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In the early twenty-first century, trauma is seemingly everywhere, whether as experience, diagnosis, concept, or buzzword. Yet even as many scholars consider trauma to be constitutive of psychological modernity or the post-Enlightenment human condition, historical research on the topic has overwhelmingly focused on cases, such as World War I or the Holocaust, in which Western experiences and actors are foregrounded. There remains an urgent need to incorporate the methods and insights of recent historical trauma research into a truly global perspective. The chapters in Traumatic Pasts in Asia make just such an intervention, extending Euro-American paradigms of traumatic experience to new sites of world-historical suffering and, in the process, exploring how these new domains of research inform and enrich earlier scholarship.
“Ranging from the healing effects of singing and pen pals to propitiating ghosts and building memorials, this excellent book brims with insightful analysis that underscores the importance of understanding local approaches to coping with trauma.” • Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (JRAI)
“[This book] presents a more than welcome and extremely successful attempt to ensure that yet unheard sufferers from Burma to Indonesia are given a voice.” • Medicine, Conflict and Survival
“By globalising trauma studies, Micale and Pols break new ground and enrich our understanding of the complex ways in which humans respond to war, genocide and environmental catastrophes…This well-written, engaging, interdisciplinary volume moves the field forward by building a bridge between Western and Asian scholars. Traumatic Pasts in Asia is thus a crucial step in carving a path towards a more global approach to understanding traumatic injury. It identifies where Western-centric conceptions of trauma are problematic, while it also explores universal patterns and experiences, including tensions between state and individual conceptions of traumatic memory. This book should spark interest and ongoing discussions among scholars, policymakers, and members of the public whose lives have been shaped by the traumatic legacies of mass violence.” • New Mandala
“A timely contribution to studies of trauma arising from state policies, drawing attention to the possible ethnocentrism of diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder, to the efficacy of local methods of healing for survivors, and to the challenges of interpreting and memorializing events.” • Janice Matsumura, Simon Fraser University
“This well-written, engaging, interdisciplinary volume moves the field forward by building a bridge between Western and Asian scholars. It is an important and valuable volume that will be a cornerstone in the ever-growing field of trauma studies.” • Jason Crouthamel, Grand Valley State University
Mark S. Micale is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. His publications include Beyond the Unconscious, Discovering the History of Psychiatry (Roy Porter, co-editor; Princeton University Press, 1993), Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton University Press, 1995), The Mind of Modernism (Stanford University Press, 2004), and Hysterical Men (Harvard University Press, 2008).
List of Illustrations
Preface and Acknowledgements
Introduction: History, Trauma, and Asia
Hans Pols and Mark S. Micale
Chapter 1. Tropical Stupor? An Investigation into Patients Affected by Earthquakes and Tropical Weather in Colonial Taiwan
Harry Yi‐Jui Wu
Chapter 2. Male Hysteria in Modern Japan: Trauma, Masculinity, and Military Psychiatry during the Asia-Pacific War
Eri Nakamura
Chapter 3. Atomic Trauma: Japanese Psychiatry in Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Ran Zwigenberg
Chapter 4. “Yankee Style Trauma”: The Korean War and the Americanization of Psychiatry in the Republic of Korea
Jennifer Yum Park
Chapter 5. “No PTSD in Vietnam”: Psychological Trauma, Psychic Shock, and the Biology of War Suffering in the Context of the American War
Narquis Barak
Chapter 6. Psychological Trauma and Suffering in Long Distance Friendships Involving Political Prisoners in Indonesia
Vannessa Hearman
Chapter 7. Haunting and Recovery in Post–Khmer Rouge Cambodia
Caroline Bennett
Chapter 8. A Field of Happiness: Space, Trauma, and Dealing with Existential Precarity among China's Sent-Down Youth
Hua Wu
Chapter 9. Performing Songs as Healing the Trauma of the 1965 Anti-Communist Killings in Indonesia
Dyah Pitaloka and Mohan J. Dutta
Chapter 10. Healing Our Sacrifice: Trauma and Translation in the Burmese Democracy Movement
Seinenu M. Thein-Lemelson
Chapter 11. Beyond PTSD: Politics of Visibility in a Kashmiri Clinic
Saiba Varma
Chapter 12. War Memorials: Materializing Traumatic Pasts and Constructing Memories of the Asia-Pacific War
Maki Kimura
Afterword: Traumatic Pasts, Haunting Futures
Byron J. Good
Index