ABSTRACT
This chapter takes an anthropological approach to terror and trauma, and criticizes medical/psychiatric models of trauma that have focused solely on the clinical condition of individual bodies and minds. It shows how extremely shocking experiences such as those described have been made politically relevant through the politics of ‘chosen trauma’, a concept that was introduced by the psychiatrist Vamik Volkan in 1999 to analyse the intergenerational transmission of trauma. The chapter examines the ways in which proclaimed trauma victims – both survivors of terror and people who claim to have been indirectly affected – have used discourses and practices of collective victimhood in an attempt to gain political influence and claim compensation for their suffering. To explain how personal traumas can be shared and politicized, the chapter addresses the debate about individuality, sociality and selfhood. The politics of chosen trauma will be examined in the analysis of trauma transmission through expellee poems and commemoration rituals.
