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Trauma Stories: Violence, Emotion and Politics in Somali Ethiopia

McGill University

This article draws on ethnographic material from Ethiopia to address two ways of making sense of violence and death: individual psychological trauma, in one society’s domain of psychological medicine, and personal and collective injury, in another society’s domain of politics. Both approaches entail theories of emotion and human nature. Both are embedded in social relations and have implications at individual, social and political levels. Among Somalis in Ethiopia, war-related distress is not interpreted in a medical framework aimed at healing. Rather, such violence is predominantly assimilated into the framework of Somali politics, in which individual injuries are considered injuries to a lineage or other defined group. The dominant emotion in this context is not sadness or fear, but anger, which has emotional, political and material importance in validating individuals as members of a group sharing mutual rights and obligations. Before advocating trauma-based models of war-related distress, researchers and practitioners should consider whether a medical framework would do better at helping individuals and communities to deal with distress and reconstruct meaningful lives and relationships in circumstances of longstanding collective violence.

Key Words: meaning • politics of PTSD • Somali refugees • trauma • war

Transcultural Psychiatry, Vol. 37, No. 3, 383-402 (2000)
DOI: 10.1177/136346150003700306


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