While in the 1980s, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) III created the diagnostic category of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), social scientists like Veena Das were foregrounding the cultural or contextual processes that were shaping the intense distress of the survivors that the psychiatric model excluded in the study of disaster survivors. As widely held, Das’ work on violence-hit humans, particularly, ‘Our work to cry: Your work to listen’, that is, a chapter in her book, Mirrors of Violence, remains one of the cornerstones in making social scientists realise the precedence to be given to the meanings and subjective experiences of trauma events from the perspective of the survivors. In this article, we attempt to highlight how this work of hers contributed to a paradigm shift in the field of trauma studies by illuminating: (a) the ways in which this shift entails focusing on the experiences of suffering shaped within the cultural and socio-political context, (b) the need to transcend the psychiatric model and (c) how ethnographic fieldwork enables the researcher to focus on the nuances of the everyday experiences of the trauma survivors.
AbramowitzS. A. (2005). The poor have become rich, and the rich have become poor: Collective trauma in the Guinean Languette. Social Science & Medicine, 61(10), 2106–2118.
2.
AcharyaN. (2000). Double victims of Latur earthquake. The Indian Journal of Social Work, 61(4), 558–564.
3.
AlexanderD. E. (2005). An interpretation of disaster in terms of changes in culture, society and international relations. In PerryR. W.QuarantelliE. L. (Eds.), What is a disaster? New answers to old questions (pp. 25–31). Philadelphia, PA: Xlibris Press.
4.
AlmedomA. M.SummerfieldD. (2004). Mental well-being in settings of ‘complex emergency’: An overview. Journal of Biosocial Science, 36(4), 381–388.
5.
American Psychiatric Association (APA). (1968). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
6.
American Psychiatric Association (APA). (1980). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental misorders (3rd ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
7.
American Psychiatric Association (APA). (2000). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (4th ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.
8.
American Psychiatric Association, & Committee on Nomenclature Statistics. (1952). Diagnostic and statistical manual: Mental disorders. Washington, DC: Mental Hospital Service, American Psychiatric Association.
9.
BrackenP. J. (2001). Post-modernity and post-traumatic stress disorder. Social Science & Medicine, 53(6), 733–743.
10.
BrackenP. J.GillerJ. E.SummerfieldD. (1995). Psychological responses to war and atrocity: The limitations of current concepts. Social Science & Medicine, 40(8), 1073–1082.
11.
BreslauN.LuciaV. C.DavisG. C. (2004). Partial PTSD versus full PTSD: An empirical examination of associated impairment. Psychological Medicine, 34(7), 1205–1214.
12.
CassellE. J. (2004). The nature of suffering and the goals of medicine (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
13.
CharmazK. (2004). Premises, principles, and practices in qualitative research: Revisiting the foundations. Qualitative Health Research, 14(7), 976–993.
14.
DasV. (1990). Our work to cry: Your work to listen. In DasVeena (Ed.), Mirrors of violence: Communities, riots and survivors in South Asia (pp. 345–399). New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
15.
DasV. (2003). Trauma and testimony: Implications for political community. Anthropological Theory, 3(3), 293–307.
16.
Dickson-SwiftV.JamesE. L.KippenS.LiamputtongP. (2007). Doing sensitive research: What challenges do qualitative researchers face?Qualitative Research, 7(3), 327–353.
17.
DiFrusciaK. T. (2010). Listening to voices: An interview with Veena Das. Altérités, 7(1), 136–145.
18.
EllingsonL. L. (1998). ‘Then you know how I feel’: Empathy, identification, and reflexivity in fieldwork. Qualitative Inquiry, 4(4), 492–514.
19.
FreudS. 1919 (1976). The uncanny. New Literary History, 7(3), 619–645.
20.
HanC. (2004). The work of indebtedness: The traumatic present of late capitalist Chile. Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry, 28(2), 169–187.
21.
Hiley-YoungB.BlakeD. D.AbuegF. R.RozynkoV.GusmanF. D. (1995). Warzone violence in Vietnam: An examination of premilitary, military, and postmilitary factors in PTSD in-patients. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 8(1), 125–141.
22.
KecmanovicD. (2011). Controversies and dilemmas in contemporary psychiatry. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
23.
KidronC. A. (2009). Toward an ethnography of silence: The lived presence of the past in the everyday lives of Holocaust trauma descendants in Israel. Current Anthropology, 50(1), 5–27.
24.
KleinmanA. (1977). Culture, depression and the ‘new’ cross-cultural psychiatry. Social Science & Medicine, 11, 3–11.
25.
KleinmanA. (1987). Anthropology and psychiatry: The role of culture in cross-cultural research on illness. The British Journal of Psychiatry, 151(4), 447–454.
26.
KleinmanA. (1988). Rethinking psychiatry: From cultural category to personal experience. New York, NY: The Free Press.
27.
KleinmanA. M. (1973). Some issues for a comparative study of medical healing. International Journal of Social Psychiatry, 19, 159–165.
28.
KuhnT. (1962). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
29.
Lewis-FernandezR.KleinmanA. (1994). Culture, personality and psychopathology. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 103(1), 67–71.
30.
McEwenB. S. (1998). Stress, adaptation, and disease: Allostasis and allostatic load. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 840(1), 33–44.
31.
PriyaK. R. (2010). Research relationship as a facilitator of remoralization and self-growth: Postearthquake suffering and healing. Qualitative Health Research, 20(4), 479–495.
32.
PriyaK. R. (2012). Trauma reactions, suffering and healing among riot-affected internally displaced children of Gujarat: A qualitative inquiry. Qualitative Research in Psychology, 9(3), 189–209.
33.
PriyaK. R. (2013). Suffering and healing. In Kenneth KeithD. (Ed.), Encyclopaedia of cross-cultural psychology. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.
34.
PriyaK. R. (2015). On the social constructionist approach to traumatized selves in post-disaster settings: State-induced violence in Nandigram, India. Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, 39(3), 428–448.
35.
PriyaK. R. (2018). Well-being and mental health in the aftermath of disasters: A social constructionist approach. In MisraG. (Ed.), Psychosocial interventions for health and wellbeing (pp. 355–368). New Delhi: Springer.
36.
RadleyA. (1999). The aesthetics of illness: Narrative, horror and the sublime. Sociology of Health & Illness, 21(6), 778–796.
37.
SummerfieldD. (1999). A critique of seven assumptions behind psychological trauma programmes in war-affected areas. Social Science & Medicine, 48(10), 1449–1462.
38.
SummerfieldD. (2001). The invention of post-traumatic stress disorder and the social usefulness of a psychiatric category. British Medical Journal, 322(7278), 95.
39.
VahaliH. O. (2009). Lives in exile: Exploring the inner world of Tibetan refugees. New Delhi: Routledge.
40.
WeissM.SaracenoB.SaxenaS.van OmmerenM. (2003). Mental health in the aftermath: Consensus and controversy. The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 191(9), 611–615.
41.
WilsonJ. P. (2004). PTSD and complex PTSD: Symptoms, syndromes, and diagnoses. In WilsonJ. P.KeaneT. M. (Eds.), Assessing psychological trauma and PTSD (pp. 7–44). New York, NY: Guilford Press.
