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-cb9f654ff-9b74x Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-08-07T17:52:14.749Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

21 - Trauma in Context: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2009

By
Robert Lemelson ,
Laurence J. Kirmayer  and
Mark Barad
Edited by
Laurence J. Kirmayer ,
Robert Lemelson  and
Mark Barad
Robert Lemelson
Affiliation:
Lecturer Departments of Anthropology and Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; President Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR); Co-director Lemelson Foundation
Laurence J. Kirmayer
Affiliation:
James McGill Professor and Director Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University; Director Culture and Mental Health Research Unit, Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital, Montréal, Québec
Mark Barad
Affiliation:
Associate Professor Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles
Laurence J. Kirmayer
Affiliation:
McGill University, Montréal
Robert Lemelson
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Mark Barad
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Get access

Summary

The contributors to this book offer diverse perspectives from which to view trauma and its impacts. In this chapter, we consider how these approaches might work together to deepen our understanding of individual and collective responses to traumatic experience. Our hope is that this will illustrate the value of interdisciplinarity for advancing scientific research, clinical practice, and cultural analysis. We will weave together strands from many of the contributions but begin with a discussion of three further narratives of traumatic experience.

THE DIVERSITY OF TRAUMA RESPONSES

The three case studies we present are drawn from ongoing clinical visual ethnographic research on culture and mental illness in Indonesia by Robert Lemelson (RL). All three individuals suffered trauma during the political upheaval in Indonesia in 1965. All three experienced intense fear or terror witnessing family members being severely beaten, taken away, or killed in front of them. They all have lived in a political climate, from 1965 through the late 1990s, in which their status as relatives of alleged communist party members made them continued targets for harassment, intimidation, violence, and discrimination, often enacted by community members. However, although their exposure to traumatic events was similar in some ways, the long-term outcomes they and their families have experienced are vastly different. These divergent trajectories illustrate the complex interaction of sociocultural, psychological, and neurobiological processes that give rise to individuals' strengths and resiliencies.

Information

Type
Chapter
Information
Understanding Trauma
Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives
 , pp. 451 - 474
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2007

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.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Alarcón, R. ;D., Bell, C. ;C., Kirmayer, L. ;J., Lin, K.-H., Ustun, T. ;B., & Wisner, K. ;L. (2002). Beyond the funhouse mirrors: Research agenda on culture and psychiatric diagnosis. In Kupfer, D. ;J., First, M. ;B., & Regier, D. ;A. (Eds.), A research agenda for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual–V (pp. ;219–289). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Press.Google Scholar
Anggawati, L. (2001). Di dalam derita manusia membaja. Klaten:Wisma Sambhodi.Google Scholar
Aron, A. (1992). Testimonio, a bridge between psychotherapy and sociotherapy. Women & Therapy, 13(3), 173–189.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Atlani, L., & Rousseau, C. (2000). The politics of culture in humanitarian aid to refugees having experienced sexual violence. Transcultural Psychiatry, 37(3), 435–449.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boehnlein, J. ;K., & Kinzie, J. ;D. (1995). Refugee trauma. Transcultural Psychiatric Research Review, 32(3), 223–252.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bracken, P. ;J., Giller, J. ;E., & Summerfield, D. (1995). Psychological responses to war and atrocity: The limitations of current concepts. Social Science & Medicine, 40(8), 1073–1082.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Breslau, J. (2000). Globalizing disaster trauma: Psychiatry, science, and culture after the Kobe earthquake. Ethos, 28(2), 174–197.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cardeña, E., & Croyle, K. (2005). Acute reactions to trauma and psychotherapy: A multidisciplinary and international perspective. Binghamton, NY: Haworth Press.Google Scholar
Cribb, R. (Ed.). 1990. The Indonesian killings of 1965–1966: Studies from Java and Bali. Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University.Google Scholar
Desjarlais, R., Eisenberg, L., Good, B., & Kleinman, A. (1995). World mental health; Problems and priorities in low-income countries. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Douglass, A., & Vogler, T. ;A. (2003). Witness and memory: The discourse of trauma. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Eisenbruch, M. (1991). From post-traumatic stress disorder to cultural bereavement: Diagnosis of Southeast Asian refugees. Social Science & Medicine, 33(6), 673– 680.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Farmer, P. (2003). Pathologies of power: Health, human rights, and the new war on the poor. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Freyd, J. ;J. (1996). Betrayal trauma: The logic of forgetting childhood abuse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Gaines, A. ;D. (1992). From Diagnostic and Statistical Manual-I to III-R; Voices of self, mastery and the other: A cultural constructivist reading of U.S. psychiatric classification. Social Science & Medicine, 35(1), 3–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gathering in the paddies. (1965, November 12). Time, 86(12), 17–18.
Groleau, D., & Kirmayer, L. ;J. (2004). Sociosomatic theory in Vietnamese immigrants' narratives of distress. Anthropology & Medicine, 11(2), 117–133.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effect of human kinds. In Sperber, D., Premack, D., & Premack, A. ;J. (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (pp. ;351–383). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hacking, I. (1998). Mad travelers: Reflections on the reality of transient mental ilnesses. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.Google Scholar
Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Hinton, A. (2004). Why did they kill? Cambodia in the shadow of genocide. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Kidron, C. ;A. (2005). Surviving a distant past: A case study of the cultural construction of trauma descendant identity. Ethos, 31(4), 513–544.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kirmayer, L. ;J. (2005). Culture, context and experience in psychiatric diagnosis. Psychopathology, 38(4), 192–196.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kleinman, A. (1988). Rethinking psychiatry. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Kleinman, A. (1999). Experience and its moral modes: Culture, human conditions, and disorder. In Peterson, G. ;B. (Ed.), The Tanner lectures on human values (Vol. 20, pp. ;357–420). Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.Google Scholar
Lemelson, R. (in press). The spirits, ngeb and the social suppression of memory: A complex clinical case from Bali. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry.Google Scholar
López, S., & Guarnaccia, P. ;J. (2000). Cultural psychopathology: Uncovering the social world of mental illness. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 571–598.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Lustig, S. ;L., Weine, S. ;M., Saxe, G. ;N., & Beardslee, W. ;R. (2004). Testimonial psychotherapy for adolescent refugees: A case series. Transcultural Psychiatry, 41(1), 31–45.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
McNally, R. ;J. (2003). Remembering trauma. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Merckelbach, H., & Jelicic, M. (2004). Dissociative symptoms are related to endorsement of vague trauma items. Comprehensive Psychiatry, 45(1), 70–75.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Noer, A. ;C. (Director). (1985). “Pengkhianatan G 30 S/ PKI” [film]. Perum Produksi Film Negara.
Robinson, G. (1998). The dark side of paradise: Political violence in Bali. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Scheper-Hughes, N. (2005). Getting over: The politics of the impossible in new South Africa. Unpublished manuscript, University of California, Berkeley.Google Scholar
Summerfield, D. (1999). A critique of seven assumptions behind psychological trauma programmes in war-affected areas. Social Science & Medicine, 48(10), 1449–1462.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Wieringa, S. (2003). The birth of the New Order State in Indonesia: Sexual politics and nationalism. Journal of Women's History, 15(1), 70–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wikan, U. (1990). Managing turbulent hearts: A Balinese formula for living. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Young, A. (1995). The harmony of illusions: Inventing posttraumatic stress disorder. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Zurbuchen, M. ;S. (2005). Beginning to remember: The past in the Indonesian present. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press.Google Scholar

Accessibility standard: Unknown

Accessibility compliance for the PDF of this book is currently unknown and may be updated in the future.

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org 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.

  • Trauma in Context: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives
    • By Robert Lemelson, Lecturer Departments of Anthropology and Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; President Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR); Co-director Lemelson Foundation, Laurence J. Kirmayer, James McGill Professor and Director Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University; Director Culture and Mental Health Research Unit, Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital, Montréal, Québec, Mark Barad, Associate Professor Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, McGill University, Montréal, Robert Lemelson, University of California, Los Angeles, Mark Barad, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: Understanding Trauma
  • Online publication: 27 July 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511500008.027
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.

  • Trauma in Context: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives
    • By Robert Lemelson, Lecturer Departments of Anthropology and Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; President Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR); Co-director Lemelson Foundation, Laurence J. Kirmayer, James McGill Professor and Director Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University; Director Culture and Mental Health Research Unit, Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital, Montréal, Québec, Mark Barad, Associate Professor Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, McGill University, Montréal, Robert Lemelson, University of California, Los Angeles, Mark Barad, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: Understanding Trauma
  • Online publication: 27 July 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511500008.027
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.

  • Trauma in Context: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives
    • By Robert Lemelson, Lecturer Departments of Anthropology and Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; President Foundation for Psychocultural Research (FPR); Co-director Lemelson Foundation, Laurence J. Kirmayer, James McGill Professor and Director Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry, McGill University; Director Culture and Mental Health Research Unit, Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital, Montréal, Québec, Mark Barad, Associate Professor Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Edited by Laurence J. Kirmayer, McGill University, Montréal, Robert Lemelson, University of California, Los Angeles, Mark Barad, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: Understanding Trauma
  • Online publication: 27 July 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511500008.027
Available formats
×