Memory
How might these dynamics inform the development of pastoral care strategies and practice of pastoral counseling in traumatized communities?
Implications
