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"Tense Past" provides a much needed appraisal and contextualization of the upsurge of interest in questions of memory and trauma evident in multiple personality and post-traumatic stress disorders, child abuse, and commemoration of the Holocaust. Contributors examine the historical origins of memory in psychiatric discourse and show its connection to broader developments in Western science and medicine. They address the new links between trauma and memory, and they explore how memory shapes the way traumatic events are put into narrative form. They also consider the social and political contexts in which sufferers speak and remember.
Contributors include renowned scholars from several displines, including anthropologist Maurice Bloch and philosopher Ian Hacking; they represent the perspectives of diverse fields including medical anthropology, history of science, psychiatry, feminist studies, and Jewish studies.
List of contents
Part I Remembering Trauma, Remaking the Self; Chapter 1 Telling Stories, Making Selves, Paul Antze; Chapter 2 Remembering Trouble, Donna J. Young; Chapter 3 Contested Meanings and Controversial Memories, Glynis George; Part II The Medicalization of Memory; Chapter 4 Memory Sciences, Memory Politics, Ian Hacking; Chapter 5 Bodily Memory and Traumatic Memory, Allan Young; Chapter 6 Traumatic Cures, Ruth Leys; Part III Culture As Memorial Practice; Chapter 7 Trauma, Time, Illness, and Culture, Michael G. Kenny; Chapter 8 Landscapes of Memory, Laurence J. Kirmayer; Chapter 9 Missions to the Past, Jack Kugelmass; Chapter 10 Internal and External Memory, Maurice Bloch; Chapter 11 The Past Imperfect, Michael Lambek;
About the author
Paul Antze teaches in the Division of Social Science and in the Graduate Programs in Anthropology and Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto. MichaelLambek is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Human Spiritis: A CulturalAccount of Trace in Mayotte and Knowledge and Practice inMayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and SpiritPossession.
Summary
Addressing the new links between trauma and memory the contributors explore how memory shapes the way traumatic events are put into narratove form. They also consider the social and political contexts in which sufferers speak and remember.
