Revisiting the Paradigm Shift in Trauma Studies: Twenty-Five Years of Veena Das’ ‘Our Work to Cry: Your Work to Listen’

Abstract

While in the 1980s, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) III created the diagnostic category of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social scientists like Veena Das were foregrounding the cultural or contextual processes that were shaping the intense distress of the survivors that the psychiatric model excluded in the study of disaster survivors. As widely held, Das’ work on violence-hit humans, particularly, ‘Our work to cry: Your work to listen’, that is, a chapter in her book, Mirrors of Violence, remains one of the cornerstones in making social scientists realise the precedence to be given to the meanings and subjective experiences of trauma events from the perspective of the survivors. In this article, we attempt to highlight how this work of hers contributed to a paradigm shift in the field of trauma studies by illuminating: (a) the ways in which this shift entails focusing on the experiences of suffering shaped within the cultural and socio-political context, (b) the need to transcend the psychiatric model and (c) how ethnographic fieldwork enables the researcher to focus on the nuances of the everyday experiences of the trauma survivors.

Rethinking “transfer” in the transgenerational transmission of trauma: A qualitative study of the 1984 anti-Sikh violence

“…It is pertinent to note, as Priya (2015Priya ( , 2018 has emphasized, that with the paradigm shift in the study of trauma related to violence (toward situating the experience of trauma and healing within the post-disaster sociopolitical and cultural contexts), a shift in methodology has also been observed in recent decades. Besides ethnography, grounded theory, semi-structured interviews, case studies, word association tests, and draw-and-tell conversation techniques, other innovative qualitative methodologies, such as documentary analysis and the analysis of relevant newspaper articles and books, have been adopted (Gupta et al, 2019;Priya, 2004Priya, , 2012bViswambharan & Priya, 2016). This led us to a search for books and articles written on the survivors' and their subsequent generation's experiences in the context of the 1984 anti-Sikh violence in line with the use of already-published narratives in qualitative research (Ruggiano & Perry, 2019).…”

“…Notwithstanding Danieli's (1998b) exclusive focus on the transfer of traumatic memory and PTSD, the transfer of post-violence structurally induced distress, which has been pointed out as an intense experience of survivors and their family members by several psychiatrists and social scientists, cannot be excluded from the content of the transfer in TGT. For example, in developing countries, the types of structurally induced distress in everyday life that unfold in the aftermath of intense traumatic events such as ethnic or political violence include state-induced safety concerns for survival; insecurities about health, employment, or resuming agriculture or other income-generation activities; the lack of educational facilities for children (Bracken et al, 1995;Das, 1990;Priya, 2015;Summerfield, 1999); struggles to avail justice-delayed for years or decades-against the perpetrators of political violence (Priya, 2015;Ramdas, 2005;Viswambharan & Priya, 2016); the patriarchal norms with regard to widowhood and marriage (Das, 1990;Gupta et al, 2019); and post-violence religious discrimination (Viswambharan & Priya, 2016).…”