Trauma: A Social Theory

In this book Jeffrey C. Alexander develops an original social theory oftrauma and uses it to carry out a series of empirical investigationsinto social suffering around the globe. Alexander argues that traumas are not merely psychological butcollective experiences, and that trauma work plays a key role indefining the origins and outcomes of critical social conflicts. Heoutlines a model of trauma work that relates interests of carriergroups, competing narrative identifications of victim and perpetrator,utopian and dystopian proposals for trauma resolution, the performativepower of constructed events, and the distribution of organizationalresources.Alexander explores these processes in richly textured case studies ofcultural-trauma origins and effects, from the universalism of theHolocaust to the particularism of the Israeli right, from postcolonialbattles over the Partition of India and Pakistan to the invisibility ofthe Rape of Nanjing in Maoist China. In a particularly controversialchapter, Alexander describes the idealizing discourse of globalizationas a trauma-response to the Cold War.Contemporary societies have often been described as more concerned withthe past than the future, more with tragedy than progress. In Trauma: A Social Theory, Alexander explains why.