Epistemologies of Trauma: Cognitive Insights for Narrative Construction as Ritual Performance
Issued Date: 21 Dec 2017
Abstract
Beginning with Cathy Caruth's post-structuralist approach in the early 1990's, the study of trauma, memory, and affect has seen significant growth across many academic disciplines. Recent postcolonial perspectives, however, criticize Caruth's trauma theory for its focus on individual melancholia, its Eurocentric assumptions, and its diminishment of discursive practice and ritual. This article considers the rapidly expanding field of trauma studies, including current neuroscientific and biological approaches, to clarify the depth and breadth of trauma's relation to memory inscription, cultural identity, and the embodied transmission of trauma.
Using a comparative methodology to examine the seminal contributions of Ted Jennings to the field of ritual studies (Jennings 1982, 1987, 2014) that correspond with Judith Herman's three-stage narrative therapy process (Herman 1997), this essay suggests that Herman's method of narrative construction conveys unique, embodied knowledge that can be understood as ritual performance. Several case studies are put into conversation with Herman's trauma theory in the conclusion of this paper to illustrate possible correctives to the weaknesses inherent in Caruth's “unspeakability” school of trauma theory—correctives having implications for fields as wide-ranging as cultural history, anthropology, ritual studies, affect theory, collective memory, anthropology, and postcolonial approaches to the study of religion.
Using a comparative methodology to examine the seminal contributions of Ted Jennings to the field of ritual studies (Jennings 1982, 1987, 2014) that correspond with Judith Herman's three-stage narrative therapy process (Herman 1997), this essay suggests that Herman's method of narrative construction conveys unique, embodied knowledge that can be understood as ritual performance. Several case studies are put into conversation with Herman's trauma theory in the conclusion of this paper to illustrate possible correctives to the weaknesses inherent in Caruth's “unspeakability” school of trauma theory—correctives having implications for fields as wide-ranging as cultural history, anthropology, ritual studies, affect theory, collective memory, anthropology, and postcolonial approaches to the study of religion.
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DOI: 10.1558/bsor.32590
References
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In Anthropology of Religion: A Handbook, edited by S. D. Glazier, 139–60.
Westport: Greenwood Press.
Assman, Jan, and Rodney Livingstone, eds. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory:
Ten Studies. Stanford University Press.
Atkinson, Meera, and Michael Richardson, eds. 2013. Traumatic Affect. Newcastle
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Bell, Catherine.1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Bolton, Gillie. 2003. “Around the Slices of Herself.” In Trauma,
the Body and Transformation: A Narrative Inquiry, edited by Kim Etherington,
121–37. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Brison, Susan J. 1999. “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self.”
In Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and
Leo Spitzer, 39–54. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Christianson, Sven-Ake. 2014. The Handbook of Emotion and Memory: Research
and Theory. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Clare, Barker. 2014. “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer
Affect.” Disability & Society 29: 1496–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.931644.
Collins, Peter J. 2014. “On Ritual Knowledge.” DISKUS: The Journal
of the British Association for the Study of Religion 13: 10–26.
Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511628061.
Des Jardin, Julie. 2003. Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender,
Race and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Douglas, Lawrence. 2005. The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in
the Trials of the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Dussel, Enrique. 1993. “The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America.”
Boundary 2 20 (3): 65–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/303341.
Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. 2015. “Living with Ghosts: Death, Exhumation,
and Reburial among the Maya in Guatemala.” Latin American Perspectives
42 (3): 180–92.
Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla. 2004. A Human Being Died That Night: A South African
Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Goodall, Jane, and Christopher Lee, eds. 2015. Trauma and Public Memory. Palgrave
Macmillan Memory Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence: From Domestic
Abuse to Political Terror. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books.
Hervieu-Léger, Daniéle. 2000. Religion as a Chain of Memory.
Cambridge: Polity.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 2012. The Invention of Tradition.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hölzel, Britta K., James Carmody, Mark Vangel, Christina Congleton, Sita
M. Yerramsetti, Tim Gard, and Sara W. Lazar. 2011. “Mindfulness Practice
Leads to Increases in Regional
Brain Gray Matter Density.” Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 191 (3):
36–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2010.08.006.
Jennings, Theodore W. 1982. “On Ritual Knowledge.” Journal of Religion
62 (2): 111–27. https://doi.org/10.1086/486929
———. 1987. “Ritual Studies and Liturgical Theology:
An Invitation to Dialogue.” Journal of Ritual Studies 1 (1): 35–56.———. 2014. “Ritual (and) Ontology: An Essay Celebrating
Ron Grimes.” Unpublished paper.
Kansteiner, Wulf, and Harald Weilnböck. 2008. “Against the Concept
of Cultural Trauma, or How I Learned to Love the Suffering of Others Without
the Help of Psychotherapy.” In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll, 229-40. New York: de Gruyter.
Kellerman, Natan PF. 2013. “Epigenetic Transmission of Holocaust Trauma:
Can Nightmares be Inherited?” The Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related
Sciences 50 (1): 33–39.
Kim, Sang Hwan, Suzanne M. Schneider, Len Kravitz, Christine Mermier, and Mark
R. Burge. 2013. “Mind-Body Practices for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.”
Journal of Investigative Medicine: The Official Publication of the American
Federation for Clinical Research 61 (5): 827–34. https://doi.org/10.2310/JIM.0b013e3182906862.
King, Anthony P., Thane M. Erickson, Nicholas D. Giardino, Todd Favorite, Sheila
A. M. Rauch, Elizabeth Robinson, Madhur Kulkarni, and Israel Liberzon. 2013.
“A Pilot Study of Group Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (Mbct) for
Combat Veterans With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (Ptsd).” Depression
and Anxiety 30 (7): 638–45. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.22104.
Lauderdale, Diane S. 2006. “Birth Outcomes for Arabic-Named Women in
California Before and After September 11.” Demography 43 (1): 185–201.
https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.2006.0008.
Leys, Ruth. 2012. “Trauma and the Turn to Affect.” Critical Inquiry
37: 434-72. https://doi.org/10.1086/659353.
Leys, Ruth, and Marlene Goldman. 2010.“Navigating the Genealogies of
Trauma, Guilt, and Affect: An Interview With Ruth Leys.” University of
Toronto Quarterly 79 (2): 656–79. https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.79.2.656.
Little Bear, Leroy. 2009. “Naturalizing Indigenous Knowledge: Synthesis
Paper.” Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan, Aboriginal Education Research
Centre.
Long, Charles H. 1969. “Silence and Signification: A Note on Religion
and Modernity.” In Myth and Symbol: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade,
edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H. Long, 141–50. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Mirabal, Nancy Raquel. 2007. Introduction to Technofuturos: Critical Interventions
in Latina/o Studies, edited by Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and Agustín Laó-Montes.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Rambo, Shelly, M., Shawn Copeland, Serene Jones, and Mayra Rivera. 2011. ‘Theologians
Engaging Trauma’ Transcript.” Theology Today 68 (3): 224–37.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0040573611416539.
Ratti, Manav. 2013. The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion,
and Literature. New York: Routledge.
Rothberg, Michael. 2008. “Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response.”
Studies in the Novel 40: 224–34.
Schaefer, Donovan O. 2015. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822374909.
Stier, Oren Baruch , and J. Shawn Landres, eds. 2006. Religion, Violence, Memory,
and Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Van der Kolk, Bessel A. 2012. “The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the
Evolving Psychobiology of Posttraumatic Stress.” In Traumatic Stress:
The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, edited by
Bessel A. van der Kolk, and Alexander C. McFarlane, 214-41. New York: Guilford
Press.
Visser, Irene. 2015. “Decolonizing Trauma Theory: Retrospect and Prospects.”
Humanities 4 (2): 250–65. https://doi.org/10.3390/h4020250.
Watson-Jones, Rachel E., and Cristine H. Legare. 2016. “The Social Functions
of Group Rituals.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 25 (1):
42–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415618486.
Wittmann, Rebecca. 2012. Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Yehuda, Rachel. 2002. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” New England
Journal of Medicine 346 (2): 108–14. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMra012941.
Yehuda, Rachel, Linda M. Bierer, James Schmeidler, Daniel H. Aferiat, Ilana
Breslau, and Susan Dolan. 2000. “Low Cortisol Risk for PTSD in Adult Offspring
of Holocaust Survivors.” American Journal of Psychiatry 157: 1252–59.
https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.157.8.1252.
Yehuda, Rachel, James Schmeidler, Earl L. Jr Giller, Larry J. Siever, and Karen
Binder-Brynes. 1998. “Relationship Between Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
Characteristics of Holocaust Survivors and Their Adult Offspring.” American
Journal of Psychiatry 155: 841–43.
https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.155.9.1163.
Yehuda, Rachel, James Schmeidler, Milton Wainberg, Karen Binder-Brynes, and
Tamar Duvdevani. 1998. “Vulnerability to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
in Adult Offspring of Holocaust Survivors.” American Journal of Psychiatry
155: 1163–71. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.155.9.1163.
In Anthropology of Religion: A Handbook, edited by S. D. Glazier, 139–60.
Westport: Greenwood Press.
Assman, Jan, and Rodney Livingstone, eds. 2006. Religion and Cultural Memory:
Ten Studies. Stanford University Press.
Atkinson, Meera, and Michael Richardson, eds. 2013. Traumatic Affect. Newcastle
upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
Bell, Catherine.1992. Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Bolton, Gillie. 2003. “Around the Slices of Herself.” In Trauma,
the Body and Transformation: A Narrative Inquiry, edited by Kim Etherington,
121–37. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Brison, Susan J. 1999. “Trauma Narratives and the Remaking of the Self.”
In Cultural Recall in the Present, edited by Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and
Leo Spitzer, 39–54. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Caruth, Cathy. 1996. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.
Christianson, Sven-Ake. 2014. The Handbook of Emotion and Memory: Research
and Theory. Hove, UK: Psychology Press.
Clare, Barker. 2014. “Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer
Affect.” Disability & Society 29: 1496–98. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.931644.
Collins, Peter J. 2014. “On Ritual Knowledge.” DISKUS: The Journal
of the British Association for the Study of Religion 13: 10–26.
Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511628061.
Des Jardin, Julie. 2003. Women and the Historical Enterprise in America: Gender,
Race and the Politics of Memory, 1880–1945. Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press.
Douglas, Lawrence. 2005. The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in
the Trials of the Holocaust. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Dussel, Enrique. 1993. “The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America.”
Boundary 2 20 (3): 65–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/303341.
Garrard-Burnett, Virginia. 2015. “Living with Ghosts: Death, Exhumation,
and Reburial among the Maya in Guatemala.” Latin American Perspectives
42 (3): 180–92.
Gobodo-Madikizela, Pumla. 2004. A Human Being Died That Night: A South African
Woman Confronts the Legacy of Apartheid. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Goodall, Jane, and Christopher Lee, eds. 2015. Trauma and Public Memory. Palgrave
Macmillan Memory Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence: From Domestic
Abuse to Political Terror. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books.
Hervieu-Léger, Daniéle. 2000. Religion as a Chain of Memory.
Cambridge: Polity.
Hobsbawm, Eric, and Terence Ranger, eds. 2012. The Invention of Tradition.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Hölzel, Britta K., James Carmody, Mark Vangel, Christina Congleton, Sita
M. Yerramsetti, Tim Gard, and Sara W. Lazar. 2011. “Mindfulness Practice
Leads to Increases in Regional
Brain Gray Matter Density.” Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging 191 (3):
36–43. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2010.08.006.
Jennings, Theodore W. 1982. “On Ritual Knowledge.” Journal of Religion
62 (2): 111–27. https://doi.org/10.1086/486929
———. 1987. “Ritual Studies and Liturgical Theology:
An Invitation to Dialogue.” Journal of Ritual Studies 1 (1): 35–56.———. 2014. “Ritual (and) Ontology: An Essay Celebrating
Ron Grimes.” Unpublished paper.
Kansteiner, Wulf, and Harald Weilnböck. 2008. “Against the Concept
of Cultural Trauma, or How I Learned to Love the Suffering of Others Without
the Help of Psychotherapy.” In Cultural Memory Studies: An International and Interdisciplinary Handbook, edited by Astrid Erll, 229-40. New York: de Gruyter.
Kellerman, Natan PF. 2013. “Epigenetic Transmission of Holocaust Trauma:
Can Nightmares be Inherited?” The Israel Journal of Psychiatry and Related
Sciences 50 (1): 33–39.
Kim, Sang Hwan, Suzanne M. Schneider, Len Kravitz, Christine Mermier, and Mark
R. Burge. 2013. “Mind-Body Practices for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder.”
Journal of Investigative Medicine: The Official Publication of the American
Federation for Clinical Research 61 (5): 827–34. https://doi.org/10.2310/JIM.0b013e3182906862.
King, Anthony P., Thane M. Erickson, Nicholas D. Giardino, Todd Favorite, Sheila
A. M. Rauch, Elizabeth Robinson, Madhur Kulkarni, and Israel Liberzon. 2013.
“A Pilot Study of Group Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (Mbct) for
Combat Veterans With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (Ptsd).” Depression
and Anxiety 30 (7): 638–45. https://doi.org/10.1002/da.22104.
Lauderdale, Diane S. 2006. “Birth Outcomes for Arabic-Named Women in
California Before and After September 11.” Demography 43 (1): 185–201.
https://doi.org/10.1353/dem.2006.0008.
Leys, Ruth. 2012. “Trauma and the Turn to Affect.” Critical Inquiry
37: 434-72. https://doi.org/10.1086/659353.
Leys, Ruth, and Marlene Goldman. 2010.“Navigating the Genealogies of
Trauma, Guilt, and Affect: An Interview With Ruth Leys.” University of
Toronto Quarterly 79 (2): 656–79. https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.79.2.656.
Little Bear, Leroy. 2009. “Naturalizing Indigenous Knowledge: Synthesis
Paper.” Saskatoon: University of Saskatchewan, Aboriginal Education Research
Centre.
Long, Charles H. 1969. “Silence and Signification: A Note on Religion
and Modernity.” In Myth and Symbol: Studies in Honor of Mircea Eliade,
edited by Joseph M. Kitagawa and Charles H. Long, 141–50. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press.
Mirabal, Nancy Raquel. 2007. Introduction to Technofuturos: Critical Interventions
in Latina/o Studies, edited by Nancy Raquel Mirabal, and Agustín Laó-Montes.
Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Patterson, Orlando. 1982. Slavery and Social Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Rambo, Shelly, M., Shawn Copeland, Serene Jones, and Mayra Rivera. 2011. ‘Theologians
Engaging Trauma’ Transcript.” Theology Today 68 (3): 224–37.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0040573611416539.
Ratti, Manav. 2013. The Postsecular Imagination: Postcolonialism, Religion,
and Literature. New York: Routledge.
Rothberg, Michael. 2008. “Decolonizing Trauma Studies: A Response.”
Studies in the Novel 40: 224–34.
Schaefer, Donovan O. 2015. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822374909.
Stier, Oren Baruch , and J. Shawn Landres, eds. 2006. Religion, Violence, Memory,
and Place. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Van der Kolk, Bessel A. 2012. “The Body Keeps the Score: Memory and the
Evolving Psychobiology of Posttraumatic Stress.” In Traumatic Stress:
The Effects of Overwhelming Experience on Mind, Body, and Society, edited by
Bessel A. van der Kolk, and Alexander C. McFarlane, 214-41. New York: Guilford
Press.
Visser, Irene. 2015. “Decolonizing Trauma Theory: Retrospect and Prospects.”
Humanities 4 (2): 250–65. https://doi.org/10.3390/h4020250.
Watson-Jones, Rachel E., and Cristine H. Legare. 2016. “The Social Functions
of Group Rituals.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 25 (1):
42–46. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721415618486.
Wittmann, Rebecca. 2012. Beyond Justice: The Auschwitz Trial. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Yehuda, Rachel. 2002. “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.” New England
Journal of Medicine 346 (2): 108–14. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMra012941.
Yehuda, Rachel, Linda M. Bierer, James Schmeidler, Daniel H. Aferiat, Ilana
Breslau, and Susan Dolan. 2000. “Low Cortisol Risk for PTSD in Adult Offspring
of Holocaust Survivors.” American Journal of Psychiatry 157: 1252–59.
https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.157.8.1252.
Yehuda, Rachel, James Schmeidler, Earl L. Jr Giller, Larry J. Siever, and Karen
Binder-Brynes. 1998. “Relationship Between Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
Characteristics of Holocaust Survivors and Their Adult Offspring.” American
Journal of Psychiatry 155: 841–43.
https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.155.9.1163.
Yehuda, Rachel, James Schmeidler, Milton Wainberg, Karen Binder-Brynes, and
Tamar Duvdevani. 1998. “Vulnerability to Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
in Adult Offspring of Holocaust Survivors.” American Journal of Psychiatry
155: 1163–71. https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.155.9.1163.
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