Cultural–Ecological Perspectives on the Understanding and Assessment of Trauma

Abstract

This chapter is premised on the assumption that the definition of trauma entails the cultural and ecological systems that mediate human experience and provide resources for coping and meaning making. Furthermore, the detection of traumatic stress disorder implies that the stressful event has overtaxed personal and, in some cases, community capacities. It follows that in considering cultural and ecological factors in the understanding of trauma and trauma recovery, both community resources for resilience and personal resources for coping that are appropriated from culture should be assessed. This emphasis on the cultural and the ecological is in response to the limitations of individually focused western conceptions of trauma and concerns about medicalized approaches to trauma intervention that insufficiently account for contextual factors in trauma recovery (Argenti-Pullen, 2000; Burstow, 2003; Summerfield, 2004). Cross-cultural trauma work provides the opportunity and challenge of deriving frameworks of understanding and practice that can have both local and global relevance. Although there has been some recognition of sociocultural and systemic factors in trauma, such as experienced by ethnic-minority or low-income populations, the related inquiry has largely focused on domestic concerns. The realities of global trauma work, however , require models of trauma assessment that reflect cultural and ecological diversity, as well as models of intervention that take into account global disparities and complex local histories (Marsella & Christopher, 2004; Wessells, 1999). Professionals in the trauma field have to confront the fact that pretrauma levels of normalcy cannot be presumed for groups that have experienced historical trauma, oppression, and culture loss