ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on emotionally and intellectually evasive quality of some of the experiences of genocide and used three concepts from psychodynamic theory to understand them better: containment, trauma, and memory. Drawing upon the psychodynamic theory of trauma and memory, the chapter explores critical situations that emerged after students watched documentary films. The analysis compares two modes of representing what remains after experiencing violence, the embodied and the contained, in three contexts: inter-psychic communication, experiences reenacted in film, and experiences presented in academic teaching and writing. Film is particularly well-suited for the communication of bodily sensations, as anthropologists have found in employing the medium. In the 1980s and 1990s, as a growing number of anthropologists conducted research on the massive violence that increasingly accompanied political conflicts around the world, they often cast their experiences, observations, descriptions, and understandings in terms of "greyness".
