Historical Trauma – emotional, spiritual, physical, and social effects of traumatic events on a group of people in the present as endured by past generations. Anthropologists study how trauma can affect whole cultures in different ways
Historical Trauma is “a constellation of characteristics associated with massive cumulative group trauma across generations.”
When we think about trauma, we often think of harm to an individual, physical body. While this is part of the discussion, when we speak of historical trauma, we speak of collective injury to people and cultures as a result of years of dispossession and displacement due to colonization.
Historical trauma is often referred to as emotional or psychological in nature, provoking people in our culture, which thinks of the body and mind as separate, to demand that those affected simply “get over it,” however, it is important to remember that we are not just talking about events written on a page and filed in history books. These are collective traumas and are actually embedded in everyday lives and bodies. They are not easily shed, in part because the are reinforced in daily life- reminders of how the trauma lives on.
Dr. Carrie Johnson explains: “A lot of our children that we see, for example, have been through not only one trauma but often multiple traumas in their life, in terms of physical abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect. But then when we look at multi-generational trauma, we look at what has happened to their parents, or what has happened to their grandparents, or their great-grandparents, and how that has been passed on from generation to generation.”
||| Explore the Literature |||
Daniel, E. Valentine. 1996. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
Abstract: How does an ethnographer write about violence? How can he make sense of violent acts, for himself and for his readers, without compromising its sheer excess and its meaning-defying core? How can he remain a scholarly observer when the country of his birth is engulfed by terror? These are some of the questions that engage Valentine Daniel in this exploration of life and death in contemporary Sri Lanka. In 1983 Daniel “walked into the ashes and mortal residue” of the violence that had occurred in his homeland. His planned project — the study of women’s folk songs as ethnohistory — was immediately displaced by the responsibility that he felt had been given to him, by surviving family members and friends of victims, to recount beyond Sri Lanka what he had seen and heard there. Trained to do fieldwork by staying in one place and educated to look for coherence and meaning in human behavior, what does an anthropologist do when he is forced by circumstances to keep moving, searching for reasons he never finds? How does he write an ethnography (or an anthropography, to use the author’s term) without transforming it into a pornography of violence? In avoiding fattening the anthropography into prurience, how does he avoid flattening it with theory? The ways in which Daniel grapples with these questions, and their answers, instill this groundbreaking book with a rare sense of passion, purpose, and intellect.
Denham, Aaron R. 2008. “Rethinking Historical Trauma: Narratives of Resilience.” Transcultural Psychiatry 45, no. 3: 391-414.
Abstract: There is significant variation in how people experience, emplot and intergenerationally transmit trauma experiences. Despite this variation, the literature rarely illustrates alternative manifestations or resilient responses to the construct of historical trauma. Based upon person-centered ethnographic research, this article highlights how a four-generation American Indian family contextualizes historical trauma and, specifically, how they frame their traumatic past into an ethic that functions in the transmission of resilience strategies, family identity, and as a framework for narrative emplotment. In conclusion, the author clarifies the distinction between historical trauma — the precipitating conditions or experiences — and the historical trauma response — the pattern of diverse responses that may result from exposure to historical trauma.
Hirschberger, Gilad. “Collective Trauma and the Social Construction of Meaning.” Frontiers in Psychology 9 (2018).
Summary: In this article, Hirschberger explores collective trauma from a psychological point of view. She outlines the process of collective trauma as moving from memory to a means of defining one’s self and social group, and the implications of the trauma on a group which spans generations.
Lester, Rebecca. “Back from the Edge of Existence: A Critical Anthropology of Trauma.” Transcultural Psychiatry 50, no. 5 (2013): 753–62.
Summary: Lester explores historical trauma from the perspective of both anthropology and transcultural psychiatry, and how by approaching a collective cultural trauma through a psychiatric and psychological lens, new methods of healing can take place.
Maxwell, Krista. 2014. “Historicizing Historical Trauma Theory: Troubling the Trans-Generational Transmission Paradigm.” Transcultural Psychiatry 51, no. 3: 407–35.
Abstract: The premise that “trauma” is transmitted across generations is central to the historical trauma discourse currently circulating in indigenous communities and professional networks in Canada. Historical trauma may be understood as the offspring of two older and apparently antithetical discourses: Native healing, and colonial professional critiques of indigenous family life. While the former has maintained a therapeutic focus on restoring intergenerational social relations, the latter has pathologized indigenous parenting and child-rearing practices. The emergence of historical trauma marks a global shift in the moral economy by which victimhood status, acquired through individual experiences of physical and especially sexual abuse, has come to wield greater currency than collective struggles against colonialism. Providers of contemporary indigenous healing programmes are drawing simultaneously on trauma discourse, which is seen to legitimate individual social suffering, and older therapeutic forms centered on sharing local social histories to restore intergenerational continuities and collective identity. But these invocations of historical trauma may continue the colonial discourse of mental health and social welfare professionals, who blamed indigenous parenting practices for children’s social problems and failure to assimilate. Some contemporary mental health and child development professionals have invoked parents’ and grandparents’ transmission of historical trauma in ways which construct indigenous families as pathological, promote an oversimplified, universalizing understanding of Canadian colonialism, and divert attention from the contemporary continuation of colonial structures and relations.
Malkki, Liisa. 1995. Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology Among Hutu Refugees In Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Summary from publisher: In this study of Hutu refugees from Burundi, driven into exile in Tanzania after their 1972 insurrection against the dominant Tutsi was brutally quashed, Liisa Malkki shows how experiences of dispossession and violence are remembered and turned into narratives, and how this process helps to construct identities such as “Hutu” and “Tutsi.” Through extensive fieldwork in two refugee communities, Malkki finds that the refugees’ current circumstances significantly influence these constructions. Those living in organized camps created an elaborate “mythico-history” of the Hutu people, which gave significance to exile, and envisioned a collective return to the homeland of Burundi. Other refugees, who had assimilated in a more urban setting, crafted identities in response to the practical circumstances of their day to day lives. Malkki reveals how such things as national identity, historical consciousness, and the social imagination of “enemies” get constructed in the process of everyday life. The book closes with an epilogue looking at the recent violence between Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda and Burundi and showing how the movement of large refugee populations across national borders has shaped patterns of violence in the region.
Menakem, Resmaa. 2017. My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press.
Abstract: In this groundbreaking book, therapist Resmaa Menakem examines the damage caused by racism in America from the perspective of trauma and body-centered psychology. The body is where our instincts reside and where we fight, flee, or freeze, and it endures the trauma inflicted by the ills that plague society. Menakem argues this destruction will continue until Americans learn to heal the generational anguish of white supremacy, which is deeply embedded in all our bodies. Our collective agony doesn’t just affect African Americans. White Americans suffer their own secondary trauma as well. So do blue Americans—our police. My Grandmother’s Hands is a call to action for all of us to recognize that racism is not about the head, but about the body, and introduces an alternative view of what we can do to grow beyond our entrenched racialized divide.
Mohatt, Nathaniel Vincent, Azure B. Thompson, Nghi D. Thai, and Jacob Kraemer Tebes. 2014. “Historical Trauma as Public Narrative: A Conceptual Review of How History Impacts Present-Day Health.” Social Science & Medicine 106: 128–36.
Summary: In this literature review, Mohatt collects the literature on, and investigates, the ways that cultural trauma can influence public and individual health. Specifically, the concept of the narrative of cultural trauma is explored in relation to the way that such narratives can also be used as healing techniques.
Prussing, Erica. 2014. “Historical trauma: Politics of a conceptual framework.” Transcultural Psychiatry, Vol. 51(3) 436–458.
Abstract: The concept of historical trauma (HT) is compelling: Colonialism has set forth cumulative cycles of adversity that promote morbidity and mortality at personal and collective levels, with especially strong mental health impacts. Yet as ongoing community based as well as scholarly discussions attest, lingering questions continue to surround HT as a framework for understanding the relationships between colonialism and indigenous mental health. Through an overview of 30 recent peer-reviewed publications that aim to clarify, define, measure, and interpret how HT impacts American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN) mental health, this paper examines how the conceptual framework of HT has circulated in ways shaped by interactions among three prominent research approaches: evidence-based, culturally relevant, and decolonizing. All define current approaches to AIAN mental health research, but each sets forth different conceptualizations of the connections between colonialism and psychological distress. The unfolding trajectory of research about HT reflects persistent tensions in how these frameworks interact, but also possibilities for better integrating them. These considerations aim to advance conversations about the politics of producing knowledge about AIAN mental health and support ongoing calls for greater political pluralism in mental health research.
Suárez-Orozco, Marcelo M, and Antonius C. G. M. Robben. 2000. Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma. Cambridge University Press.
Summary: In this book, the relationship between anthropology and psychology is explored through a number of case studies on cultural trauma, and specifically how violence on a large scale across a culture, influences later generations.