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Eds. by Mark Micale and Hans Pols. Traumatic Pasts in Asia History, Psychiatry, and Trauma 

from the 1930s to the Present. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, ISBN:9781800731844  

Traumatic Pasts in Asia focuses on how people reacted to horrific past events of wars, mass 

violence, and natural disasters across modern Asian history, covering the period from the mid-

1930s to the present. The book includes twelve case studies examining social, cultural, and 

political manifestations of psychological trauma. The book can be read in relation to the 

original Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870-1930 

volume, published in 2001 that exclusively focused on Europe and North America.  Employing 

‘trauma’ as a vantage point to excavate underrepresented social histories challenges the 

conventional contours of the term as both a diagnostic label and a moral frame. The contributors 

interrogate pasts suggested by our current time where ‘trauma’ is increasingly capable of 

evoking relatable meanings and moral concerns, dubbed the “age of trauma” (117). Trauma is 

articulated in two distinctive ways. Whereas ‘trauma’ is utilized in some cases to unravel the 

silenced forms of pain and suffering, some other cases critiqued the overt exporting of “trauma” 

to non-Western realms through professionals obscured local priorities of healing.   

The overarching argument furthers the fact that “Western concepts of psychological trauma 

provide a powerful lens of analysis through which to study modern Asian history” (5). In that 

way, the book resembles a novel contribution to the growing interdisciplinary area of historical 

trauma studies with non-Western accounts. Most case studies provide a profound critique to 

the expansion of Western psychiatric diagnostic categories like ‘trauma’ and its concomitant 

‘PTSD’ as objective categories in recognizing psychological suffering and their potential 

incongruity in non-Western contexts. The studies carried out mainly by historians and 

anthropologists in this volume explore “how individuals and communities reacted to these 

calamities, and how victims, survivors, and others crafted narratives and coping strategies to 

render their suffering legible, intelligible, visible, manageable and legitimate” (3). Arguably, 

this book counts as a valuable endeavour to “decolonize mental health” by defamiliarizing 

current Western conceptions of psychology and psychiatry that seek universalism.i It highlights 

the necessity of unsettling the hegemonic aura of biomedical psychological categories. That is, 



"taking Asian experiences of trauma ‘on their own terms’” (Micale and Pols; 2021, 5). More 

precisely, “psychological trauma is culturally and historically situated and cannot be extracted 

from its complex social, cultural and political context” (4). The book, thus, exposes readers to 

a wide range of sociocultural patterns in handling psychological suffering, either by drawing 

on indigenous cultural references, importing foreign biomedical frames, or combining both 

modes of knowledge.  

After traumatizing events, people resort to diverse cultural strategies to restore their 

communities and gain a sense of normality that the book editors identify as a “blend of 

interpretations.”  This “blend of interpretations” unfolds the intriguing fusion between 

traditional healing techniques along with other different streams of medical, psychological, and 

psychiatric traditions in interpreting the aftereffects of trauma. In other words, the chapters 

unpack “the dynamic interplay between dominant (Western) psychiatric views on PTSD and 

various local idioms of distress” (19).  

Some chapters have instrumentalized the concept of “trauma” to uncover the existing silences 

on experienced violence. However, words like “trauma” and “traumatic” are not part of the 

various spoken languages in Asia. Chapter 3, “Atomic Trauma,” by Ran Zwigerbery tackles 

the paradoxical phenomenon of the rising interest in studying the psychological ramifications 

of the nuclear age after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (in Japan), as a 

“psychological weapon of ‘mass terror’” as an unprecedented event witnessed by the entire 

world, while overlooking the actual survivors of these bombings who faced neglect for their 

mental suffering for decades (78). The historical excavations uncovered a confluence of 

reasons behind the negligence of atomic bomb survivors’ psychological trauma. The failure to 

acknowledge the psychological pain among the survivors is attributed to multiple reasons, 

namely American censorship, Japanese researchers’ suspicion of trauma, and the immense 

interest in radiation damage.  

Likewise, Chapter 6 tries to read the psychological trauma implied in the letter-writing 

friendship between Western activists and a group of Indonesian women imprisoned as part of 

anti-communist purges in Indonesia. The author, Vannessa Hearman, recognizes the fact that 

these women never used the term “trauma,” but applying psychological trauma allows the 

research to subvert the imposed stigma on female communist activists in contemporary 

Indonesia. Similarly, Hua Wu relies on the connections of trauma and memory in addressing 



the remembering of the experiences of Sent-Down Youth programs that mobilized urban 

educated kids to the countryside during the communist restructuring of 1960s China.  

The ethnographic studies in Chapters 5, 10, and 11 defy the globalization of PTSD. In fact, 

PTSD screening has been indoctrinated as an integral humanitarian effort to elevate the 

suffering of inflicted populations since the 1990s. Such standardization of psychological relief 

has obscured the complex dynamics that take place in processing traumatic events, especially 

in protracted conflicts, like in Vietnam, Burma and Kashmir. As the editors nicely put it, “many 

individuals in Asia today remain in situations that continue to traumatize them: they therefore 

are not yet post their trauma” (16). In Chapter 5, “No PTSD in Vietnam,” Narguis Barak attends 

to the vigorous marketization of PTSD, by bringing into play an array of particular cultural, 

contextual, socio-political history and environmental factors that condition suffering and 

healing in the Vietnamese context after the war. Barak discovered that foreign theories of 

French and Soviet psychiatry found resonance in traditional Vietnamese medicine that 

“emphasized the somatic and social over the intrapsychic and individual” (134). The 

subsequent Chapters 10 and 11 thoroughly describe the transferring of the public health model 

of trauma and its intersection with local common-sense-making processes, one in Burma and 

the other in occupied Kashmir. Most importantly, the authors of both chapters notice the 

constitution of “trauma” and its associated terms as a form of “public testimony” (246) to gain 

international visibility for the inflicted populations.      

Another curious moment that some of the studies trace is the non-linearity of the development 

of psychiatry and psych-sciences in the early twentieth century. They, rather, unravel the 

dialectic dynamics in transferring and applying these modern Western realms of ideas and 

traditional cultural frames, in various contexts, cultures, and times. In Chapter 4, Jennifer Yum-

Park discusses the time in South Korea in which army psychiatrists struggled to diagnose and 

treat the psychiatric victims of war after the Korean War. This historical case simultaneously 

highlights the role of war in facilitating the global exchange of medical ideas, and the 

dynamism of ideas in psychiatric thought and practice, at that time. For instance, the Neo-

Freudian dominated American psychiatry which extended Freud’s thought in explaining 

mental breakdown in the army. The neo-Freudians ascribed the mental breakdown to the “pre-

existing psychological and interpersonal disturbances since their early childhood” (102). In 

Chapter 7, Caroline Bennett—through her focus on haunting in post-Khmer Rouge 

Cambodia—provides what she describes as “a counter-narrative or alternative approach to 

totalizing approaches” that perpetuate “the notion of PTSD as a normal stress response to 



traumatic events” (194). Bennett dissects the Cambodian ritualistic offerings for the dead in 

the re-ordering of sociality.    

To wrap up, the book represents insightful cases that expose the diversity of how people react 

to horrific past events across Asia’s modern history. The careful contextualization included in 

each chapter confronts the inherent bias of the historical trauma studies of well-documented 

traumatic experiences in the Western world. Untangling intricate social and cultural 

mechanisms people deploy in times of turbulence and rapture challenge the discursive 

hegemony of trauma as a self-evident moral imperative. Nevertheless, a significant cluster of 

studies have relied on trauma as an entry point to discerning extraordinary violence, its long-

lasting psychological residue, and identifying potential silences.  

iMills, China. Decolonizing Global Mental Health : The Psychiatrization of the Majority World. London ; 
Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2014.  
 
Nouran El-Hawary is a PhD candidate in the Social Anthropology Programme, at the 
University of Otago. Her research topic explores the concepts and practices of wellbeing 
among Arab refugees, who recently resettled, since 2016,  in the city of Dunedin, New Zealand. 
Unpacking ‘wellbeing’ critically challenges the trauma-centric discourse in humanitarian 
practices which depict refugees as helpless victims, in need of saving. Focusing on ‘wellbeing’ 
draws on the creativity, life-sustaining techniques, and dignity that refugees carve out along 
their displacement journeys.  
 
In 2019, she ethnographically examined the everyday lives of sub-Saharan refugees and 
migrants in tracking their experiences in accessing healthcare in Rabat, Morocco, as part of her 
MA degree. Applying anthropological inquiry provided grounded and nuanced understandings 
of complexities and ambivalences stemming from the implementation of global health polices 
that promote refugees’ healthcare access, through studying specific locale situated within 
particular national context and historicity.  
 

 
© 2024 Nouran El-Hawary 

 

                                                             


