Essay On Cultural Trauma

Many scholars have presented various definitions of genocide from different perspectives. Kuper Leo (1989:19) claims that it is very hard to develop a general theory of genocide. There are many different kinds of massacre, such as eliminating of an ethnic group as whole or a part due to their differences with other groups in race, religion and ideology, in some other cases is because of wealth or natural resources, which either one group consider the other as a threat to their well-being and justifies their annihilation. In most cases conflicts and antagonism grows between ethnic and religious groups in their contest for power, opportunity and wealth, which a single group controls all power. According to Arvin Staub (2011), this kind of conflicts

In the following will look at the concept of cultural trauma, Jeffery Alexander, defined cultural trauma that 'when members of collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marked upon their consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways '(2004:1). The cultural trauma usually refers to previously unrelated events, structure, perception and actions. Alexander presents two dimension of cultural trauma. Firstly, the "Lay Trauma Theory", which he argues that traumas are naturally occurring events that crash individuals or collectives sense of well-being, the power that shatters trauma, it is a thinking that appears from events itself, being traumatised is response to that kind of shattering event. Secondly, he discussed the lay trauma theory in term of enlightenment thinking and psychoanalytic version. The enlightenment version signifying that trauma is kind of rational response to abrupt changes. The psychoanalytic version suggested that "places a model of unconscious emotional fears and cognitively distorting mechanisms of psychological defence between the external shattering event and the actor’s internal traumatic response"(2004:5). However, he rejected the idea that the events in and themselves create the collective trauma, events not intrinsically traumatic. "The trauma is socially mediated