Epistemologies of Trauma
Cognitive Insights for Narrative Construction as Ritual Performance
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/bsor.32590Keywords:
Trauma Theory, Affect Theory, Ritual Theory, Ted Jennings, Judith Herman, Cathy CaruthAbstract
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.
References
Alexander, Bobby C. 1997. “Ritual and Current Studies of Ritual: Overview.” 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.
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.
Published
2017-12-21
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Tully, T. (2017). Epistemologies of Trauma: Cognitive Insights for Narrative Construction as Ritual Performance. Bulletin for the Study of Religion, 46(3-4), 48-56. https://doi.org/10.1558/bsor.32590
