Anthropology and Trauma

People may suffer trauma in their personal lives, through loss of loved ones, injury, social and physical deprivation. Psychologists and psychiatrists may study and treat such distress individually. Anthropologists do as well, but as cultural phenomena interpreted through a conventional societal lens.

As an example of such culturally constructed trauma, consider the following. In Latin America, posttraumatic stress syndrome is identified as susto. Much more widely diagnosed and distributed throughout the population, anyone can suffer from susto, as a result of a strong emotion and often but not exclusively fear. Anthropologists who study susto examine the cultural context that supports and treats those who suffer from susto. Among the Kaqchikel (Maya) of Guatemala healers who specialize in curing susto are called oyonela or “callers.” When one is severely frightened and does not immediately drink water, one's third soul, the one that wanders as we dream or travels to check on loved ones, can become lost, rooted in the spot where the fright occurred. The soul must be “called” back to the body. The loved ones of the susto sufferer gather around to help entice the spirit back. The caller, usually using a basin of water as a medium, calls out to the soul, entreating its return. Callings are usually done in triads. Even if the soul returns on the first summons, two more ceremonies are done to firmly re-root the straying essence. Cures for susto and local conceptions of the illness are individual, though anthropologists often identify cultural bases for sustaining this model of illness.

However, all too often, crises and the trauma they induce affect large populations. Anthropologists also dedicate themselves to the study of posttrau-matic distress at the societal level. There are three basic approaches to the study of societal trauma: (a) fact-finding; (b) assessments of damage, with facilitation of the development and implementation of coping mechanisms; and (c) long-term ethnographic and applied involvement with the community.

When a community is hit by a disaster, natural or induced, the inhabitants face an existential crisis. Survivors, if any, must decide if they wish to rebuild or to move on and dedicate their erstwhile homeland as monument to those who died. Today, the Hopi of Arizona cherish the site of the community of Awatovi as a shrine to those who were killed there in 1700 by other tribal members in a struggle to preserve the indigenous lifeways. In Guatemala, the Tz'utujiil settlement of Pan Aab'aj was buried by a mudslide during Hurricane Stan in 2005; survivors relocated to Checumuc (Xe Kumuq), and the original townsite was consecrated as a cemetery and the dead and their homes left interred.