Cultures under siege : collective violence and trauma /

Robben (Utrecht) and Suarez-Orozco (Harvard) hope to spur interdisciplinary research into the near and distant consequences of massive violence and trauma. Their introduction provides an overview of psychoanalytic theory on violence from Freud on. The remainder of the volume has two sections. "Management of Collective Trauma" explores the study or treatment of trauma occasioned, directly or indirectly, by the Holocaust, military repression in Argentina, the Gulf War, and civil war in the Balkans. Yolanda Gampel (Tel Aviv) analyzes the intergenerational transmission of trauma from Holocaust survivors to their descendants, while Robben discusses the prolonged and complex struggle of relatives of Argentina's "disappeared" thousands for an accounting of their loss. "Cultural Responses to Collective Trauma" examines trauma transmitted over generations under the rubric of "chosen trauma." Essays on the Parsi of India, immigrants to the US, and the Greeks versus the Turks explore how and why, generations after some major social disruption, people still cultivate, elaborate, and transmit to others a sense of themselves as historically victimized. Readers can cull from this volume useful concepts and an overview of research on mourning, trauma, and cultural identity. All academic collections. P. R. Sullivan; independent scholar