Babykillers czy ofiary systemu? Walka o kształt pamięci społecznej na przykładzie amerykańskiego zaangażowania w wojnę w Wietnamie
Babykillers or System Victims? Fight for the Shape of Social Memory on the Example of american involvement in the Vietnam War

Summary/Abstract: Social trauma is a result of a collusion between the individual experience of trauma and the culture-mediated process of communal creation, negotiation and structuring of meaning. It emerges from the process of communalisation of individual trauma: when individual trauma becomes an experience shared originally by a ‘carrier group’ and later on spreads throughout whole societies. As a communal experience trauma alienates from their carriers by means of cultural media and their products. In the form of cultural artifacts, such as movies or books, it transforms into a Durkheimian social fact. The inability to negate it ultimately forces the society to engage in negotiations of meaning, resulting in either a refutation or an inclusion of the carrier group’s trauma into the wider social identity. The act of emergence of social trauma can be defined as a complex, multilayered process of continuous expansion of the intersubjective field. The history of American engagement in the Vietnam war and the society’s reaction to it serves as an informative example of this process.

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