Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity

About this book

In this collaboratively authored work five distinguished sociologists develop an ambitious theoretical model of "cultural trauma"and on this basis build a new understanding of how social groups interact with emotion to create new and binding understandings of social responsibility. Looking at the "meaning making process" as an open-ended social dialogue in which strikingly different social narratives vie for influence they outline a strongly constructivist approach to trauma and apply this theoretical model in a series of extensive case studies including the Nazi Holocaust slavery in the United States and September 11 2001.