Commentary: Trauma and Testimony: Between Law and Discipline

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Commentary: Trauma and Testimony: Between Law and Discipline Veena Das

Didier Fassin and Estelle d’ Halluin open their article on the politics of trauma in French political asylum policies with an epigraph from Philosophical Investigations, in which Ludwig Wittgenstein speaks of the criteria for establishing the truth of a confession as lying not in the description of process but, rather, in our trust in the truthfulness of the confession. Now the special criteria for establishing our trust in the truthfulness of the confession in ordinary life would lie in the fact that the person confessing to something is not telling us how the world is but, rather, how it is with him or her. Yet when confession enters the expert domains of police practice, law, or medicine, its truthfulness becomes completely dependent on the protocols through which the body and mind of the person who is confessing are read. The two contributions under discussion here on the various trajectories of confession and testimony in relation to collective violence, practices of asylum, and especially the figure of the refugee that are now increasingly embedded in another intersecting line—that of trauma discourse—provide an important lens to the way in which anthropological method and reasoning can shed light on the category of the “West” itself. Fassin and d’Halluin give us a superb example of the way in which Foucault’s notion of “governmentality” might be put to good use to show the various intersecting forces that have coagulated to generate the particular politics of suspicion around refugees and asylum seekers in contemporary French politics. Too often in the literature now the concepts of “government” and “governmentality” are completely confused. In Fassin and d’Halluin, however, there is

ETHOS Vol. 35, Issue 3, pp. 330–335, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. © 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ETH.2007.35.3.330.

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a patient exploration of how two collective histories, one of the legitimization of trauma as a nosological category in psychiatry and the other the rise of xenophobic suspicion of immigrants and the decline of asylum as a legitimate category, come to intersect. The result is the emergence of new protocols of bureaucratic and judicial regulation in which the test to which asylum seekers have to submit to establish that they are “true” victims of repression must correspond to the category of trauma formalized as posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a recognized diagnostic category in psychiatry. Fassin and d’Halluin demonstrate the pressures that this change in describing trauma as a specific kind of diagnosis generates on NGOs engaged with providing care to refugees or on physicians who know the grave consequences for the asylum seeker of the failure to certify that suffering derives from symptoms recognizable as trauma. The article gives a delicate mapping of the way that disciplinary practices are generated within this assemblage of concepts, institutions, and practices. Its architecture is a superb demonstration of the way in which a case might be constructed traversing various networks of actions. Apart from its theoretical sophistication the work could serve as an important pedagogic example of how to do anthropological research in this field that dismantles the local as spatial concept while simultaneously showing what multisided ethnography might mean in practice. Kelly McKinney’s work joins the critique of some recent developments of trauma theory, especially its development into an ideology that might end up sacralizing the victims of violence, casting them as innocent victims, and ending up by denying their “full moral and psychological agency.” The two ethnographic sites that McKinney describes, one in New York and one in Denmark, are engaged in rehabilitation programs for survivors of torture and refugee trauma. There is some sense of their political struggles but the project seems to develop in several registers. For instance, it engages with conceptual disagreements among trauma theorists to show how some arguments in purely professional settings (esp. in regard to counter transference) might generate such affects as anger and guilt among practitioners. The kinds of double binds placed on professionals who participate in the therapeutic process that embraces the idea that the stories of survivors must be believed if they are not to suffer from further trauma and the pressure to determine whether memories are accurate or not, characterize the affective work of these professionals. Yet McKinney seems to turn rather quickly to generalizations that flatten out the

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import of the particular descriptions. For example, she states that, “This (the fear that their testimony will not be believed) may be more likely to happen when master narratives of truth are produced in the interests of the state or other political actors who are perpetrators of violence and repression or who otherwise have an agenda that would be threatened by these testimonies outside of the therapeutic contexts.” The political actors here are so general—state, other political actors, or perpetrators of violence and repression—that one wonders what work the conjunction of these categories in a single sentence is doing. Is the capability to produce master narratives the same in all these cases? Is there some sense here that the legal blocking of narratives of trauma is occurring in the same manner in legal courts as in offices of immigration authorities even within a single state such as the United States? I think the interest here would lie in tracking the way a story moves from the therapeutic context to other contexts, but the analysis offered by McKinney is itself blocked by producing numerous citations from the literature rather than following up such a trajectory. This might not be McKinney’s fault because IRB regulations prohibit her from any direct contact with patients, which is entirely reasonable if in the clinician’s judgment any form of retelling the story outside the therapeutic context carried the risk of harming the patients. However, it does point to the fact that stories might be silenced for many reasons including those derived from technical or moral considerations. I wish McKinney had drawn out the ethnography of the testimonies further than she does by, say, giving a few examples of how the written documents provided by the therapists are put to use. But, perhaps, this is available in other publications. Both these contributions have the great merit of showing the power of ethnography to illuminate how discourses of trauma are in fact embodied in institutional sites. They tell us how discourses of trauma actually circulate and participate in wider politics and in popular culture. This approach is very different from a framework in which an archaic figure such as homo sacer is assumed to fashion political subjectivities across a range of historical and political circumstances, all subsumed under the category of modernity. Clearly there is some way in which issues of life and death become the business of the state under modernity and the anxiety around the figure of the immigrant–refugee tells us something about the political body and its imagination in the Western milieu. What both articles do, however, that is different,

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is to show the relation between law and the discipline of psychiatry as an evolving relationship. There are some continuities in the manner in which the figure of the dangerous individual as it evolved in psychiatry allowed the law to take preemptive steps against certain individuals as shown by Michel Foucault (2003) and in the manner in which the diagnosis of PTSD now functions to establish the accuracy or inaccuracy of a testimony given by the survivor of violence. The differences, however, are equally remarkable in that what is at stake (at least in part) today in political imaginaries is the self-image of the West. How so? When reading these articles I was reminded of the following passage from an interview with Emmanuel Levinas: “Europe has many things to be reproached for, its history has been of blood and war, but it is also the place where this blood and war have been regretted and constitute a bad conscience, a bad conscience of Europe which is also the return [retour] of Europe, not toward Greece but toward the Bible. . . : man is Europe and the Bible, and all the rest can be translated from there” (2001:164). The articles by Fassin, d’Halluin, and McKinney shed light on a significant puzzle for me. How is one to hold the fact of the enormous violence of say, the colonial wars in the last century with the enormous investment of discursive and other resources in such projects as that of human rights, international courts of justice, and the altruistic spirit demonstrated in the work of voluntary groups such as Doctors without Borders, Lawyers without Borders, Physicians for Responsibility, Centers for Torture victims, and other numerous organizations that have tried to redress these harms. I am not interested in any accountant’s view of the world that would ask what the balance between these two opposing trends is. It seems to me that one possible way of going about framing these kinds of questions is to look closely at the relation between law and disciplines as these authors do. Another way might be to see how a differentiated geography of harm and redress emerges in the political imaginaries of Europe and the United States. There are clear hints in both projects that the push to refine disciplinary theory and practice comes at least partially from the application of theories of trauma to the non-European subjects. Thus, for example, the suspicion around stories of trauma in the political sphere becomes crystallized when more and more refugees begin to come from Africa, Sri Lanka, or the Middle East. This suggests another line of intersection in which the scientific discourse around

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trauma needs to be retold from the perspective of the different geographies of fear and suspicion in the European and North American imagination. Given that more refugees live in Asia and Africa than in Europe, perhaps there is an interesting critical experiment to be performed here to see how different kinds of political imaginaries impact on the relation between law and disciplines, including law and medicine. Finally, the issue of innocence and guilt in relation to victims and survivors is an extremely interesting and important one. McKinney is particularly interesting in her insistence on how the idea of innocent victims attaches to the survivors of the Nazi camps but begins to be put into question for survivors of torture or genocide from other regions. It seems to me that if anthropology does not become part of the same political imaginary and popular culture that insists that the positional condition of being able to tell one’s story and have it received is that of innocent victim, then we might open ourselves to the fact that under conditions of ongoing violence people will take recourse to many ways of escaping that violence. Neither the intentions of people living in such zones of violence nor their methods of escape might be “legal,” at least as the immigration authorities or even psychiatrists define legality. Siddharthan Maunguru (n.d.) has begun to show how women wishing to escape the oppressive conditions of ongoing violence in Sri Lanka contract marriages with men living in Canada or London but have to construct appropriate marriage stories to satisfy immigration authorities that these are truly “traditional” marriages. It seems to me that the entire scenario calls for a rethinking of the borders between legality and illegality, between discipline and its breach, and between Europe and its non-European others. It is also time for anthropology as a discipline to think about its own enchantment with forms of explanation that seem to depend on long lost archival figures as somehow casting a shadow on the rest of history independent of actual conditions of life and labor. My suggestion is not to somehow reinstate new forms of empiricism but to take seriously the conditions of possibility through which the lines of the actual are realized. Both these contributions are splendid examples of such labors.

VEENA DAS is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor, Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University

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References Cited Foucault, Michel 2003 Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France 1974–1975. London: Verso. Levinas, Emmanuel 2001 Is It Righteous to Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas. Jill Robbins, ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Maunguru, Siddharthan N.d. Changes in Conceptions of Marriage among Tamils in Sri Lanka and International Regulation of Immigration. Unpublished MS.