Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity Chapter 2

"Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma"
Neil J. Smelser

This chapter is devoted, as its title would suggest, to mapping the intersections between psychological and cultural traumas, focusing especially on the trauma experience as both an event and its accompanying context. Smelser argues that Freud, too, understood trama as growing from this relationship, although he says this can be hard to derive from his work.

From here, Smelser begins to tackle the idea of cultural trauma, translating his idea of trauma as an event plus context to the national scale. Smelser argues that there is no certainty that any event will become a trauma, despite how violent it may be, and that the range of events that can qualify as cultural traumas is vast and varied.

At this point, Smelser qualifies his statement with specifics. Citing the sociocultural context of an event, the production of memory and its association with a particular affect ["usually disgust, shame, or guilt (36)], and the time at which it is remembered, be it days, months, decades, or centuries, Smelser concludes that "cultural traumas are for the most part historically made, not born" (37).

Further, Smelser contends that a chief factor in the production of trauma is a massive disruption in the stable social system, which is "classified along functional lines," including economic, legal, medical, educational institutions, etc. (37). However, these disruptions are subjective. Smelser identifies "carrier groups," influential individuals and groups, that enforce the idea that a trauma has occurred, and work to memorialize it.

Essential factors of a cultural trauma, Smelser writes, are its duel statuses as both indelible and ingrained on the national psyche, and as such, its assimilation into the group's national collective identity. Beginning here with a discussion of defense and coping mechanisms (45), Smelser postulates that "collective memory work," the work done by carrier groups in trauma memory production, is essential in collective coping because it frames the 'traumatic' event as affecting the entire collective, indirectly if not directly.

Smelser closes his chapter with a discussion of ambivalence surrounding trauma. Memorials, he claims, can be considered paradoxical in their intents to both remember the event, but to have the done the work of mourning in the construction of the monument. As such, the trauma is both left open and slammed closed. As the chapter ends, Smelser warns the readers of the ever widening opportunities for trauma in an increasingly globalized world.



*definition of cultural trauma 44