Abstract
The genealogy of ‘trauma’ has its origins in Greek medicine but has come to be wedded to Western modernity through psychoanalysis and neuroscience. From being a wound, trauma became a metaphor for surfaces of signification of body and mind. Hovering over the traumatic impact has been the whole question of memory and meaning. Broch-Due explores how ‘trauma’ is continuously produced anew as a powerful gestalt between the domains of the bodily, the social, the self, and the sign—themselves invested with cultural meanings that must be framed locally. She ends her essay from the unruly margins of Kenya, developing an alternative analysis of trauma by drawing on the concepts of ‘liminality’ and ‘rites of passage’, demonstrating that vintage concepts in anthropology have an untapped potential which can push a theorizing more sensitive to the diverse experiences of trauma.
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Broch-Due, V. (2016). Trauma, Violence, Memory: Reflections on the Bodily, the Self, the Sign, and the Social. In: Broch-Due, V., Bertelsen, B. (eds) Violent Reverberations. Culture, Mind, and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39049-9_2
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