Language, Translation, Trauma

Contemporary definitions of trauma and their application remain controversial within anthropology. A survivor's awareness of a parallel, incompatible world of atrocity is understood to bypass language or conscious expression. Such a framework can be compared with ethnographic work on the silence of survivors. Experiences of inhumanity and extreme violence eventually find a discursive niche but nevertheless pose problems of translation. Through the lens of traditional anthropology another realm emerges-a world of vampires, zombies, and cannibals. "Crimes against humanity" can be added to the list, but overall translations seem oriented toward the maintenance of interpretative control, even in contexts of mass dehumanization. Anthropologists are well placed to pay attention to both the complex evidential systems of survivors and the construction of liberal voices. The image of trauma and its untranslatability, however, linger in the background of interventions and point to the vital but endangered bond between language and humanity.