Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity

Journal of Political and Military Sociology, Summer 2007 by Bartmanski, Dominik

Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity by J.C. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N.J. Smelser, P. Sztompka. Berkeley: University of California Press (2004). (304 pp.)

Reviewed by Dominik Bartmanski

Yale University

Once in a while there appears on the sociological market a collaborative work that evinces a remarkable conceptual coherence in spite of its manifold empirical references and authors' independent original styles. This book is an epitome of such a production. Although not absolutely unanimous in their theoretical judgments, the authors develop here a series of compelling theoretical arguments that form an explanatory structure challenging the majority of lay and scientific views on social trauma. But the studies included in the book do more than that. They insightfully grapple with important questions about the nature of collective identity and set forth an audacious cultural framework that redefines the common preconceptions about the underpinnings of moral order and social change. In this sense the volume as a whole is an outstanding meditation of five renowned sociologists on the modalities of normative bonds and on what it takes to properly understand them.

The book is opened by a bold theoretical introduction by Jeffrey Alexander who emphasizes the significance of the book's crucial assertion, namely that events are not inherently traumatic. This clearly constructivist statement forms the conceptual pivot around which all the essays revolve. Alexander insists that the mission of an attentive sociologist is to gain "the sense of strangeness," i.e., to render seemingly obvious phenomena unusual. The analyses presented here aim at exactly this theoretical effect by treating harmful social incidents and processes not as "naturally born" but as "intentionally made," not as harrowing and detrimental "in themselves" but as "believed to be such." In other words, Alexander underscores that the work does not stem from the interest in the ontology of the things human but in developing an epistemology of our collective representations that constitute a prevailing sense of community.

The following essay by Neil Smelser reiterates this general point and proposes a formal definition of cultural trauma as publicly cultivated memory laden with negative affect. Thereby Smelser makes an important contribution to the culturalist discourse, for he shows that the symbolic medium of culture does not exhaust itself in the sphere of "socially constructed" meanings but also includes the collective acts of "endowing events with affects." If we observe a systematic attribution of negative affects to a social event, we are likely to deal with a cultural trauma.

Such a stance may make readers assume that the studies included in the book simply follow the famous direction charted by Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. Yet this is not exactly right. Although the authors do treat social traumas as "imagined events," they employ a Durkheimian rather than an Andersonian notion of social imagination, which emphasizes not "illusory" but "representational" aspect of culture. Moreover, even if Durkheim remains the prominent background figure of the book, all the contributions seek to utilize a multidimensional approach to social problems. Contrary to what contemporary sociological audiences might expect from self-consciously constructivist thinkers, their articles not only offer counterintuitive accounts of "socially mediated attributions" but also recognize the importance of particular carrier groups and the considerable constraints of structural factors. While they focus attention on symbolic properties of social discourses and cultural boundaries between sacred and profane, there is always a room for Weberian takes that underscore the importance of particular historical settings. Whether it is a story of the Nazi genocide (Alexander, Giesen), an account of slavery in America (Eyerman) or a narrative on the shock of political transition in Eastern Europe (Sztompka), the authors always make sure they provide a reader with a historical context and the particularities of a given time and place.

If the study as a whole suffers from any shortcomings, it is the fact that its empirical scope is relatively narrow. Although Alexander mentions in his opening theoretical essay several non-Western cases of cultural trauma, the ground covered in the book remains confined to the well-known phenomena of North American and European societies. Moreover, while the new theoretical perspective promises to treat them as "strange" in Alexander's formulation, they do not quite cease to appear familiar and deceptively self-evident. Especially, the epilogue by Smelser devoted to the terror of September 11, 2001, attests to the fact that it is hard to convincingly substantiate antinaturalistic postulate when traumatogenic events are not just "historical facts" but current issues of huge political weight and poignant personal involvements. Suggesting that there is such thing as "quintessential" cultural trauma, Smelser balances a bit suspiciously at the border of the new approach and the traditional "naturalistic" accounts that the authors seek to impugn. This implies, inter alia, that there is a deep temporal aspect to the trauma process that is not thoroughly explored in the theories fleshed out in the book.