ABSTRACT
Social trauma, like individual trauma, can be worked through and recovered from. A trauma is something that overwhelms the psyche in a more than momentary way arousing fear or even terror, often a fear of death and a sense that life is not worth living. Trauma interferes with the capacity to symbolise. The traumatised person loses a sense of there being a containing figure, internally or externally. Language gets its possibility and meaning from shared activities and practices. So to lose one's language is to lose a form of life. One aspect of the cultural trauma perpetrated on hunter-gather cultures has been the colonial attempt to obliterate local language speaking, for example in Canada when the policy was to remove native. As with individuals, a cultural traumatic event may be either what used to be called in insurance policy documents an "Act of God" or it may be more or less man-made.
