Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-06T06:47:49.998Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Introduction - An Anthropology of the Effects of Genocide and Mass Violence

Memory, Symptom, and Recovery

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 November 2014

By
Devon E. Hinton  and
Alexander L. Hinton
Edited by
Devon E. Hinton  and
Alexander L. Hinton
Devon E. Hinton
Affiliation:
Harvard University
Alexander L. Hinton
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
Devon E. Hinton
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Alexander L. Hinton
Affiliation:
Rutgers University, New Jersey
Get access

Summary

What are the wounds of mass violence on various experiential levels and how might recovery occur? Despite the emergence of an international human rights movement in the period after the Holocaust and World War II, mass violence has not ended. The late twentieth-century genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda were followed by early twenty-first-century genocides in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Civil war remains a central part of many of these conflicts, as illustrated by the atrocities perpetrated in Aceh, Colombia, East Timor, Guatemala, Liberia, Kosovo, Nepal, Peru, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Syria, and Uganda. The United States has recently entered zones of mass violence in a post-9/11 world, and with its allies has waged war in Afghanistan and Iraq while confronting terrorism at home. There is the postconflict legacy of such violence: economies and infrastructures destroyed, families and communities fractured, interpersonal mistrust, grieving, trauma, symptoms, unwanted memories, and many other forms of social suffering.

This volume explores lingering aftermaths of mass violence and the reaction to it. What are the legacies of mass violence for individuals and the social worlds in which they live and how do they seek to recover? Former zones of violence often become sites of humanitarian aid, peace-building efforts, and transitional justice, but scholars and practitioners have paid too little attention to the ways in which individuals and cultural groups react to mass violence through microdynamics of memory, social practice, ritual, coping, understanding, symptoms, and healing. Psychological anthropology should have much to say about these issues given its emphasis on taking into account various levels of human ontology such as social experience, collective representations, and sociopolitical process; brain function and psychology; the phenomenology of lived experience; and the nexus of self, memory, and emotion. But psychological anthropology has only just begun to grapple with the legacies of mass violence (see, e.g., Fassin & Pandolfi, 2010; Kirmayer, Lemelson, & Barad, 2007; Kleinman, Das, & Lock, 1997; Robben & Suárez-Orozco, 2000).

Type
Chapter
Information
Genocide and Mass Violence
Memory, Symptom, and Recovery
 , pp. 1 - 42
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

American Psychiatric Association. (2000, 2013). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, 4th ed., text revision and 5th ed. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.Google Scholar
Antze, P., & Lambek, M. (1996). Tense past: Cultural essays in trauma and memory. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Argenti, N. (2007). The intestines of the state: Youth, violence, and belated histories in the Cameroon grassfields. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.CrossRef
Argenti, N., & Schramm, K. (2010). Remembering violence: Anthropological perspectives on intergenerational transmission. New York: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Bal, M., Crewe, J. V., & Spitzer, L. (1999). Acts of memory: Cultural recall in the present. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College: University Press of New England.Google Scholar
Behrouzan, O., & Fischer, M. J. (2014). “Behaves like a rooster and cries like a [four eyed] canine”: The politics and poetics of depression and psychiatry in Iran. In Hinton, D. E. & Hinton, A. L. (Eds.), Genocide and mass violence: Memory, symptom, and recovery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Berger, , & Arthur, . (1995). Blind men and elephants: Perspectives on humor. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.Google Scholar
Berliner, D. (2010). Memories of initiation violence: Remembered pain and religious transmission among the Bulongic (Guinea, Conakry). In N. Argenti & K. Schramm (Eds.), Remembering violence: Anthropological perspectives on intergenerational transmission (pp. 83–102). New York: Berghahn Books.
Biehl, J., & Locke, P. (2010). Deleuze and the anthropology of becoming. Current Anthropology, 51, 317–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Caruth, C. (1995). Trauma: Explorations in memory. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
Cougle, J. R., Feldner, M. T., Keough, M. E., Hawkins, K. A., & Fitch, K. E. (2010). Comorbid panic attacks among individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder: Associations with traumatic event exposure history, symptoms, and impairment. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 24, 183–88.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Coulter, C. (2009). Bush wives and girl soldiers: Women’s lives through war and peace in Sierra Leone. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Crandon-Malamud, L. (1991). From the fat of our souls: Social change, political process, and medical pluralism in Bolivia. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Das, V., Kleinman, A., Lock, M., Ramphele, M., & Reynolds, P. (Eds.). (2001). Remaking a world: Violence, social suffering, and recovery. Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
de Jong, J., & Clarke, L. (1996). Mental health of refugees. Geneva: World Health Organization.Google Scholar
de Jong, J., & Reis, R. (2013). Collective trauma resolution: Dissociation as a way of processing post-war traumatic stress in Guinea Bissau. Transcultural Psychiatry, 50, 644–61.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Evans-Campbell, T. (2008). Historical trauma in American Indian/Native Alaska communities: A multilevel framework for exploring impacts on individuals, families, and communities. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 23, 316–38.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Farmer, P. (1997). On suffering and structural violence: A view from below. In A. Kleinman, V. Das & M. Lock (Eds.), Social suffering (pp. 261–84). Berkeley: University of California.
Fassin, D., & Pandolfi, M. (2010). Contemporary states of emergency: The politics of military and humanitarian interventions. Cambridge, MA: Zone Books.Google Scholar
Fassin, D., & Rechtman, R. (2009). The empire of trauma: An inquiry into the condition of victimhood. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Fletcher, L., & Weinstein, H. M. (2002). Violence and social repair: Rethinking the contribution of justice to reconciliation. Human Rights Quarterly, 24, 573–639.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Foa, E. B., Ehlers, A., Clark, D. M., Tolin, D. F., & Orsillo, S. M. (1999). The Posttraumatic Cognitions Inventory (PTCI): Development and validation. Psychological Assessment, 11, 303–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Friedman, M. J., & McEwen, B. S. (2004). Posttraumatic stress disorder, allostatic load, and medical illness. In Schnurr, P. P. & Green, B. L. (Eds.), Trauma and health: Physical health consequences of exposure to extreme stress. Washington, DC:American Psychological Association.Google Scholar
Giddens, A. (1984). The constitution of society: Introduction of the theory of structuration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gone, J. P. (2009). A community-based treatment for Native American historical trauma: Prospects for evidence-based practice. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 77, 751–61.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gone, J. P. (2013). Redressing First Nations historical trauma: Theorizing mechanisms for indigenous culture as mental health treatment. Transcultural Psychiatry, 50, 683–706.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gone, J. P. (in press). Reconsidering American Indian historical trauma: Lessons from an early Gros Ventre war narrative. Transcultural Psychiatry.
Good, B. J., Good, M. J., & Moradi, R. (1985). The interpretation of Iranian depressive illness and dysphoric affect. In A. Kleinman & B. J. Good (Eds.), Culture and depression: Studies in anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry of affect and disorder (pp. 369–428). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Good, M. J., & Good, B. J. (2008). Indonesia Sakit: Indonesian disorders and subjective experience and interpretice politics of contemporary Indonesian artists. In M. J. Good, S. T. Hyde, & Good, B. J. (Eds.), Postcolonial disorders (pp. 62–108). Berkeley: University of California Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Green, L. (1999). Fear as a way of life: Mayan widows in rural Guatemala. New York: Columbia University Press.
Gustafsson, M. L. (2009). War and shadows: The haunting of Vietnam. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hagengimana, A., & Hinton, D. E. (2009). Ihahamuka, a Rwandan syndrome of response to the genocide: Blocked flow, spirit assault, and shortness of breath. In Hinton, D. E. & Good, B. J. (Eds.), Culture and panic disorder (pp. 205–29). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hinton, A. L. (2005). Why did they kill? Cambodia in the shadow of genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hinton, A. L. (2013). Transitional justice time: Uncle San, Aunty Yan, and outreach at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. In Mayersen, D. & Pohlman, A. (Eds.), Mass atrocities in Asia: Legacies and prevention (pp. 82–94). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hinton, A. L. (Ed.) (2010). Transitional justice: Global mechanisms and local realities after genocide and mass violence. New Brunswick, NJ:Rutgers University Press.Google Scholar
Hinton, A. L., & O’Neill, K. L. (Eds.) (2009). Genocide, truth, memory, and representation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinton, D. E. (2012). Multicultural challenges in the delivery of anxiety treatment. Depression and Anxiety, 29, 1–3.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hinton, D. E., Chea, A., Ba, P., & Pollack, M. (2004). Olfactory panic among Cambodian refugees: A contextual approach. Transcultural Psychiatry, 41, 155–99.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hinton, D. E., Field, N. P., Nickerson, A., Bryant, R., & Simon, N. (2013). Dreams of the dead among Cambodian refugees: Frequency, phenomenology, and relationship to complicated grief and PTSD. Death Studies, 37, 750–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinton, D. E., & Good, B. J. (2009). A medical anthropology of panic sensations: Ten analytic perspectives. In Hinton, D. E. & Good, B. (Eds.), Culture and panic disorder (pp. 57–85). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Google Scholar
Hinton, D. E., Hinton, A., Chhean, D., Pich, V., Loeum, J. R., & Pollack, M. H. (2009). Nightmares among Cambodian refugees: The breaching of concentric ontological security. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 33, 219–65.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hinton, D. E., & Hinton, S. D. (2002). Panic disorder, somatization, and the new cross-cultural psychiatry; or, the seven bodies of a medical anthropology of panic. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 26, 155–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hinton, D. E., & Kirmayer, L. J. (2013). Local responses to trauma: Symptom, affect, and healing. Transcultural Psychiatry, 50, 607–21.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hinton, D. E., & Lewis-Fernández, R. (2010). Idioms of distress among trauma survivors: Subtypes and clinical utility. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 34, 209–18.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hinton, D. E., & Lewis-Fernández, R. (2011). The cross-cultural validity of posttraumatic stress disorder: Implications for DSM-5. Depression and Anxiety, 28, 783–801.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hinton, D. E., Nguyen, L., & Pollack, M. H. (2007). Orthostatic panic as a key Vietnamese reaction to traumatic events: The case of September 11th. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 21, 81–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinton, D. E., Nickerson, A., & Bryant, R. A. (2011). Worry, worry attacks, and PTSD among Cambodian refugees: A path analysis investigation. Social Science and Medicine, 72, 1817–25.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hinton, D. E., Peou, S., Joshi, S., Nickerson, A., & Simon, N. (2013). Normal grief and complicated bereavement among traumatized Cambodian refugees: Cultural context and the central role of dreams of the deceased. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 37, 427–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinton, D. E., Pich, V., Chhean, D., & Pollack, M. H. (2005). “The ghost pushes you down”: Sleep paralysis-type panic attacks in a Khmer refugee population. Transcultural Psychiatry, 42, 46–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hinton, D. E., Pich, V., Marques, L., Nickerson, A., & Pollack, M. H. (2010). Khyâl attacks: A key idiom of distress among traumatized Cambodia refugees. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 34, 244–78.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hinton, D. E., Rasmussen, A., Nou, L., Pollack, M. H., & Good, M. J. (2009). Anger, PTSD, and the nuclear family: A study of Cambodian refugees. Social Science and Medicine, 69, 1387–94.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hirsch, M. (1999). Projected memory: Holocaust photographs in personal and public fantasy. In M. Bal, J. V. Crewe & L. Spitzer (Eds.), Acts of memory: Cultural recall in the present (pp. 3–23). Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College: University Press of New England.
Hollan, D. (2004). Self systems, cultural idioms of distress, and the psycho-biology consequences of childhood suffering. Transcultural Psychiatry, 41, 62–79.CrossRef
Honwana, A. M. (2006). Child soldiers in Africa. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Igreja, V., Dias-Lambranca, B., Hershey, D. A., Racin, L., Richters, A., & Reis, R. (2010). The epidemiology of spirit possession in the aftermath of mass political violence in Mozambique. Social Science and Medicine, 71, 592–9.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
James, E. (2008). Haunting ghosts: Madness, gender, and ensekirite in Haiti in the democratic era. In M. J. Good, S. T. Hyde, & Good, B. J. (Eds.), Postcolonial disorders (pp. 132–56). Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Jenkins, J. H. (2011). Pharmaceutical self: The global shaping of experience in an age of psychopharmacology, 1st ed. Santa Fe, NM:School for Advanced Research Press.Google Scholar
Jenkins, J. H., & Valiente, M. (1994). Bodily transactions of the passions: El calor (the heat) among Salvadoran women. In Csordas, T. (Ed.), The body as existential ground: Studies in culture, self, and experience (pp. 163–82). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kirmayer, L. J., & Blake, . (2009). Theoretical perspectives on the cross-cultural study of panic disorder. In D. Hinton & B. Good (Eds.), Culture and panic disorder (pp. 31–56). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Kirmayer, L. J. (1996a). Confusion of the senses: Implications of ethnocultural variations in somatoform and dissociative disorders for PTSD. In Marsella, A. J., Friedman, M. J., Gerrity, E. T. & Scurfield, R. M. (Eds.), Ethnocultural aspects of posttraumatic stress disorder: Issues, research, and clinical applications (pp. 131–64). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.Google Scholar
Kirmayer, L. J. (1996b). Tense past: Cultural essays in trauma and memory. In Antze, P. & Lambek, M. (Eds.), Tense past: Cultural essays in trauma and memory (pp. 173–98). New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kirmayer, L. J., Lemelson, R., & Barad, M. (Eds.) (2007). Understanding trauma: Integrating biological, clinical, and cultural perspectives. New York:Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirmayer, L. J., & Sartorius, N. (2007). Cultural models and somatic syndromes. Psychosomatic Medicine, 69, 832–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kleinman, A., & Becker, A. E. (1998). “Sociosomatics”: The contributions of anthropology to psychosomatic medicine. Psychosomatic Medicine, 60, 389–93.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kleinman, A., Das, V., & Lock, M. (Eds.) (1997). Social suffering. Berkeley: University of California.Google Scholar
Kleinman, A., & Good, B. J. (Eds.) (1985). Culture and depression: Studies in anthropology and cross-cultural psychiatry of affect and disorder. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kleinman, A., & Kleinman, J. (1994). How bodies remember: Social memory and bodily experience of criticism, resistance, and delegitimation following China’s cultural revolution. New Literary History, 25, 707–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Langer, L. L. (1991). Holocaust testimonies: The ruins of memory. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Lewis, S. (2013). Trauma and the making of flexible minds in the Tibetan exile community. Ethos 41, 313–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lischer, S. K. (2005). Dangerous sanctuaries: Refugee camps, civil war, and the dilemmas of humanitarian aid. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Lubkemann, S. C. (2008). Culture in chaos: An anthropology of the social condition in war. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Malkki, L. H. (1995). Purity and exile: Violence, memory, and national cosmology among Hutu refugees in Tanzania. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
McNally, R. J., & Frueh, B. C. (2013). Why are Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans seeking PTSD disability compensation at unprecedented rates?Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 27, 520–6.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Miller, K. E., & Rasmussen, A. (2010). War exposure, daily stressors, and mental health in conflict and post-conflict settings: Bridging the divide between trauma-focused and psychosocial frameworks. Social Science and Medicine, 70, 7–16.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2012). The make-believe space: Affective geography in a postwar polity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Neuner, F., Pfeiffer, A., Schauer-Kaiser, E., Odenwald, M., Elbert, T., & Ertl, V. (2012). Haunted by ghosts: Prevalence, predictors and outcomes of spirit possession experiences among former child soldiers and war-affected civilians in Northern Uganda. Social Science and Medicine, 75, 548–54.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Nickerson, A., & Hinton, D. E. (2011). Anger regulation in traumatized Cambodian refugees: The perspectives of Buddhist monks. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 35, 396–416.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Obeyesekere, G. (1990). The work of culture: Symbolic transformation in psychoanalysis and anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Perera, S. (2001). Spirit possessions and avenging ghosts: Stories of supernatural activity as narratives of terror and mechanisms of coping and remembering. In Das, V., Kleinman, A., Lock, M., Ramphele, M. & Reynolds, P. (Eds.), Remaking a world: Violence, social suffering, and recovery (pp. 157–200). Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Reis, R. (2013). Children enacting idioms of witchcraft and spirit possession in response to trauma: Therapeutically beneficial, and for whom?Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 50, 622–43.Google ScholarPubMed
Robben, A. C. G. M., & Suárez-Orozco, M. M. (2000). Cultures under siege: Collective violence and trauma. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism, 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage.
Seligman, R., & Brown, R. A. (2010). Theory and method at the intersection of anthropology and cultural neuroscience. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 5, 130–7.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Straker, G. (1992). Faces in the revolution: The psychological effects of violence on township youth in South Africa. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Suleiman, S. R. (2006). Crises of memory and the Second World War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Summerfield, D. (1999). A critique of seven assumptions behind psychological trauma programmes in war-affected areas. Social Science and Medicine, 48, 1449–62.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Taylor, C. C. (1992). Milk, honey, and money: Changing concepts in Rwandan healing. Washington, DC: Smithsonian.
Trawick, M. (2007). Enemy lines: Childhood, warfare, and play in Batticaloa. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
van Duijl, M., Nijenhuis, E., Komproe, I. H., Gernaat, H. B., & de Jong, J. T. (2010). Dissociative symptoms and reported trauma among patients with spirit possession and matched healthy controls in Uganda. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry, 34, 380–400.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Volkan, V. (2001). Transgenerational transmisssions and chosen traumas: An aspect of large-group identity. Group Analysis, 34, 79–97.CrossRef
Watters, E. (2010). Crazy like us: The globalization of the American psyche. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Yager, J. (2009). Review of “Moscow Dreams.” Times literary supplement, May 29.
Young, A. (2007). Commentary: 9/11: Mental health in the wake of terrorist attacks. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 195, 1030–2.CrossRef
Young, A. (1995). The harmony of illusions: Inventing post-traumatic stress disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zraly, M., Rubin, S., & Mukamana, D. (2013). Motherhood and resilience among Rwandan genocide-rape survivors. Ethos, 41, 411–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Zurbuchen, M. S. (2005). Beginning to remember: The past in the Indonesian present. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×