Abstract
The chapter presents a comparative ethnographic study of Cambodian genocide descendants and Israeli Holocaust descendants. Challenging the foundational assumptions of Holocaust and Genocide Studies and trauma theory regarding the psychosocial legacy of descendants, both descendant samples reject the pathologized profile of transmitted PTSD, are disinterested in accessing the familial past, and avoid public commemoration. Differing Jewish-Israeli and Buddhist Cambodian culture-specific attitudes regarding wellness and illness and the centrality/marginality and function of memory work in everyday life are shown to account for divergent Cambodian and Jewish-Israeli legacies. Comparative findings raise questions pertaining to the cultural competency of Euro-Western forms of therapeutic intervention, humanitarian aid and hegemonically imposed glocal commemorative sites within culturally diverse populations where a universalizing semiotics of suffering elide culturally particular responses to atrocity.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Violent Reverberations |
| Subtitle of host publication | Global Modalities of Trauma |
| Editors | Vigdis Broch-Due, Bjørn Enge Bertelsen |
| Place of Publication | London |
| Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
| Pages | 59-89 |
| Number of pages | 31 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-3-319-39049-9 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2016 |