ReviewHistorical trauma as public narrative: A conceptual review of how history impacts present-day health
Introduction
Historical trauma refers to a complex and collective trauma experienced over time and across generations by a group of people who share an identity, affiliation, or circumstance (Brave Heart and DeBruyn, 1998, Crawford, 2013, Evans-Campbell, 2008, Gone, 2013). Although historical trauma was originally introduced to describe the experience of children of Holocaust survivors (Kellermann, 2001a), in the past two decades, the term has been applied to numerous colonized indigenous groups throughout the world, as well as African Americans, Armenian refugees, Japanese American survivors of internment camps, Swedish immigrant children whose parents were torture victims, Palestinian youth, the people of Cyprus, Belgians, Cambodians, Israelis, Mexicans and Mexican Americans, Russians, and many other cultural groups and communities that share a history of oppression, victimization, or massive group trauma exposure (Baker and Gippenreiter, 1998, Campbell and Evans-Campbell, 2011, Daud et al., 2005, Karenian et al., 2011, Sotero, 2006, Wexler et al., 2009). Scholars from various disciplines have described the generational aspect of historical trauma as transgenerational, intergenerational, multi-generational, or cross-generational (Bar-On et al., 1998, Kellermann, 2001b), and have introduced concepts, such as soul wound (Duran, 2006, Duran and Duran, 1995) or Post Traumatic Slavery Syndrome (Leary, 2005), to capture the collective experience of trauma by specific cultural groups across generations.
Despite the multitude of terms, historical trauma can be understood as consisting of three primary elements: a “trauma” or wounding; the trauma is shared by a group of people, rather than an individually experienced; the trauma spans multiple generations, such that contemporary members of the affected group may experience trauma-related symptoms without having been present for the past traumatizing event(s). It is distinct from intergenerational trauma in that intergenerational trauma refers to the specific experience of trauma across familial generations, but does not necessarily imply a shared group trauma. Similarly, a collective trauma may not have the generational or historical aspect, though over time may develop into historical trauma.
The widespread interest in historical trauma by scholars across many disciplines presents two unique challenges for this new and rapidly growing area: 1) how to make sense of a diverse empirical literature, and 2) how to integrate that literature with theory so as to advance scientific inquiry. In this critical review and integration, we address these challenges by providing a conceptual framework for understanding the empirical literature on historical trauma, and then specify a theoretical model based on that framework that explains how historical trauma affects present-day health among individuals and communities.
Section snippets
Trauma as narrative representation
Central to our perspective is the view that historical trauma functions as a contemporary narrative with personal and public representations in the present. In an influential article published in this journal, Stjepan Meštrović (1985) discussed how early scholarly work on stress and trauma emphasized that trauma is a psychological process independent from the specific traumatic event, that is, as “representation.” He argued that scientific methods should be employed to understand how
Existing research and theory on historical trauma
A number of empirical studies have shown that groups who have histories of trauma are more vulnerable to diminished psychological health in later generations. Kellermann, 2001a, Kellermann, 2001b reviews show that children of Holocaust survivors from Israel to Canada are more vulnerable to PTSD, and Barel et al.'s (2010) meta-analysis shows that second and third generation offspring of Holocaust survivors display both remarkable resilience and heightened post-traumatic stress symptoms. Daoud
Historical trauma as public narrative
By conceptualizing historical trauma as a public narrative we are focusing on narrative accounts that link past experiences of traumatization by a group or community to health over time. Narratives of past traumas and group health over time can be found throughout the world and in reference to a wide diversity of mass-experienced trauma, from a single event, such as a natural disaster (Cox and Perry, 2011), to a recurrent history of oppression and traumatization (Evans-Campbell, 2008). In the
A narrative model for understanding the impact of historical trauma on health
Fig. 1 presents a narrative model that specifies how public narratives of historical trauma impact health. As shown, the model specifies successive recursive stages beginning with public narratives of historical trauma that frame contemporary reminders of past collective trauma for a particular group or community. These contemporary reminders influence how salient the narrative is to a person or group; conversely, the salience of the narrative to the individual is critical in determining
Conclusion
History provides a narrative context within which contemporary social issues are interpreted. By incorporating a rich understanding of community or group history into social science research on health, we improve the local relevance and responsiveness of research findings and enhance the ability of interventions to leverage community-level and culturally-relevant strategies and variables (Trickett et al., 2011). Should the history contain trauma, the questions become in what ways the historical
Acknowledgments
This work was funded, in part, by a grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) postdoctoral training program in substance abuse prevention research (T32 DA 019426) to the senior author in support of the lead author, and a Yale Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women's Health (BIRCWH) Scholar program award (K12HD066065) in support of the second author. The authors are grateful for comments made about this manuscript by two anonymous reviewers and by the Investigators Lab
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