Cultural–Ecological Perspectives on the Understanding and Assessment of Trauma

This chapter is premised on the assumption that the definition of trauma entails the cultural and ecological systems that mediate human experience and provide resources for coping and meaning making. Furthermore, the detection of traumatic stress disorder implies that the stressful event has overtaxed personal and, in some cases, community capacities. It follows that in considering cultural and ecological factors in the understanding of trauma and trauma recovery, both community resources for resilience and personal resources for coping that are appropriated from culture should be assessed. This emphasis on the cultural and the ecological is in response to the limitations of individually focused western conceptions of trauma and concerns about medicalized approaches to trauma intervention that insufficiently account for contextual factors in trauma recovery (Argenti-Pullen, 2000; Burstow, 2003; Summerfield, 2004).