Kirmayer Laurence J, Gone Joseph P, Moses Joshua
McGill University
University of Michigan.
Transcult Psychiatry. 2014 Jun;51(3):299-319. doi: 10.1177/1363461514536358.
Recent years have seen the rise of historical trauma as a construct to describe the impact of colonization, cultural suppression, and historical oppression of Indigenous peoples in North America (e.g., Native Americans in the United States, Aboriginal peoples in Canada). The discourses of psychiatry and psychology contribute to the conflation of disparate forms of violence by emphasizing presumptively universal aspects of trauma response. Many proponents of this construct have made explicit analogies to the Holocaust as a way to understand the transgenerational effects of genocide. However, the social, cultural, and psychological contexts of the Holocaust and of post-colonial Indigenous "survivance" differ in many striking ways. Indeed, the comparison suggests that the persistent suffering of Indigenous peoples in the Americas reflects not so much past trauma as ongoing structural violence. The comparative study of genocide and other forms of massive, organized violence can do much to illuminate both common mechanisms and distinctive features, and trace the looping effects from political processes to individual experience and back again. The ethics and pragmatics of individual and collective healing, restitution, resilience, and recovery can be understood in terms of the self-vindicating loops between politics, structural violence, public discourse, and embodied experience.
近年来，历史创伤作为一种概念兴起，用于描述北美原住民（如美国的印第安人、加拿大的原住民）所遭受的殖民、文化压制和历史压迫的影响。精神病学和心理学的论述通过强调创伤反应中假定具有普遍性的方面，导致了不同形式暴力的混淆。这一概念的许多支持者明确将其与大屠杀进行类比，以此来理解种族灭绝的跨代影响。然而，大屠杀与后殖民时期原住民“生存”的社会、文化和心理背景在许多显著方面存在差异。事实上，这种比较表明，美洲原住民的持续苦难更多地反映的不是过去的创伤，而是持续存在的结构性暴力。对种族灭绝和其他形式的大规模、有组织暴力的比较研究，对于阐明共同机制和独特特征，以及追溯从政治进程到个人经历再返回的循环效应大有帮助。个人和集体疗愈、恢复原状、恢复力和康复的伦理与务实做法，可以从政治、结构性暴力、公共话语和具体体验之间自我证明的循环角度来理解。
