Abstract
In this paper I try to develop a conceptual background to thinking through my ethnographic data on PTSD in a particular Bosnian context – the context of relations of the 1992 – 1995 war veterans to the public arena. In the first part, I discuss anthropological approaches to war trauma and PTSD.
I argue that these approaches consider war trauma and PTSD as constructions (of psy-science, of societies’ moral economy, and of Western hegemony) and their normativity as inherently ‘troubling’. In the second part, alternatively to these approaches, I invite to the discussion some thoughts of Annemarie Mol in order to sensitize me to the issue of multiple ontologies of PTSD and their “ontonorms”.
Inspired by Mol, I want to suggest that norms (dangers, morals, ideals, values) of PTSD are not contained in the ready-made (i.e. already constructed) PTSD diagnosis but rather they are an effect of particu-lar sociomaterial practices that enact what PTSD and war veterans are in a specific place and time. In that vein I want to focus on two close yet sometimes clashing norms associated with PTSD – a person with the PTSD should be expected to be dangerous, and a person with the PTSD should be helped and cared for.