1. Cultural Trauma and Collective
Identity
Jeffrey C. Alexander
Presented by Christina Vollbrecht
FSS MUNI April 28, 2011

2. What is Cultural Trauma?
• “Cultural trauma occurs when members of a
collectivity feel they have been subjected to a
horrendous event that leaves indelible marks
on their group consciousness, marking their
memories forever and changing their future
identity in fundamental and irrevocable
ways.”
• An empirical, scientific concept
• Within the domain of social responsibility and
political action

3. I. Theoretical Roots
• “Trauma” is rooted in reality and has a language,
therefore social and collective.
• Common-sense or “Lay Trauma Theory” identifies
traumas as naturally occurring events which
undermine well-being.
• Enlightenment thinking adds that trauma is a rational
response to a naturally occurring abrupt change,
which leads towards progress.
• The psychoanalytic lens distorts the rational internal
response though emotional displacement of trauma
in the imagination.

4. I. The Naturalistic Fallacy: trauma
is socially constructed
• “Events do not, in and of themselves, create
collective trauma. Events are not inherently
traumatic. Trauma is a socially mediated attribution.”
• Imagination informs trauma construction by
representing experience, whether actually occurred
or not.
• Traumatic status is attributed to phenomena which
affect the collective identity. The destabilization of
structures of meaning depends on the imposition of
new cultural classification and the skills of powerful
agents.

5. II. the “trauma process”: between
the event and representation
1. Claim making: symbolic representations
2. Carrier groups: actors in the public sphere
3. Audience and situation: public and context
•Social actors decide to represent social pain as
a fundamental threat to who they are, where
they come from, and where they want to go

6. II. Trauma becomes the new cultural
narrative.
• A successful story answers the following
questions, both for particular groups and the
wider “people”:
– The nature of the pain: what happened?
– The nature of the victim: to who?
– The relation of the victim to the audience: what
does it have to do with me?
– Attribution of responsibility: who did it?

7. II. Mediating the language of the
narrative: Institutions and
Stratification Hierarchies
• Realms of religion (theodicy), aesthetics (imagination
and emotion), law (binding responsibilities,
punishments, reparations), science (documentation,
methodology), mass media (dramatics, distortion),
state bureaucracy (channel and tilt the process)
• Resources and networks of the institutions mediate
their influence.
• The government at all levels has significant power
over the trauma process.

8. II. “Calming down”: identity
revision, memory, and routinization
• The trauma process revises collective identity
• “lessons” become objectified
• Routinization detaches affect from meaning
• New collective identity is a source for
resolving future problems

9. III. The Rape of Nanking

10. III. The Rape of Nanking
• Wide participation in pain broadens social understanding and
incorporation when the process is successful
• Claims of trauma have been made
• For social-structural and cultural reasons, carrier groups have
not emerged
• Persuasive narratives have no been created, or have not been
successfully broadcast
• Perpetrators have not been compelled to accept moral
responsibility
• Lessons have not been memorialized or ritualized
• New scope of moral and social responsibility has not been
generated
• More particular collective identities have not been created