This book looks at ethnographies of survival, reconciliation, and resilience in communities and individuals. It interrogates the definition of happiness, hope and despair and explores how communities and individuals navigate life when besieged by trauma and the processes they must go through to enable healing.
Devastations caused by violence force people to look for ways to deal with seemingly irreconcilable life circumstances. Sometimes these efforts are individual and sometimes collective. People draw on a variety of resources, such as religion, culture, family and kinship networks, friends, literature, storytelling, art, theatre, and counselling to come to grips with their circumstances. This volume discusses such efforts through a multidisciplinary lens. It looks at ethnographic accounts of communities and individuals that showcase methods used to renegotiate, reconfigure the pain and to enable a life of dignity, healing and social transformation. It also looks at violence, memory, trauma, dislocation through different prisms.
Part of the Social Movements and Transformative Dissent series, this book will be of interest to students, academicians, activists, and all those engaged with the study of trauma studies, mental health, philosophy of psychology, behavioural sciences, philosophy, humanities, clinical psychology, gender and peace and conflict studies.
Table of Contents:
Preface. Acknowledgements. Foreword. Introduction 1. Revisiting the Memories of Partition: Understanding Resilience 2. Beyond Partition: The Transition of Refugee Women of Bengal from Victimhood to Activism 3. Happiness or Hollowness… just a Heave: Murmuring as a Form of Negotiating Existence 4. Collective Commemoration in Sites of Ruin Keep the Palestinian Nakba Alive 5. Making Sense of the Gaza Mono-Logues in a Strife torn World 6. Borderlands to Centre: Memories of Violence and Aspirations as Mechanism of Reconciliation among Sindhi and Rohingya Migrants in Delhi 7. Where Mind is Without Fear 8. Negotiating with Trauma in Everyday Lives: A Sociological Analysis of Women ex-combatants in the Maoist Movement of Odisha 9. Commemorating and Reconstructing Past: Narratives of ‘Identity’ among Dalit Women 10. Autoethnography of Forgiveness 11. A Practitioner’s Perspective 12. In a World Without Handrails 13. ‘Listening’ as an Intervention in Mitigating Death Cases: from the field diaries/notes of a mitigation investigator. Index.
