Tense Past : Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory

The last several years have seen the rise of a new Canada-centred cross-disciplinary discussion of memory and trauma. Key players include the philosopher Ian Hacking and the anthropologists Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, their students and collaborators, all based in Toronto, and some scholars from other places. This multidisciplinary volume is the first to give an idea of the importance and scope of the reflections of this strongly anchored and loosely bounded group. The book represents a milestone in studies of memory in giving a much-needed cross-cultural perspective on the field, in a way at the same time is sensitive to psychological and historical approaches.The book begins with a wide-ranging and sometimes inspired introduction by the two editors. The remainder is divided into three parts. The first contains papers on memory and trauma in the lives of individuals; the last papers on collective memory and the handling of collective trauma. Between these the editors have appropriately put papers on explicit expert theories of memory and trauma, reflecting the recent increase of scholarly interest in experts" discourses. In more classical anthropological terms, it's as if Griaule had put data on individual Dogon in a first section, Ogotemmeli's version of Dogon cosmology in a second, Griaule's own reconstruction of the collective Dogon world in a third.The first section of the book contains three papers on cases of traumatic memory and how individuals deal with them. Paul Antze draws implications for our assumptions about identity from his participation in a self-help group for people defined as having multiple personality disorder resulting from repressed early trauma. Donna Young and Glynis George each presents women's histories of trouble and their efforts to conceptualize and deal with them, both from Atlantic Canada. These two papers show the link between individual trauma and social conditions, as well as the sometimes vast implications of turning private trauma into public disclosure.The second part, "The Medicalization of Memory," takes critical views of what are often unquestioned professional readings of memory. Here the guiding spirit (or sprite) is Michel Foucault, whose work on medicine, psychiatry, and the penal system created a field of critical scholarly discourse about scholarly discourse, particularly as it is used to justify the existence of institutions of treatment and constraint. The first chapter in this section, "Memory Sciences, Memory Politics" by Ian Hacking, is a memory manifesto which to some degree anchors the whole book. Hacking's purpose, following Foucault, is to identify unspoken assumptions ("depth knowledge") behind expert discourses ("surface knowledge"). Depth knowledge, the "knowledge" that there is something to know in a given domain, differs from period to period and among societies. Its source is more likely to lie in general social conditions than the explicit rules of the sciences that it makes thinkable. This relatively relativistic position is presumably what Hacking means by insisting on "politics" in relation to "sciences." He holds that "memory" as a scientific category was historically and politically constituted through modernity, illustrating this history with short treatments of key figures: Freud, the psychologists of shellshock, Locke, Ribot.The next chapter in this section is by Allan Young, an anthropologist who some years ago turned his ethnographic gaze on medicine and has more recently considered the psychiatric profession and its development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Young traces the passage of the notion of trauma from bodily to psychic damage and shows how current psychological and psychiatric uses of the concept represent extensions of its source in the body. Finally Ruth Leys, an historian of ideas, goes over some of the same material from a different angle, giving a compelling history of the idea of trauma among psychologists and psychoanalysts from World War 1 to now. …