Cultural, Social and National Trauma in Contemporary Socio-cultural Discourse and its Overlap with the Czech Social Science Context
Abstract
A notion of trauma has its roots in psychiatry and medicine where it was theorized at the level of individual. Particularly, in the course of the last decade the concept has established itself extensively as an instrument for analysis of broader social phenomena.
Trauma at the collective level is described in variety ways - as cultural, social, collective or national, if most common descriptions mentioned. The prevalent line of thinking regarding the trauma at the collective level involves constructivist approach taking trauma as socially produced construct.
In spite of the fact that the pretext for trauma usually involves an event perceived as disrupting the bases of social life and threatening the core values and norms, the trauma itself is rather an outcome of constructive sociocultural process in which several social groups take part. The process involves creation of meanings and attribution of symbolic sense to certain event.
The process is significantly associated with construction of common identity and collective memory of the given society. By creating sufficiently convincing, strong and appealing cultural narratives, a given event starts to be perceived as a trauma and finally becomes trauma per se.