Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory

Description

Provides an 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. This study addresses the links between trauma and memory, and explores how memory shapes the way traumatic events are put into narrative form. It also considers the social and political contexts in which sufferers speak and remember.

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. Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Human Spiritis: A Cultural Account of Trace in Mayotte and Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession.

""Highly recommended for social workers and for practitioners in related fields..""
-The Social Worker
"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.."
-Anthropologica, XLIII (2001).