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Reviewed by:
  • Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity
  • Brian Steensland
Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. By Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sztompka. University of California Press, 2004. 314 pp. Cloth, $65.00; paper $24.95.

Is it possible that the tragic events of September 11, 2001, might not have traumatized the American people as it subsequently did? In developing a theory of cultural trauma, the authors of this volume suggest just that possibility. Alexander and his colleagues adopt an unapologetically social constructionist orientation to argue that events, even those on the scale of the 9/11 attacks, are not inherently traumatic. Rather, the cultural templates through which they are experienced render them so. This approach to trauma redirects our attention from looking at the nature of events to looking at their collective representation.

The book is a collective enterprise, but each of the six chapters (plus an epilogue) is written by a single author. Alexander sketches a theory of cultural trauma and offers this definition: "Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their identity in fundamental and irreversible ways" (1). The analytical linchpin here is the relationship between cultural trauma and collective [End Page 1776] identity: no threat to group identity, no cultural trauma. This defines many types of tragedy as something other than cultural trauma, and thus beyond the scope of the book. For example, slavery was not culturally traumatic for blacks until the creation of an African American identity during Reconstruction against which slavery was retrospectively cast as traumatic. Neither was the Holocaust initially traumatic for Jews (much less, the West) until it was later coded and narrated as an assault on collective identity. Some may find this focus on the relationship between trauma and collective identity restrictive, since it brackets the significance of other sources of subjective experience. Certainly blacks were in some sense traumatized by slavery before it became a touchstone for collective identity decades after Emancipation. Yet it is threats to collective identities that the authors seek to elucidate.

Alexander distinguishes the book's explanatory approach from two existing "lay theories" of trauma — Enlightenment and psychoanalytic versions — that each suffers from the "naturalistic fallacy:" the assumption that events themselves create trauma. While Alexander's past work has been self-consciously neo-Durkheimian, his theory of cultural trauma contains both Durkheimian and Weberian elements. He discusses cultural classification, collective memory, and symbolic pollution, but also identifies carrier groups, institutional settings, and stratification hierarchies as essential elements in explaining the origins and routinization of narratives of trauma. In his empirical chapter on the creation of the Holocaust as a universal "trauma drama," these Weberian strands play second fiddle to a reading more firmly grounded in literary theory and French structuralism. Nevertheless, the synthetic theoretical framework is spelled out clearly.

The other co-authors highlight and extend various facets of the theory. Smelser explicates how emotions provide a bridge between cultural and psychological levels of trauma, and how affective states create the conditions in which particular claims about trauma resonate. Eyerman inverts Alexander's analytic framework by placing collective identity in the foreground. He examines the formation of African American identities in the late 1800s against the backdrop of an emergent narrative on the trauma of slavery, and then charts how this trauma narrative changed in response to diverging black identity movements during the subsequent century. Giesen's chapter on German national identity after the Holocaust takes a similar interest in trauma as a touchstone for identity formation and change. Sztompka outlines an ideal-typical sequence through which traumas unfold and applies it to the collapse of the communist system in East-Central Europe.

Smelser's epilogue applies a cultural trauma framework to the events of September 11, 2001. Written just four months after the attacks, it demonstrates the difficulty of applying a constructionist approach to events that are still so fresh. He successfully shows how strands of American culture mediated the perceptions of the attacks, but unfortunately does not bolster the strongest premise of the book — namely, that...

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