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Over
the past twenty years, sociologist Kai Erickson's
"research errands", as he refers to
them, have taken him to any number of communities
still reeling from the effects of recent disasters.
From the flood ravaged town of Buffalo Creek,
to the Grassy Narrows Indian reservation on
the banks of the mercury-contaminated Wabigoon
River, to the neighborhoods surrounding the
Three Mile Island nuclear plant, his journey
is charted in his book, A New Species of
Trouble (1994).
The book is a gripping examination
of the impact of collective trauma which Erikson
defines as a "blow to the basic tissues
of social life that damages the bonds attaching
people together and impairs the prevailing sense
of community" (p. 233). Whether in the
form of a natural or human-made disaster, discrete
or on-going social disorder, or chronic condition,
collective trauma is of sociological interest
because it reveals so much about the intricate
interaction between trauma and culture.
As Geertz (1973) points out,
culture may be viewed as a context of symbols
and meanings that people create and recreate
for themselves during the process of social
interaction. Culture is represented externally
in artifacts, roles, rituals and institutions,
and internally as values, beliefs, attitudes,
identities, stock of knowledge and world view.
With reference to that definition
of culture, this present article engages in
the kind of research errand that Erickson sets
out. It examines an array of collective traumas
around the world for the insights it provides
about the role that culture plays in just two
of what really are many critical areas: the
shaping of the experience of collective trauma,
and the facilitation of recovery from these
unexpected ruptures in social life.
Culture and the Experience
of Collective Trauma
When culture functions well,
it buffers members from at least some of the
disruptive impact and consequences of collective
trauma, as the international research literature
attests. Abu Heim, Quota, Thabet and El Sarraj
(1993), for example, find that a strong commitment
to Palestinian cultural values and world view
offers psychological protection to many of the
children in Gaza where armed conflict with the
Israelis is a feature of everyday life. Swartz
and Levett (1989) observe similar buffering
effects of cultural commitment for Black children
living under the repressive regime of apartheid
in South Africa. In their interviews with a
small sample of elderly Armenian survivors of
the Turkish genocide, Kalayjian, Shahinian,
Gergerian and Saraydarian (1996) also find that
strong religious belief and fierce pride in
cultural identity mitigate, to some extent,
the otherwise devastating grief and outrage
that survivors experience to this day.
Cultural stories, myths and
legends that have as themes the mastery of past
events of collective trauma also may be used
a resource by members of a culture who are currently
experiencing collective trauma. Uyehara (1980-1981)
analyzes the Horehore-Bushi type of Japanese
folksong that developed among immigrant laborers
in Hawaii. Its themes of the trauma of plantation
life and the longing for homeland are offset
by a leitmotif of persistence in the face of
hardship and, ultimately, independence and success.
A source of comfort and inspiration to the immigrants
who composed them, the songs also serve as a
cultural resource for later Japanese generations
coping with other types of collective trauma.
There is at least one example
of a subculture "borrowing" a collective
traumatic event in order to create its own sustaining
and comforting myth during a time of chronic,
even unrelenting, trauma. In April 1912, the
luxury liner Titanic struck an iceberg
on its maiden voyage and sunk in the north Atlantic,
killing 1500 of its passengers and crew, and
challenging the western world's belief in God
and its faith in technology. Today, more is
known about that disaster than ever before,
but the story that the immensely popular film,
the Broadway musical and the plethora of recently
published books do not tell is about the appropriation
of the disaster by African-Americans.
None of the ill-fated ship's
passengers were African-American, nor any of
its crew, but as Weisbord (1994) points out
both southern and northern Blacks, traumatized
by virulent racism and demoralized by persistent
poverty, made the Titanic disaster
the subject of a toast, an oral narrative. In
a Harlem version of the toast, Shine, a dark-skinned
Black, worked aboard the luxury liner as a stoker.
As the ship began to sink, and the wealthy white
passengers began to panic and then die, he used
his superior athletic skills to break down an
iron door and swim to safety, ignoring along
the way the captain's wife who offered him sexual
favors for his help, and an elderly millionaire
who offered cash. The toast is not only a narrative
through which contempt for White society is
expressed, but a wholly constructed myth about
the triumph of the race in the face of prejudice,
hatred and temptation.
Other cultural artifacts also
serve that function. During World War II, approximately
120,000 Japanese-Americans were confined in
relocation camps. Caught between the demand
to show allegiance to their country of birth
by renouncing their cultural heritage, and the
temptation to embrace their heritage even while
risking expulsion from their country, many of
the detainees felt demoralized, confused and
powerless. But the paintings and sketches of
the camps' artists provided images of dignity
and efficacy and, perhaps most importantly,
also celebrated the richness and the strength
of the very dual cultural identity, that of
Japanese-American, that under conditions of
internment had become the source of so much
anxiety and even shame for the detainees (Kuramitsu,
1995).
When Culture Fails
As deVries (1996) points out,
culture is a "double-edged sword"
(p. 400). Because it acts as a buffer and supportive
system, its members are dependent upon it to
give their lives meaning and direction. Collective
trauma, by its very definition, poses a direct
assault on the continuity and integrity of the
cultural system. At times, however, those disruptions
are so unexpected as to have been entirely unforeseen.
Two examples from different parts of the world
about two subtle, yet insidious, disruptions
provide that insight.
In 1986 the Chernobyl nuclear
disaster occurred. The worst in a series of
nuclear disasters throughout the world, the
explosions in the Chernobyl plant released hundreds
of tons of radioactive dust and dispersed it
across Europe and Scandinavia. A million acres
of forest were contaminated and vast tracts
of land will remain uninhabitable for thousands
of years. The human toll of "this new species
of trouble," as Erickson (1994, p. 141)
refers to it, is inestimable. To date, over
a half a million people who either were involved
in the clean-up or were living nearby are sick
or dead, and it is estimated that over $50 billion
will be needed to address the future health
needs of the over 4 million people who continue
to live in the most seriously contaminated areas
including the Ukraine where Sappa and Mordovenko
(1993) surveyed students who were 11 to 12 years
old at the time of the nuclear disaster. Although
most of the students agree that the ultimate
consequences of the disaster will take years
to assess, 57% express no real concerns about
nuclear accidents and think that existing nuclear
plants should remain open, and 11% feel that
more should be built.
It is tempting, of course,
to dismiss this quite surprising finding as
nothing more than the product of adolescent
folly and ignorance, but Van Den Hout, Havenaar
and Meikler-Iljina (1995) offer a compelling
interpretation of Soviet life from which the
impact of collective trauma on the cultural
stock of knowledge may be surmised. Every culture
provides its members with a stock of knowledge
about the way it works and a set of meanings
that makes sense of that work. At times, a collective
traumatic event is so overpowering, so shattering,
that it tests that stock of knowledge and if
that cultural system can offer no real explanation
for the event or its aftermath, the members
of the culture are left epistemically disempowered,
that is, they are at a loss to explain what
happened and why, and to derive any meaning
from their own suffering. Under the political
and social conditions of propaganda, disinformation
and lies that followed the Chernobyl disaster,
the already depleted stock of knowledge could
not be replenished because the people's distrust
of government and the official press led them
to reject all information about the
disaster--even factual and life-saving information--as
exaggerated or untrue. From this brief discussion
of the sociopolitical context of the Chernobyl
nuclear disaster an alternative explanation
for the surprising responses of the Ukrainian
students begins to emerge: they may be evidence
of the kind of epistemic disempowerment that
at times occurs when a collective trauma tests
a cultural stock of knowledge and finds it wanting.
The Irish potato famine provides
another example of the unexpected disruption
to culture that can occur in the face of collective
trauma. Over the four awful years of "the
Great Hunger," nearly half of the Irish
population either died from famine-related diseases
or emigrated to escape their plight. The personal
toll of the famine was enormous and tragic,
of course, but it is its altogether unexpected
impact on the Gaelic language that is of interest
here. Language is the primary means for communicating
culture and for socializing new generations.
As preliterate people, the Irish poor were devoted
to the oral tradition, using stories, songs
and verse to express and transmit a rich and
vigorous traditional culture. But their language
was one of the victims of the famine. A disproportionate
number of those who died or emigrated were Gaelic-speakers.
By the famine's end, only 300,000 monoglot Gaelic-speakers
were left in the country and over successive
generations English spread rapidly as the association
between the Gaelic language and poverty and
ignorance was firmly forged in the collective
consciousness (Miller, 1985).
The steady Anglicization of
Ireland over the 150 years after the famine
created what the Irish refer to as "the
Great Silence," an ever-widening linguistic
and cultural gap between each successive generation.
Increasingly cut off from all that is communicated
by native language--tradition, identity and
sense of place--post-famine generations left
their homeland and sought their dreams abroad,
with increasingly profound socioeconomic and
political consequences for their native country.
At times, an entire culture
is compromised by collective trauma, leaving
its members vulnerable to the psychological
sequelae so familiar to experts in traumatic
stress. The immediate aftermath of the Exxon
Valdez oil spill provides that unsettling
insight. In March 1989, the Exxon Valdez
poured over a quarter of a million barrels of
crude oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound,
killing innumerable fish, seals, sea birds,
otters and whales and destroying the livelihoods
of native
Aleut and non-native fishing
communities. In their study of community residents,
Palinkas, Downs, Patterson and Russell (1993)
find that native Aleuts were over twice as likely
to have experienced PTSD and generalized anxiety
disorder than were the non-natives because the
natural resources destroyed by the oil spill
are more than just an economic commodity to
them--they are the crux of Aleut identity, social
organization and ideology, and are the symbols
through which native culture is transmitted
to future generations.
Finally, it is important to
consider another cultural failure, this one
so systemic that it is most descriptively termed
cultural disintegration. As Bosnia, Rwanda,
Somalia and other places around the world tragically
reveal, civil wars, ethnic cleansings, revolutions
and mass expulsions and exoduses disarticulate
cultural systems and reduce them to meaningless
customs, pointless rituals and vague collective
memories. As deVries (1996) points out, the
disintegration of culture inevitably gives rise
to fierce nationalism, tribalism and fundamentalism,
all regressive forces that act to "release
individuals behaviorally and ideologically from
an intolerable complexity that cannot be managed
or used in a more productive way" (p. 407).
When culture no longer can provide identity
and meaning, it is these kinds of regressive
forces that rush in to fill the vacuum.
Although much yet needs to
be learned about cultural disintegration and
its repercussion on individuals, deVries (1996)
offers some interesting, albeit disturbing,
insights. He suggests that when culture disintegrates,
the individual's problems will be proportional
to it, with the avenues of personal vulnerability
following the routes vacated by the culture.
Thus, "paranoia substitutes for trust;
aggression replaces nurturance and support;
identity confusion or a negative identity substitutes
for a positive identity" (p. 408). While
this hypothesis does not seem to bode well for
too many people around the world today, history
also shows that once the collective traumatic
event recedes or ends completely, people almost
always reconstruct on the remnants of the culture
upon which they had been so dependent.
Culture and the Resolution
of Trauma
Culture not only functions
to buffer its members from the devastating impact
of collective trauma, but it also provides the
devices that facilitate the process of healing.
One such device is ritual. The interest of sociologists
and anthropologists in the function and structure
of ritual is well detailed in their respective
literatures which describe ritual as a process
that shapes the expression of emotion, guides
behavior, and offers meaning and closure even
while it strengthens the link of the individual
to the social group and to the culture at large
(Durkheim, 1961; Turner, 1967). For traumatized
individuals whose emotions may be labile and
behavior immoderate, who have an existential
need for meaning and sense, and whose bonds
with others and with the culture may have been
torn, ritual can play an integral role in healing.
Research on racial minority
veterans of the Vietnam War provide that insight.
Parson (1985) was one of the first to call attention
to the "tripartic adaptational dilemma"
of minority veterans who must come to terms
with their bicultural identity, confront institutional
racism, and work through the traumatic echoes
of the war. For African-American veterans he
advocates the use of "post-traumatic psychocultural
therapy" (PTpsyCT) that focuses on each
prong of this adaptational dilemma and even
historicizes institutional racism by addressing
the experience and legacy of slavery.
For American Indian veterans,
participation in cultural rituals provides a
helpful adjunct to more traditional psychotherapy.
One such Navajo ritual, the Enemy Way, lasts
for seven days and involves family, clan and
community members in a ceremony that restores
harmony, balance and connection to the traumatized
Navajo veteran. As Manson et al. (1990) explain,
the greatest relevance of such culturally specific
healing practices lies in their meaning-making
function--they make sense of the traumatic event
and the individual's responses to it through
the use of familiar cultural symbols and activities,
and by reference to the cultural belief system
and world view.
An insight into the psychological
consequences of the failure to enact cultural
rituals during and after a collective traumatic
event is provided by research on refugee groups.
Here, the concept of "cultural bereavement"
is important to appreciate. Eisenbruch (1991),
who coined the term, describes cultural bereavement
as the experience of the uprooted person or
group resulting from loss of social structures,
cultural values and self-identity (p. 674).
His own work with Cambodian refugees shows that
those who sought refuge in the United States
tend to have more persistent post-traumatic
symptomatology than those who fled to Australia
where there is less pressure to conform and
assimilate, and more tolerance for the performance
of cultural rituals that serve to heal the psychic
wounds of civil war and geographic displacement.
Cultural bereavement is observed
in other refugee groups as well. Harrell-Bond
and Wilson (1990) find that many who fled the
civil war in Mozambique are unable to work through
the trauma of displacement because they continue
to feel haunted by the spirits of dead relatives
for whom they had not been able to carry out
culturally prescribed burial rituals. For the
Beta Israel, as Ethiopian Jews prefer to be
called, rituals associated with the land are
at the heart of their culture. Their recent
emigration to Israel deprived them of land ownership
and thus rendered meaningless the rituals that
engender their social cohesion and reaffirm
their cultural identity. Schindler (1993) notes
the attenuated grief and mourning of the Beta
Israel emigres even several years after their
dramatic air lift into Israel, and attributes
it to the loss of these unifying and identifying
rituals.
It is also important to consider
the plight of those who, because of the marginalizing
effects of prejudice, itself a chronic collective
trauma, are routinely and systematically denied
access to and participation in the restorative
rituals, roles and practices of the larger White
culture. Penck and Allen (1991), for example,
find a higher and more persistent rate of PTSD
among African-American Vietnam War veterans
which they attribute, in large part, to the
marginalizing effects of chronic racism. Loo
(1994) finds the same for Asian-American veterans
and theorizes that their marginalization upon
return to the United States systematically excludes
them from the cultural rituals and roles that
will aid in their healing. War is not the only
collective trauma that reveals this insight.
In their study of the survivors of the savage
Buffalo Creek flood, Green, Lindy, Grace and
Glessner (1990) conclude that the one of the
variables that explains the late onset of PTSD
in African-American survivors is the resurfacing
of "the usual prejudicial attitudes"
(p. 57) that work to keep them from full participation
in the restorative rituals and roles that a
decade after the flood had served White survivors
quite well.
Trauma and the Recreation
of Culture
The tendency for collective
trauma to act as a "centrifugal force,"
as Erickson (1994, p. 232) calls it, that is
to push already socially marginalized groups
ever further away from the cultural center,
is quite well documented in the literature that
is sensitive to its possibility. It would be
remiss, however, not to mention its "centripetal
force." Collective trauma also can bring
people together in the kind of social interaction
that Geertz (1973) says functions to recreate
culture. Two examples, both focusing on another
interaction between culture and trauma-commemoration--will
bring this review article to a close.
The AIDS epidemic is a collective
trauma, as Erickson defines it, and to date
has taken more lives than were lost fighting
the war in Vietnam. The patchwork quilt that
commemorates in individual three by six foot
panels just a fraction of those who died increases
in size with the losses from the epidemic; now
so large, it barely can be experienced all at
once. But when it is, culture is recreated.
Rituals have emerged from the showings of this
cultural artifact (Hawkins, 1993). The wearing
of white clothing by those who first unfolded
the panels for display over a decade ago, a
purely functional choice so as to distinguish
them from the viewers, now is a tradition invested
with symbolic significance. The process of folding
and unfolding the panels, the reading of the
names, the singing of the hymn "Amazing
Grace," and the candlelight procession
of viewers representing the spectrum of religion,
race, economic class and sexual orientation,
but brought together by loss, are testimony
to the centripetal force of collective trauma.
In the wake of the bombing
of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City,
the centripetal force of collective trauma also
is observed. The sheer horror of the event,
the violence of the deaths of ordinary people
performing routine, everyday functions, carry
a message "that death can occur arbitrarily
and unfairly. . .and suggests severe limits
to our cultural promise of safety and control"
(Haney, Leimer & Lowery, 1997, p. 169).
In the face of this type of devastating event,
the emotional response of even those not directly
affected is so overwhelming, and the cultural
stock of knowledge so inadequate to explain
and offer meaning, that traditional cultural
death rituals lose their usefulness and can
feel empty and meaningless.
One response to their inadequacy
is the creation of what Haney, Leimer and Lowery
(1994, p. 161) refer to as "spontaneous
memorials," that is, the collection of
mementos, usually of a symbolic nature, that
people bring to and leave at the site of the
collective traumatic event. The wire mesh fence
surrounding the area where the Murrah Federal
Building once stood is covered with flowers,
hand-made signs, toys, letters and poems, and
other mementos, and even now, three years after
the event, is still a site of pilgrimage. But
it is also the site of the recreation of culture.
The spontaneous memorial represents people's
efforts to create a new, meaningful and public
ritual that acknowledges the grief and fear
of the larger community, lifts constraints on
the duration of mourning and the expression
of emotion, and offers the role of mourner to
anyone who participates.
Conclusion
This article examined collective
traumas around the world for the insights they
provide about the role that culture plays in
shaping the experience of collective trauma,
and in facilitating recovery from these unexpected
ruptures in social life. Since it was Erickson's
work that inspired this "research errand,"
it is his conclusion that can be cited to best
summarize the insights this paper has uncovered:
"The experience of trauma, at its worst,
can mean not only a loss of confidence in the
self but a loss of confidence in the scaffolding
of family and community, in the structures of
human government, in the larger logics by which
humankind lives, and in the ways of nature itself"
(p. 242).
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©1998 by
The American Academy of Experts in Traumatic
Stress, Inc. |
