Tense Past: Cultural Essays in Trauma and Memory

Tense Past provides a much needed appraisal and contextualization of the upsurge of interest in questions of memory and trauma evident in multiple personality and post-traumatic stress disorders, child abuse, and commemoration of the Holocaust. Contributors examine the historical origins of memory in psychiatric discourse and show its connection to broader developments in Western science and medicine. They address the new links between trauma and memory, and they explore how memory shapes the way traumatic events are put into narrative form. They also consider the social and political contexts in which sufferers speak and remember.

About the Author

Paul Antze teaches in the Division of Social Science and in the Graduate Programs in Anthropology and Social and Political Thought at York University, Toronto., Michael Lambek is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Toronto. He is the author of Human Spiritis: A Cultural Account of Trace in Mayotte and Knowledge and Practice in Mayotte: Local Discourses of Islam, Sorcery, and Spirit Possession.