Alexander, J. C., Eyerman, R., Giesen, B., Smelser, N. J. & Sztompka, P. (2004). Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Not read. The summary is drawn from the abstract or from what the work is standardly cited for. A reading should check it first.
Why this is here
The sociological account on which a group’s trauma belongs to its identity, not to any individual’s experience. For QUESTION-297 and LIT-1388 (the political legacy of slavery).
Read in its place
The work cannot be read here, so the record holds it at second hand.
Eyerman’s chapter gives the volume’s framework as its authors shared it in 2001, cited as “Alexander et al. 2001”: Smelser’s definition of cultural trauma, quoted whole (p. 2); Alexander’s “trauma process” and “carrier groups”, and the meaning struggle over the pain, the victim and the responsible party (p. 3); Sztompka’s “traumatic affects” (p. 3); and Giesen’s “temporal map” (p. 6). It applies them to slavery, the case the LIT’s summary names as Eyerman’s. Missing still: the published chapters themselves; Alexander’s theory chapter and his Holocaust chapter; the other cases the LIT’s summary names (the Holocaust, Germany after Nazism); whether the 2004 wording matches the 2001 one; and Eyerman’s chapter in the volume.
Hirst, Cyr and Merck give Alexander’s theory chapter in four quotations with page numbers: the trauma process as a collectivity’s coming to feel a horrendous event has marked its consciousness (p. 1); trauma as “acute discomfort entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity” (p. 10); the speaker, audience and situation triad (p. 12); and the constraint of unevenly distributed resources (p. 21). They also paraphrase his Holocaust chapter on Anne Frank and the series Holocaust. Their reference list swaps the two chapters’ labels. Missing still: the theory chapter’s full argument; the other authors’ chapters (Eyerman, Giesen, Smelser, Sztompka); and the volume’s cases apart from the Holocaust.