HGSE Professor Marcelo Suarez-Orozco Edits New Volume on the Trauma of Collective Violence

This century has brought barbaric episodes of large-scale violence and trauma: the Holocaust, the Cambodian killing fields, the unprecedented state-terror generated by the Latin American counterinsurgency campaigns, the organized ethnic cleansings and sexual assaults in the former Yugoslavia, and the carefully orchestrated interethnic bloodbaths in Rwanda and Burundi.

Long after the slaughter ends and peace treaties are signed, violence continues to shape the inner, interpersonal, and socio-cultural words of victims and their children. Anthropologists and psychoanalysts have independently looked at the human cost and traumatic aftermath of war and collective violence. Rarely have they worked together to examine how large-scale violence simultaneously afflicts individuals and cultures.

Cultures under Siege: Collective Violence and Trauma, edited by Harvard Graduate School of Education Professor Marcelo Suárez-Orozco and Utrecht University Professor Antonius C.G.M. Robben, draws on the work of anthropologists, psychologists, and psychoanalysts to look at the complex, overlapping ways that societies and individuals come to grips with the traumatic effects of violence, humiliation, discrimination, and feelings of historical injustice. Past humiliations may be passed on from parent to child, and from one generation to the next. Feelings of shame, helplessness, and loss of self-worth are borne by each generation in the belief that the next generation will undo the past harm and humiliation.

Examining episodes of mass violence that have occurred around the globe, including Slovenia, Greece, Israel, the United States, India, and Argentina, the authors show how individual acts of terrorism destroy fundamental cultural norms and kinship ties, leaving cultures in ruins for generations.

"The mass and public rapings organized in the recent violence in the Balkans (Serbian soldiers raping Bosnian women) and Rwanda (Hutu soldiers raping Tutsi women) highlight the socio-cultural uses of violence," says Marcelo Suárez-Orozco. "In both Bosnia and Rwanda, fathers and mothers were made to witness the repeated brutal sexual assault of their daughters, destroying the most basic culturally constituted parental function: protect the children."

Providing provocative, at times deeply troubling, insights into the darker side of humanity, Cultures under Siegeproposes new ways of understanding how cultures are affected by massive outbreaks of violence. The authors demonstrate how several path-breaking concepts such as those emerging from studies of the Holocaust can be applied to the interpretation of large-scale violence and massive trauma in other societies.

Chapters Include:

• "Reflections on the Prevalence of the Uncanny in Social Violence" by Yolanda Gampel
• "The Assault on Basic Trust: Disappearance, Protest, and Reburial in Argentina" by Antonius C.G.M. Robben
• "Mitigating Discontents with Children in War: An Ongoing Psychoanalytic Inquiry" by Roberta J. Apfel and Bennett Simon
• "Child Psychotherapy as an Instrument in Cultural Research: Treating War-Traumatized Children in Former-Yugoslavia" by David de Levita
• "The Traumatized Social Self: the Parsi Predicament in Modern Bombay" by Tanya M. Luhrmann
• "Identities under Siege: Immigration Stress and Social Mirroring among the Children of Immigrants" by Carola Suárez-Orozco
• "Modern Greek and Turkish Identities and the Psychodynamics of Greek-Turkish Relations" by Vamik D. Volkan and Norman Itzkowitz
• "The Violence of Non-Recognition: Becoming a 'Conscious' Muslim Woman in Turkey" by Katherine P. Ewing

About the Editors

Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco is a Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and co-director of the Harvard Immigration Project. His recent books include Transformations: Immigration, Family Life, and Achievement Motivation Among Latino Adolescents (with C. Suárez-Orozco), The Making of Psychological Anthropology II (with G. and L. Spiner), Status Inequality (with G. De Vos) and Children of Immigration (with C. Suárez-Orozco). He is the editor ofCrossings: Mexican Immigration in Interdisciplinary Perspectives and other collections.

Antonius C.G.M. Robben is a Professor at Utrecht University. He is the author of Sons of the Sea Goddess: Economic Practice and Discursive Conflict in Brazil and co-author of Fieldwork under Fire: Contemporary Studies of Violence and Survival.

For More Information

Contact Christine Sanni at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (617-496-5873) or Alan Young at Cambridge University Press (212-924-3900 ext. 310). For order information, contact Cambridge University Press at 1-800-872-7423.