Witness and Memory: The Discourse of Trauma

In an era of atrocities, and in a world of increasingly marked by traumatic shocks to human bodies and minds, we are challenged to understand the nature of violence and its effects. One response to this demand has emerged in the form of witness discourse. This collection challenges the assumed accuracy of various "discourses of trauma." The essays uncover a number of paradoxes and problems related to the act of witnessing, including questions of individual versus collective voice, the intersection of history and memory, unmediated truth and literary form, and the commercialism and fraud that have plagued efforts to "remember" atrocities.
This is a landmark collection within the anthropology of violence and witness studies, a discipline inaugurated within the last two decades. It accomplished a tight focus while tackling seemingly disparate topics: from Rigoberta Mechu to O.J. Simpson, and from feminist poetry to Hiroshima Mon Amour. With approaches ranging from anthropological and historical to literary and philosophical, this collection is very engaging in both subject matter and writing style and has the potential for course adoption in a variety of disciplines.