Cultural Trauma, Morality and Solidarity. The Social Construction of the Holocaust and Other Mass Murders
Cultural Trauma, Morality and Solidarity. The Social Construction of the Holocaust and Other Mass Murders
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DOI：
10.1016/s0185-1918(16)30045-9
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发表时间：
2016-12-01
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
Alexander, Jeffrey C.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Alexander, Jeffrey C.
当一个社区的成员感到他们经历了一个可怕的事件，在他们的集体意识中留下了不可磨灭的伤疤，永远烙印在他们的记忆中，并以一种根本和不可挽回的方式改变了他们未来的身份时，就会产生文化创伤。虽然这一科学概念表明，在以前没有联系的事件、结构、感知和行动之间存在经验/因果联系，但它也重新阐明了道德责任和政治行动的一个重要领域。通过阐述文化创伤，社会群体、国家社会，有时甚至整个文明可能不仅在认知上确定人类痛苦的存在和根源，而且还为此承担一定的道德责任。社区成员建立起相互支持的关系，这种关系可能使他们-甚至迫使他们-分担他人的痛苦。别人的痛苦也是我们的痛苦吗？尽管这被认为是合理的，但社会扩大了“我们”的圈子，并将奋进通过愈合过程防止创伤再次发生。本文以经验主义为基础，考察了纳粹对犹太人的大规模屠杀及其在创伤的阐释和再现中的基础地位，并讨论了美国黑人、原住民、西方和日本帝国主义的殖民受害者、南京大屠杀、以及苏联和毛泽东主义中国共产主义政权的受害者。
A cultural trauma is produced when the members of a community feel they have gone through a dreadful event that has left indelible scars on their collective consciousness, branding forever their memories and changing their future identity in an essential and irrevocable way. Although this scientific concept suggests there are empiric/causal links among occurrences, structures, perceptions, and actions that were not previously connected, it also illuminates anew a significant domain of moral responsibility and political action. By elaborating cultural traumas, social groups, national societies and sometimes even entire civilizations may not only cognitive-ly identify the existence and sources of human suffering, but also take certain moral responsibility for it. As groups identify the roots of trauma and assume a moral responsibility, the members of communities establish supportive relationships that may allow them -and even force them-to partake of the suffering of the others. Is the others' suffering also our suffering? Insofar as it is deemed plausible, societies broaden the circle of the "us" and will endeavor to prevent the trauma from happening again by means of their healing process. This article considers empirically the working-through of a trauma in the case of the Holocaust -the massive extermination of Jews by the Nazis and its foundational status in the elaboration and re/signifying of the trauma-, and discusses the experiences of the Afro-Americans, the indigenous peoples, the colonial victims of Western and Japanese imperialism, the Nanking Massacre, and the victims of communist regimes of the Soviet Union and the Maoist China.