Cultural Trauma

Abstract

There is a current effort to borrow the concept of trauma from medicine and psychiatry and to introduce it into sociological theory. The author explicates the notion of cultural trauma as applicable to the theory of social change. He defines cultural trauma as the culturally defined and interpreted shock to the cultural tissue of a society, and presents a model of the traumatic sequence, describing typical conditions under which cultural trauma emerges and evolves. Drawing on the work of Robert K. Merton on anomie, and of Anthony Giddens on risk, he suggests a number of typical strategies by which societies cope with cultural traumas. Cultural trauma is treated as a link in the ongoing chain of social changes; depending on the number of concrete circumstances, cultural trauma may be a phase in the constructive morphogenesis of culture or in the destructive cycle of cultural decay.