4

THEORIES OF CULTURAL
TRAUMA
Todd Madigan

Introduction
The theory of cultural trauma emerged from the social sciences in the early twenty-first
century, and in light of the increasing interest in what has by now become an established
research paradigm, scholars working within the field have lately begun taking stock (e.g.
Sciortino 2018; Eyerman 2019; Woods 2019). In these works of reflexive scholarship,
authors highlight a number of tensions, tendencies and diverging trajectories among the the-
ory’s many practitioners, but they stop short of calling out anything irreconcilable within
this growing skein of analysis. The purpose of the present chapter is to do just that: to argue
that there are, in fact, two distinct and not entirely compatible concepts being used under
the shared term “cultural trauma”. This has until now been unacknowledged, a fact that has
led to considerable theoretical muddiness. In order to clear the water, we would do well to
recognize that today it is more accurate to talk about the theories of cultural trauma and to
encourage scholars in the field to be cognizant of which theory they are applying to their
research.

Theories of cultural trauma

While it has long been recognized that individuals can be traumatized, it was not until the
latter part of the twentieth century that sociologists began to apply this notion to social
groups, as well (e.g. Erikson 1976; Neal 1998). The theory of cultural trauma is an exten-
sion and refinement of this novel idea (i.e. that a collectivity might experience trauma), and
it has been used to illuminate otherwise obscure social phenomena, including how individ-
uals might be traumatized by an event they did not personally experience, why some cata-
strophic events are collectively remembered while others are seemingly forgotten, and how
the boundaries of social inclusion are variously reinforced, constricted or expanded by this
sort of experience.
In what has become the standard definition of cultural trauma, Jeffrey Alexander asserts
that “Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected
to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking
their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable

45
 Todd Madigan

ways” (Alexander 2004: 1). In a crucial elucidation of this definition, he goes on to argue
that “events are not, in and of themselves, traumatic” (8). Instead, they must be represented
as traumatic. That is, they must be interpreted and articulated as such by members of soci-
ety. This involves a complex, often contentious, social process through which the nature of
the collective injury is described, victims and perpetrators are identified and consequences
are meted out. The principal mechanism for this process is narration, and usually there are
numerous incompatible narratives being put forward by competing social groups in an effort
to establish the accepted version of the event in question. These narratives can be communi-
cated through myriad modes of discourse, including political speeches, news articles, reli-
gious sermons, academic works, casual conversations, films and, of course, literature. Indeed,
literature often plays an outsized role in its ability to represent and broadcast trauma at the
cultural level. In his seminal book on the cultural trauma of American slavery, Ron Eyer-
man explores the literature of writers including Zora Hurston, Langston Hughes, Maya
Angelou, Alice Walker and Toni Morrison; in doing this, Eyerman highlights the ways in
which these writers’ works offer differing accounts of black American collective identity vis-
à-vis slavery and how these accounts lead either away from or toward cultural trauma (Eyer-
man 2001). The critical point is that this mediated, narrated nature of cultural trauma reveals
that such traumas are “made, not born” (Smelser 2004a: 37).
While those who are engaged in empirical studies based on the concept of cultural
trauma have often written as though they are all working within a single research paradigm,
it does not mean they have taken this paradigm to be monolithic. While they would all
accept the description of cultural trauma as set out above, there is still considerable differ-
ence of opinion regarding how it ought to be applied. For example, Boersema (2013)
argues that there should be greater attention paid to the emotional experiences of individuals
and to how social position, including race, class and gender, causes cultural trauma to be
differentially experienced. Ron Eyerman, one of the original creators of the theory of cul-
tural trauma, puts up some resistance to the theory’s constructivist tendencies, arguing for
a more “realist” perspective on the emotional responses to traumatic events (Eyerman 2012,
2019). In Bernhard Giesen’s elaboration of a “latency period”, he suggests a much closer
adherence to a psychoanalytic model than is typically followed in cultural trauma research
(Giesen 2004a, 2004b). Furthermore, these three scholars at times invert the larger trend
toward focusing solely on the victims of injustice. Instead, in some cases they delineate and
explore a type of cultural trauma that is unique to those who commit acts of oppression and
mass murder – a “trauma of the perpetrator” (Giesen 2004a, 2004b; Boersema 2013; Eyer-
man 2019; see also McGlothlin, Chapter 9, this volume). Inge Schmidt (2013) disputes the
commonplace notion that traumatic events must occur, if not suddenly, then within discrete
temporal bounds. She argues that there are “perpetual traumas” that are oriented toward
a danger that is yet to come (e.g. injury or death as a result of drunk driving). Because the
threat of certain types of suffering is always present, the resulting trauma is ongoing and
indefinite. The forward-looking element of perpetual traumas also challenges the scholarly
bias toward what Schmidt calls “retrospective traumas”, traumas that are understood to have
already occurred (see also Chapter 25 by Craps and Chapter 32 by Teittinen in this
volume).
In her work on the racist acquittal of Emmett Till’s murderers, Angela Onwuachi-Willig
(2016) questions the assumption that cultural traumas must be the result of an extraordinary
event, one that defies expectations. Rather, she argues for the existence of a “trauma of the
routine”, a cultural trauma that can occur even when routines are simply reaffirmed (e.g.
that black Americans are oppressed by a race-based hierarchy). And finally, abandoning the

46
 Theories of cultural trauma

requirement for direct human injury altogether, Mira Debs (2012) develops a “cultural
trauma of objects”, one in which cultural trauma is produced in response to the damage or
destruction of totemic items (e.g. world heritage sites, sacred objects, highly-valued works of
art), as opposed to the loss of human life.
With all these different perspectives on cultural trauma, it is no wonder Giuseppe Scior-
tino entitled his recent review of the concept in the plural: “Cultural Traumas” (Sciortino
2018). However, the primary innovations within most of these “cultural traumas” are still
considered by their authors to fall under the same theoretical rubric. My claim is that there
is a much deeper divide running through the heart of what is generally assumed to be
a single theory, that in fact a conceptual speciation has occurred whereby two distinct theor-
ies of cultural trauma have evolved, theories that describe wholly different social phenom-
ena. The importance of recognizing this distinction is that it leads to different social
diagnoses. In other words, scholars who apply the theory of cultural trauma to the social
world might reach opposite conclusions on such a foundational question as whether cultural
trauma has occurred in a particular society, and they might reach those opposite conclusions
based not on the empirical evidence, but for no other reason than that they are unwittingly
applying two different theories of cultural trauma.

The theory of traumatic events

For the sake of distinguishing the two theories of cultural trauma, I will refer to one as the
theory of traumatic events and the other as the theory of traumatized societies. The theory of
traumatic events focuses on the discursive struggle over the meaning of an event. In that
struggle, various narratives claiming to accurately represent the truth of the event are put
forward by different groups. In order for the event to be coded as “culturally traumatic”,
there are several criteria that must be met: (1) the struggle over the event’s meaning must
be significantly widespread throughout a society, (2) a narrative that frames the event as
catastrophic must emerge as the most widely accepted way of understanding the event, and
(3) this accepted narrative must become part of the collective memory of the social group
(Alexander 2004). Scholars working within the field of cultural trauma often refer to this
contentious process as a “trauma drama”, a play of forces contending with one another to
establish a dominant narrative of an event as either traumatic or mundane.
To see what an application of the theory of traumatic events looks like, we can look at any
number of empirical case studies. Onwuachi-Willig applies this version of cultural trauma
theory when she analyses the aftermath of the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old
black boy killed by two white men in Mississippi. She concludes that as a result of the all-
white jury’s acquittal of the murderers, African Americans suffered a cultural trauma. And
she supports this claim by arguing that the concept’s criteria were met: “All four compo-
nents of a master narrative for cultural trauma, as defined by Alexander, [were present …]
after the acquittal of Milam and Bryant [i.e. the murderers]” (Onwuachi-Willig 2016: 344).
These “four components” comprise the establishment of the following: the nature of the
pain, the nature of the victim, the relation of the trauma victim to the wider audience and
the attribution of responsibility (Alexander 2004: 12–15). In the meaning struggle that fol-
lowed the acquittal, the event was narrated as a “trauma”, but the collective identity of Afri-
can Americans was unchanged. In fact, the collective identity was reaffirmed: the “public
discourse … about the meaning of the routine harm, [consisted] of public or official affirm-
ation of the subordinated group’s marginal status” (Onwuachi-Willig 2016: 346). Onwua-
chi-Willig reiterates this finding in the following:

47
 Todd Madigan

For African Americans, continued stability meant exactly what the acquittal of
Milam and Bryant had resulted in: a reminder to all black people that they were
not part of the country’s or state’s core identity and that the laws of the nation and
the state did not exist to protect them.
(Onwuachi-Willig 2016: 347)

As I will demonstrate below, the fact that the African American collective identity was not
significantly revised in light of the traumatic event means that this historical case would not
have been deemed a cultural trauma had the researcher been working with the traumatized
societies iteration of cultural trauma theory.
An application of the theory of traumatic events similar to Onwuachi-Willig’s can be
found in Zhukova’s work on the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the
Soviet Union. In summarizing the theory of cultural trauma she deploys in her analysis,
Zhukova explains that

cultural trauma is linked to a struggle over meaning in a public sphere about the nature
of the pain, victims, and perpetrators. Trauma reaches a cultural level when questions
about responsibility are raised in the public sphere: who or what can be blamed for caus-
ing the calamity, and who can be responsible for dealing with its aftermath?
(Zhukova 2016: 336)

Thus, in the case of Chernobyl, a narrative struggle played out in the public sphere after the
catastrophe, a struggle that identified the nature of the pain, the identity of victims and
ultimately the “construction of responsibility” (Zhukova 2016: 333). Zhukova states that
a cultural trauma is created when “the responsibility for the causes and subsequent misman-
agement of a traumatic occurrence is addressed in the national public sphere through
a moral framework” (333). But again, just as in the previous example, there is no discussion
of a need to re-narrate and re-establish a fragmented collective identity; indeed, collective
identity is left relatively unscathed and unchanged in the wake of the disaster.
The body of work that falls under the rubric of cultural trauma provides many examples
of the implicit use of the theory of traumatic events. In her elaboration of the cultural trauma
suffered by the Italian people after an earthquake in 1997 badly damaged the Basilica of
St. Francis of Assisi – and importantly, the Basilica’s fourteenth-century frescoes by the
Renaissance master, Giotto – Debs states that in the public discourse, the “Basilica was
quickly coded as the central site of symbolic injury” (Debs 2012: 482) and that “the trauma
narrative centred on the frescoes” (482). Debs makes the point that in the event of damage
to or destruction of a totemic object, “its loss becomes the trauma” (480). What’s more,
because Debs is implicitly employing the theory of traumatic events, she can assert that “the
cultural trauma of the Basilica lasted two years” (489); in other words, the traumatic event
lasted for two years because the discourse about the nature of the symbolic injury – the
trauma drama – lasted for two years. In Debs’s study there is no claim that the Italians felt
compelled to change their collective identity in response to the earthquake.
In Schmidt’s research on how ever-present risk can become traumatic, she writes that
“perpetual traumas are ongoing, random, tragic events that plague everyday life – such as
drunk driving, incurable diseases, or global terrorism” (Schmidt 2013: 243; emphasis added).
In the case of drunk driving, Schmidt argues that the organization Mothers Against Drunk
Driving “has successfully anchored their trauma narrative in the public eye” (252). The trau-
matic events version of cultural trauma Schmidt applies to this case “explains how individuals

48
 Theories of cultural trauma

and societies interpret and understand their deepest fears and emotions”, and it does this in
a way similar to what we have seen highlighted in the previous examples. The only differ-
ence here is that in Schmidt’s case, the traumatic event has not yet occurred. Instead, what
she describes is how the dread of a future traumatic event leads to a trauma drama, the
struggle to define the nature of the injury, the identity of the victim and perpetrator and the
attribution of responsibility. The collective identity of the affected group (in this case,
American society) is left intact.

The theory of traumatized societies

In the theory of traumatized societies, the initial analytical steps are the same as those of the theory
of traumatic events; however, in the case of traumatized societies, these steps – the trauma drama
regarding which narrative will become the accepted version of the event – become repositioned.
In the theory of traumatized societies, the struggle to define the nature of the injury, the identity
of the victim and perpetrator and the attribution of responsibility is not the main event, but
rather the play-within-the play. In other words, the trauma drama becomes a mere scene (albeit
a critical one) in the society’s emergent, overarching narrative of collective identity.
In determining whether a collectivity has been traumatized, the theory of traumatized soci-
eties examines whether the group in question has – in light of the socially constructed trau-
matic event – felt compelled to reconstruct its collective identity. In fact, from the
traumatized societies perspective, this process of reconstructing society’s collective identity is
the foremost factor regarding whether or not cultural trauma has obtained. As Eyerman and
Sciortino put it, “a central aspect of the cultural trauma process is the attempt to re-narrate
and reestablish collective identity” (Eyerman and Sciortino 2020: 209). And this factor, this
“central aspect”, is one that, as we have seen in the preceding examples, is absent in social
analyses that apply the theory of traumatic events.
That the re-narrating of collective identity is the decisive factor in the theory of trauma-
tized societies is not surprising, for it is the fundamental analogue with psychological trauma
on which cultural trauma is based. To see this, we can point to the fact that over the course
of an individual’s life, he or she will have many negative experiences, and some of these
will be quite catastrophic. And of course, some number of these negative experiences will
be etched into the individual’s memory, never to be forgotten. However, this fact alone –
that a terrible event is not forgotten – is not sufficient to qualify it as psychological trauma.
So while we often use the word “traumatic” to describe life’s many disappointing events
(e.g. “I’ve overcooked the soufflé!”), this ordinary usage is not an argument for the clinical
understanding of trauma. Instead, psychological trauma occurs as a response to an event
(Caruth 1995: 4). And in the case of the theory of traumatized societies, the “event” that is
responded to is a socially-mediated representation, a narrative construction. Put differently,
if the original analogy from individual to cultural trauma is to hold, the public meaning
struggle that defines a traumatic event is not a response to an event – it is the event.
A society can be considered traumatized when, in response to this event, its

collective identity [becomes] significantly revised. This identity revision means that
there will be a searching re-remembering of the collective past, for memory is not
only social and fluid but deeply connected to the contemporary sense of the self.
Identities are continuously constructed and secured not only by facing the present
and future but also by reconstructing the collectivity’s earlier life.
(Alexander 2004: 22)

49
 Todd Madigan

Note that in this description of cultural trauma, Alexander asserts that when such trauma
occurs, the collective identity will undergo significant revision, re-remembering and reconstruction.
The research decision that leads toward either of the two distinct theories of cultural
trauma – traumatic events or traumatized societies – hinges precisely on how the analyst inter-
prets this significant revision, re-remembering and reconstruction of collective identity. Up
until this decision point, the two theories are analytically identical. They both see cultural
trauma as a “sociological process that defines a painful injury to the collectivity, establishes
the victim, attributes responsibility, and distributes the ideal and material consequences”
(Alexander 2004: 22). But once this is established, it is this crucial interpretation that will
determine which path one follows. If one is content to allow this significant revision, re-
remembering and reconstruction of collective identity to mean simply that the event becomes
a more-or-less permanent part of a society’s collective memory, then one will have settled
on the theory of traumatic events. However, if one chooses a stronger interpretation of this
response, one will have adopted the theory of traumatized societies.
An instructive case of what this looks like in empirical research on cultural trauma is Volker
Heins and Andreas Langenohl’s analysis of the Allied bombing of Dresden during the Second
World War. In spite of the devastating conflagration and loss of life – an event that “clearly
represents a historical instance of massive collective suffering” (Heins and Langenohl 2013: 21) –
the authors argue that “the memory of the bombing war has not been turned into a national or
‘cultural trauma’” (4). From the perspective of the theory of traumatic events, the only way the
bombing should fail to register as a cultural trauma is if it had either not been narrated as an
instance of massive collective suffering or if it had been more or less forgotten. Yet this indelible
memory of suffering in Germany’s collective memory is exactly what Heins and Langenohl
assert: “images of the bombings and their human consequences are deeply ingrained in the polit-
ical culture” (22). Instead, the authors argue that the reason the bombing “does not point to an
ongoing cultural trauma process” (21) is because it is not an event that “fundamentally shapes
the collective identity of modern-day Germans” (21); specifically, it has not been an “identity-
changing event” (4). In other words, the reason they claim that the Allied bombing of Dresden
failed to become a cultural trauma is because they use the theory of traumatized societies rather
than the theory of traumatic events.
The use of the theory of traumatized societies is ubiquitous in cultural trauma research projects.
In her exploration of the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink, Gülay Türk-
men-Dervisoglu argues that “The assassination had undermined one of the fundamental tenets
of Turkish national identity – the benevolence of Turks – and tore the national fabric” (Türk-
men-Dervisoglu 2013: 684). In this way, “the idea of ‘Turkishness’ was brought up for public
debate and reflection”, and as a result of the “fervent discussion of the meaning of Turkishness,
the assassination initiated a cultural trauma” (675). Similarly, in the examination of another assas-
sination – that of Mahatma Gandhi – Debs claims that because “cultural traumas influence
national identity” (Debs 2013: 3), the assassination generated a cultural trauma, for it produced
“a case of change and contestation in national identity” (2). And finally, Neil Smelser asserts that
the cultural trauma associated with the 9/11 attacks on the United States resulted in the “sense
that American identity had been altered fundamentally” (Smelser 2004b: 267).
Throughout Jacob Boersema’s study of the cultural trauma of apartheid as experienced
by Afrikaners living in post-apartheid South Africa, he states explicitly that the traumatic
process is “about cultural and identity change” (Boersema 2013: x) and emphasizes that the
trauma “destabilizes worldviews and shapes new ones” (234). He argues that within
a traumatized society, “cultural habits have to be unknit and rewoven” (xiv) and asserts that
the collectivity must “reconsider who [they] are as a volk or people” (xiii). Summing up his

50
 Theories of cultural trauma

claims, Boersema explains that Afrikaners “share the common challenge of negotiating and
contesting the cultural meaning of being Afrikaner after apartheid” (243). In much the same
way, when Alexander and Rui Gao examine whether the emerging awareness and public
discourse in contemporary China around the Nanking massacre presages the birth of
a cultural trauma, they explore the “current, highly fraught process of negotiating and con-
structing a new collective Chinese identity” (Alexander and Gao 2012: 598). They remark
that in light of the erosion of Chinese communist cultural foundations, the focus on the
massacre “marks a response to deeper concerns about collective identity” (598) and wonder
whether “the story of the massacre harbors the potential for constructing a new traumatic
history for the Chinese nation, whereby a post-Communist and more nationalist collective
identity is coming into being?” (598).
And in a final set of examples, Eyerman and Sciortino explain in the conclusion to their
edited volume that “For any event or series of events to result in cultural trauma, various
factors have to align in a process that incorporates […] the search for a new collective iden-
tity” (Eyerman and Sciortino 2020: 208). True to this theoretical position, one of the con-
tributing authors in Eyerman and Sciortino’s book asserts that France was traumatized by
the Algerian War, for “The Algerian War entailed fundamental changes to the conception
of French nationhood and national identity” (Choi 2020: 142). And another trio of contrib-
uting authors in the aforementioned book describe how, based on the same criteria that
France is deemed traumatized, Portugal is not. The return to the metropole of some
half million Portuguese citizens living in the country’s colonies did not instigate a cultural
trauma: “This durable disruption of the national identity narrative, by confrontation with
the traumatic experience of retornados, did not happen in Portugal” (Pires et al. 2020: 201).

Conclusion
In his classic analysis of fiction and the human experience of time, Frank Kermode (2000 [1966])
explains how when we reach the conclusion of a narrative, we understand everything that led up
to it a bit differently; we see it in a new light. It is as though the ending changes the past, rewrites
it. We might say the same thing about a traumatized society. When a trauma narrative becomes
the accepted understanding of an event, a new sense of “who we really were all along” dawns on
the group. At the national level, this new understanding amounts to a significant “reconstruction of
national identity” (Alexander 2004: 23). This narrative reconstruction is necessary, for the traumatic
event is inherently unassimilable (Caruth 1996). That is to say, a traumatic event is traumatic pre-
cisely because it does not “fit” within the collective identity of the affected group. The collective
response, then, is to re-narrate the group’s self-understanding in such a way as to make the trauma
comprehensible – to assimilate it into the collective identity by recasting that identity. Giesen calls
attention to this revision of collective identity by pointing to the cultural trauma suffered by Ger-
many after their defeat in the Second World War: “Nazi Germany is a paradigm case of a society
whose members imagined themselves as triumphant heroes but – after the collapse of its rule – had
to realize that they had been perpetrators” (Giesen 2004b: 3). In this way the eventual recasting of
its collective identity enabled a traumatized German society to make sense of their defeat – to
assimilate the traumatic event.
Both theories of cultural trauma accept the idea that the trauma in question “is not the
result of a group experiencing pain. It is the result of this acute discomfort entering into the
core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity” (Alexander 2004: 10). But what does
“entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity” mean? The answer to
this question – the same question we asked above regarding what it is to significantly revise

51
 Todd Madigan

a society’s collective identity – is the razor’s edge that separates the two theories of cultural
trauma. The theory of traumatic events answers by asserting that it means an indelible mark
on the group’s collective memory, while the theory of traumatized societies answers by assert-
ing that it means not only an indelible mark on the group’s collective memory, but also
a significant revision of its collective identity. The former understanding is quantitative; it
augments collective identity by adding another memory to the store. The latter understand-
ing is qualitative; it transforms the nature of the entire collective identity.
Another place where we can see this ambiguity play out is in the application of the theo-
ry’s central metaphor. Cultural trauma is regularly described as a “tear in the social fabric”.
Eyerman makes this explicit when he writes that a “cultural trauma refers to a dramatic loss
of identity and meaning, a tear in the social fabric” (Eyerman 2004: 61). In this description,
the “fabric” is understood to mean the collective identity of a social group. In a similar way,
Türkmen-Dervisoglu describes how “the assassination [of Hrant Dink] tore the social fabric”
(Türkmen-Dervisoglu 2013: 683) of “Turkish national identity” (684). Both of these
examples are drawn from research projects that apply the theory of traumatized societies, and
in both cases it is clear that “social fabric” is a metaphor for the society’s collective identity.
Eyerman, Madigan and Ring spell this out when they assert that “A cultural trauma is
a discursive response to a tear in the social fabric, occurring when the foundations of estab-
lished collective identity are shaken” (Eyerman et al. 2017: 13).
On the other hand, in her exploration of the cultural trauma of objects, Debs describes how
“the damage to the Basilica [of St Francis of Assisi] powerfully affected the ‘social fabric’ of the
Italian public” (Debs 2012: 482), and Onwuachi-Willig, in her work on the trauma of the rou-
tine, describes how the act of two black witnesses testifying in open court against two white male
defendants “tore at the social fabric, which, though oppressive for African Americans, had once
held these Southern societies together” (Onwuachi-Willig 2016: 342). In this second pair of
examples, the scholars are employing the theory of traumatic events, and the “social fabric” is
a metaphor for the status quo of public discourse. In other words, from this perspective the claim
that a traumatic event “tears the social fabric” means that public discourse becomes agitated and
focused on the struggle over meaning. This social cathexis is at the heart of the creation of the
traumatic event – the trauma drama – but the ambiguity of this oft-cited metaphor obscures the
fundamental differences between the two theories of cultural trauma.
It is an accident of language that the term “trauma” has come to be used to describe
both an injury and the source of that injury: both the effect and its cause. And while this
accident is inconsequential in ordinary usage, research in the social sciences would do well
to be chary of such accidents. When we ask, as Eyerman, Alexander and Butler Breese do,
“Why do some events get coded as traumatic and others that seem equally painful and dra-
matic do not?” (Eyerman et al. 2013), a less-than-ideal answer is: “Because researchers
unwittingly apply the term cultural trauma to denote two totally different social phenomena.”

Bibliography
Alexander, J. (2004) “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma”, in J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen,
N. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1–30.
Alexander, J. and Gao, R. (2012) “Remembrance of Things Past: Cultural Trauma, the ‘Nanking Mas-
sacre,’ and Chinese Identity”, in J. Alexander, R. Jacobs and P. Smith (eds) The Oxford Handbook of
Cultural Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, 583–609.
Boersema, J. (2013) Afrikaner, Nevertheless: Stigma, Shame, and the Sociology of Cultural Trauma, PhD Dis-
sertation, Amsterdam: Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research.

52
 Theories of cultural trauma

Caruth, C. (1995) “Introduction”, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in Memory, Baltimore, MD

and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 3–12.
———. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore, MD and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Choi, S. E. (2020) “Pied-Noir Trauma and Identity in Postcolonial France, 1962–2010”, in R. Eyerman
and G. Sciortino (eds) The Cultural Trauma of Decolonization, New York: Palgrave, 137–68.
Debs, M. (2012) “The Suffering of Symbols: Giotto Frescoes and the Cultural Trauma of Objects”, Cul-
tural Sociology 7(4): 479–94.
———. (2013) “Using Cultural Trauma: Gandhi’s Assassination, Partition, and Secular Nationalism in
Post-independence India”, Nations and Nationalism 19(4): 635–53.
Erikson, K. (1976) Everything in Its Path: Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood, New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Eyerman, R. (2001) Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
———. (2004) “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Foundation of African American Identity”, in
J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective
Identity, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 60–111.
———. (2012) “Cultural Trauma: Emotion and Narration”, in J. Alexander, R. Jacobs and P. Smith
(eds) The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Sociology, New York: Oxford University Press, 564–82.
———. (2019) Memory, Trauma, and Identity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Eyerman, R., Alexander, J. and Butler Breese, E. (eds) (2013) Narrating Trauma: On the Impact of Collective
Suffering, Boulder, CO: Paradigm.
Eyerman, R., Madigan, T. and Ring, M. (2017) “Cultural Trauma, Collective Memory and the Vietnam
War”, Croatian Political Science Review 54(1–2): 11–31.
Eyerman, R. and Sciortino, G. (2020) “Conclusion”, in R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds) The Cultural
Trauma of Decolonization, New York: Palgrave, 205–28.
Giesen, B. (2004a) “The Trauma of Perpetrators”, in J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen, N. Smelser and
P. Sztompka (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley: University of California Press, 112–54.
———. (2004b) Triumph and Trauma, Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers.
Heins, V. and Langenohl, A. (2013) “A Fire That Doesn’t Burn? The Allied Bombing of Germany and
the Cultural Politics of Trauma”, in R. Eyerman, J. Alexander and E. Butler Breese (eds) Narrating
Trauma: On the Impact of Collective Suffering, Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 3–26.
Kermode, F. (2000 [1966]) The Sense of an Ending, New York: Oxford University Press.
Neal, A. (1998) National Trauma and Collective Memory: Major Events in the American Century, New York:
M. E. Sharpe.
Onwuachi-Willig, A. (2016) “The Trauma of the Routine: Lessons on Cultural Trauma from the
Emmett Till Verdict”, Sociological Theory 34(4): 335–57.
Pires, R. P., Delaunay, M. and Peixoto, J. (2020) “Trauma and the Portuguese Repatriation:
A Confined Collective Identity”, in R. Eyerman and G. Sciortino (eds) The Cultural Trauma of Decol-
onization, New York: Palgrave, 169–204.
Schmidt, I. (2013) “Perpetual Trauma and Its Organizations: Mothers against Drunk Driving and Drunk
Driving Revisited”, Memory Studies 7(2): 239–53.
Sciortino, G. (2018) “Cultural Traumas”, in J. Hall, L. Grindstaff and M.-C. Lo (eds) Routledge Handbook
of Cultural Sociology, 2nd edition, London: Routledge, 135–43.
Smelser, N. (2004a) “Psychological Trauma and Cultural Trauma”, in J. Alexander, R. Eyerman,
B. Giesen, N. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 31–59.
———. (2004b) “September 11, 2001, as Cultural Trauma”, in J. Alexander, R. Eyerman, B. Giesen,
N. Smelser and P. Sztompka (eds) Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 264–82.
Türkmen-Dervisoglu, G. (2013) “Coming to Terms with a Difficult Past: The Trauma of the Assassination
of Hrant Dink and its Repercussions on Turkish National Identity”, Nations and Nationalism 19(4):
674–92.
Woods, E. (2019) “Cultural Trauma: Ron Eyerman and the Founding of a New Research Paradigm”,
American Journal of Cultural Sociology 7(18): 1–15.
Zhukova, E. (2016) “From Ontological Security to Cultural Trauma: The Case of Chernobyl in Belarus
and Ukraine”, Acta Sociologica 59(4): 332–46.

53