Epistemologies of Trauma

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 48-56
Author(s):  
Tyler Tully
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Narrative Therapy ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Discursive Practice ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Trauma Memory

Beginning with Cathy Caruth's post-structuralist approach in the early 1990's, the study of trauma, memory, and affect has seen significant growth across many academic disciplines. Recent postcolonial perspectives, however, criticize Caruth's trauma theory for its focus on individual melancholia, its Eurocentric assumptions, and its diminishment of discursive practice and ritual. This article considers the rapidly expanding field of trauma studies, including current neuroscientific and biological approaches, to clarify the depth and breadth of trauma's relation to memory inscription, cultural identity, and the embodied transmission of trauma. Using a comparative methodology to examine the seminal contributions of Ted Jennings to the field of ritual studies (Jennings 1982, 1987, 2014) that correspond with Judith Herman's three-stage narrative therapy process (Herman 1997), this essay suggests that Herman's method of narrative construction conveys unique, embodied knowledge that can be understood as ritual performance. Several case studies are put into conversation with Herman's trauma theory in the conclusion of this paper to illustrate possible correctives to the weaknesses inherent in Caruth's “unspeakability” school of trauma theory—correctives having implications for fields as wide-ranging as cultural history, anthropology, ritual studies, affect theory, collective memory, anthropology, and postcolonial approaches to the study of religion.

scholarly journals Ritual Studies

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Post
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Second Phase ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Liturgical Movement ◽  
Death Studies ◽  
Liturgical Studies ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Material Religion

Ritual studies is not a school, nor is it a theory or a method; it is a multi- or interdisciplinary platform for the academic, critical, and systematic study of ritual, or in the words of the founding father of ritual studies, Ronald Grimes: it is a field. The platform of ritual studies, which emerged in the mid-1970s, initially combined the fields of religious studies, anthropology, liturgical studies, and theater studies. The emergence of ritual studies as a field of research of its own fits seamlessly into a broader development in academia that took place in three phases. The first phase took place during the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, when academic disciplines came into being and formed distinct profiles. The study of ritual plays a prominent role in (comparative) religious studies (Eliade, Otto, Van der Leeuw), in philosophy (ritual and symbol, Ricoeur), in anthropology and sociology (Durkheim, Turner), in psychology (Jung), and in cultural history (Huizinga). There was at this time remarkably little interest in ritual among theologians. It was not until the influence of the Liturgical Movement that a change occurred. The second phase took place during the long decade of the 1960s, which saw the start of a fruitful interdisciplinary phase. Rituals were thought to offer an effective entrance into a culture, allowing one to penetrate it deeply. The liturgical renewal project also took place after Vaticanum II, and it was in this setting that the term “ritual studies” was first used by the American Academy of Religion in 1977. The beginning of the 21st century saw the start of a new phase, during which different disciplines have been connected and integrated into large, multidisciplinary thematic clusters. In this context, the field of ritual studies features in a broad range of studies, including cultural memory studies, media and communication studies, death studies, leisure studies, material religion studies, migration studies, and many others.

Hexametrical Genres from Homer to Theocritus

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Athanasious Faraone
Keyword(s):  
Internal Structure ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Early History ◽  
Classical Period ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Ritual Performance ◽  
Detailed Picture

This book focuses on the evidence for short, non-epic hexametrical genres as a way of gaining new insights into the variety of their often ritual performance and their early history. It also shows how poets from Homer to Theocritus embedded or imitated these genres to enrich their own poems, by playing with and sometimes overturning the generic expectations of their audiences or readers. In doing so the book combines literary and ritual studies to produce a rich and detailed picture of a number of genres performed in sanctuaries, such as hymns and laments for Adonis, or in other spaces likewise dedicated to traditional speech-acts, such as epithalamia, oracles, or incantations. It deals primarily with the recovery of a number of lost or underappreciated hexametrical genres, which are usually left out of modern taxonomies of archaic hexametrical poetry, either because they survive only in fragments or because the earliest evidence for them dates to the classical period and beyond. Of central importance will be the surviving hexametrical poets, especially those of archaic and Hellenistic date, who embed or imitate traditional hexametrical genres of shorter duration either to give a recognizable internal structure to a shorter poem or to an episode or speech within a longer one.

Trauma and ordinary objects in Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett

2018 ◽  
pp. 135-154
Author(s):  
Yoshiki Tajiri
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Ordinary Life ◽  
Ordinary Objects ◽  
To Come ◽  
Shed Light

In this chapter, Yoshiki Tajiri focuses on the connection between trauma and everyday life: a traumatised subject needs to come to terms with everyday life and can find ordinary objects in it unexpectedly significant. By discussing such aspects of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, this chapter will illuminate the ways in which trauma and ordinary life are correlated rather than opposed. It also demonstrates that trauma theory and everyday life studies can stimulate each other: trauma is far from an everyday phenomenon, but it can shed light on the nature of everyday life after calamities of modernity as in the cases of Woolf and Beckett; conversely, there may be ways of enriching trauma studies by incorporating reflections on everyday life.

Evangelical Encounters: The American Tract Society and the Rituals of Print Distribution in Antebellum America

2019 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 200-234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonia Hazard
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Distribution Systems ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Antebellum America ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Sacred Objects ◽  
Media Distribution

Abstract The American Tract Society, an evangelical publisher, built one of the largest media distribution systems in antebellum America. Called “colportage” from 1841, the system mobilized hundreds of “colporteurs” who delivered tracts and books to people, mostly poor whites, in their homes across the United States. This article draws on ritual studies and affect theory to argue that colportage encounters were affectively charged rituals in which colporteurs staged a disposition of spaces, bodies, speech acts, and tempos to transmit affect, shape the subjectivity of readers, and consecrate books and tracts as sacred objects. An up-close examination of these encounters puts pressure on ideas of religious print as a democratizing medium, demonstrating that the reception of evangelical texts was conditioned by the forceful processes through which they were delivered into the hands of readers.

Modern Social Imaginaries

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (4) ◽  
pp. 1056-1057
Author(s):  
Ronald Beiner
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Charles Taylor ◽  
History Of Philosophy ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Social Imaginary ◽  
Social Imaginaries ◽  
History Of ◽  
Duke University

Modern Social Imaginaries, Charles Taylor, Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 215The originality of Charles Taylor's thought can be seen in the fact that it is not easy to “place” his work over the last fifteen years in the categories of standard academic disciplines. It is not really political philosophy. It is not really sociology (though it perhaps leans more towards sociology than towards political philosophy). It is something else. But what? Cultural history and the history of philosophy clearly provide the materials for Taylor's enterprise, but whatever it is, it aims for something intellectually more ambitious than mere intellectual or cultural history. The term “social imaginary” in fact captures quite well this “unplaceability” of his work between philosophy and sociology.

Ritual Individuation and Ritual Change

2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 340-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl Seaquist
Keyword(s):  
Papua New Guinea ◽  
New Guinea ◽  
Fundamental Concept ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Ritual Performance

AbstractWhat makes a ritual performance an instance of one ritual and not another? When we observe unfamiliar rituals, how do we know where one ends and the next begins? Is there a principled way of distinguishing mere preparations from the ritual proper? Can rituals change, and how do we know if they have changed? Current ritual studies methods give us no systematic means of answering such questions. Individuation is a familiar and fundamental concept in philosophy, and it should belong to the methodological toolbox of every student of ritual. This paper provides a solid introduction to some basic problems in ritual studies theory, illustrated by detailed examples from Episcopal liturgy and ritual in New Ireland (Papua New Guinea).

scholarly journals (Un)Exceptional Trauma, Existential Insecurity, and Anxieties of Modern Subjecthood: A Phenomenological Analysis of Arbitrary Sovereign Violence

2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Sabeen Ahmed
Keyword(s):  
Affect Theory ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Life ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Original Theory ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article examines the lasting phenomenological consequences of inhabiting “spaces” of exception by rethinking the operation of sovereign violence therein. Taking as its point of departure Giorgio Agamben’s suggestion that the ‘state of exception’ is the ‘rule’ of modern politics,  I argue  that  arbitrary sovereign violence  has taken the place of the ‘sovereign decision’ of Carl Schmitt’s original theory.  However, recognizing that  it is neither enough simply to articulate the institutional grid of intelligibility of the state of exception nor expose the  logics  of sovereignty that make possible arbitrary violence, it draws on phenomenology, affect theory, and trauma studies to reorient our focus  from the  sovereign  to the  subject  upon whom sovereign power is executed. Ultimately  it proposes  a new understanding of modern subjecthood as one of  existential insecurity  generated by the ‘new age of anxiety’  permeating social and political life  today.

scholarly journals Meaghan Morris: Cultural Historian

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Healy
Keyword(s):  
Social Sciences ◽  
Cultural Studies ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Knowledge Work ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
The Social ◽  
Cultural Historian ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Cultural Theorist

Meaghan Morris was celebrated at the Meaghan Morris Festival as a mentor, a cultural theorist, a much-loved colleague, a lecturer, a polemicist and a stirrer, a teacher, an internationalist, a translator and much else besides. Here, I want to add to that chorus by making a very specific case: that Meaghan Morris is the most significant and innovative living Australian cultural historian. This characterisation is, in part, rooted in my own investments in work at the intersections of cultural studies and cultural history but it is of much greater significance. An influential contemporary characterisation of cultural studies is that it was a boomer reaction to existing disciplinary constraints, a manifestation of anti-canonical impulses that choose instead to celebrate marginality while at the same time making an innovative case for the ways in which culture matters. It follows that if, today, academic disciplines in the social sciences and humanities have become highly flexible (rather than canonical) and maintained their institutional hegemony while simultaneously becoming irrelevant to much knowledge-work and that, today, margins and mainstreams seem like next-to-useless terms to describe cultural topographies or flows and that, today, culture matters nowhere so much as the rapacious industries of media cultures, then perhaps the moment of cultural studies seems of historical interest only.1

Whose shadow is it? The representation of trauma and creativity in Anton Nimblett’s ‘Ring Games’ and ‘Sections of an Orange’

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 249-265
Author(s):  
Jutta Schamp
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Trauma Theory ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Creative Self ◽  
Authentic Life ◽  
Traumatic Impact

Intervening in the current debate about an overemphasis on the individual in classical psychoanalytic trauma theory and the demand for a prioritization of the group in postcolonial trauma studies, this article proposes that Anton Nimblett’s short stories ‘Ring Games’ and titular ‘Sections of an Orange’ from his 2009 collection invite a postcolonial, post-Jungian optic because they portray the devastating effects of a colonized creative unconscious on the characters’ Self, relationships, and the collective. Both short stories explore the traumatic impact of colonialism and neoliberalism on the development of the characters’ unconscious and consciousness, unveiling the obstacles to re-inscribing a traditional heteronormative, Euro- American image of masculinity; individuating as gay; and living an authentic life. Questioning the binary opposites of the individual and the group, both short stories gesture towards the importance of creative self-realization as one cornerstone of individual and collective health when healing the destructive impact of postcolonial and neoliberal power configurations.

Memory Drawn into the Present: Waltz with Bashir and Animated Documentary

2018 ◽  
pp. 172-188
Author(s):  
Jonathan Murray
Keyword(s):  
Film Studies ◽  
Memory Studies ◽  
Academic Disciplines ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
Documentary Filmmaking ◽  
International Success

The international success of Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008) saw this work routinely defined and discussed as the first feature-length example of animated documentary cinema. This chapter analyses Folman’s film and the multidisciplinary body of scholarly response that it has provoked. Much response to Folman’s film evaluates it in isolation and speculates more ambitiously on animated documentary’s possible aesthetic, conceptual and ethical strengths and weaknesses as a distinctive mode of audio-visual practice. This chapter’s analysis of Folman’s film likewise identifies defining formal and thematic characteristics that drive the contemporary turn towards animated documentary filmmaking more generally. This chapter also identifies several main evolving concepts and debates that characterise animated documentary scholarship as a distinctive subset of Animation Studies and Film Studies. Finally, this chapter also identifies other academic disciplines – such as Memory Studies and Trauma Studies – within which significant discussion of animated documentary is also taking place.

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