Culture, Taboo, and Trauma
Human cultures in general transmit memetic packets to their members, including patterns which might be called traumatic, or which at least smell like trauma.
There are three patterns of things which are helpfully referred to as "cultural trauma" which I want to talk about:
- Taboo as a highly general pattern, and often functioning as a kind of "cultural traumatic payload"
- Adaptation to traumatic environmental conditions
- Self-traumatization, that is, of a culture upon its members
But first, regarding the term cultural trauma: I often find this term distasteful, and it's especially often deployed politically by factions I dislike, and to make arguments I don't endorse. For anyone reading who has similar reflexes, I'd ask that you assume I'm trying to be precise, and making do with a word that's good enough for a moderately subtle concept.
Three main clusters
Taboo and superstition
I'll use the word 'taboo' to refer to a broad cluster of patterns in human cultures which I suspect rely on the same or overlapping psychological mechanisms. This includes a lot of what might be included as norms, superstitions, or generically sometimes just "cultural practices."
Taboo in this sense forms a kind of primal human social technology, which provides a distributed mechanism to "succinctly" communicate information about low probability negative events. In some modern theories, taboo is seen as a low-resolution cultural pattern which encodes knowledge about danger or risk, but perhaps distorted or over-reified. Salient examples here might be taboos against incest, or different kinds of taboos around cleanliness, feces, etc.
Let's say: human children come with very little knowledge, and our species is specifically adapted for long childhoods rich with learning. Children are both highly vulnerable and quickly become capable of putting themselves at risk that outstrips their understanding of the world. There's often a steep tradeoff between capability/curiosity/intelligence on one hand, and sensitivity to risk on the other. In a species like ours, cultures need to be able to transmit densely the risk associated with various strategies or behaviors, and in a general way which can be applied to a wide range of dangers in the environment.
(Note that people feel that children and especially adolescents are too risk-taking, and this is somewhat true but it's not what I'm quite talking about—I mean things like, small children don't yet understand that stoves or knives or busy streets are dangerous.)
Under such a regime, the packets communicating different kinds of dangers have to a. strongly convey some danger, even at risk of exaggerating it, b. be very likely to be kept and transmitted to the next generation, and c. be understood by both children unsophisticated adults. The tendency then is for such packets to be very simple, sharp, and often indeed to be exaggerated over time.
Note the claim here is not "taboo is meaningless and only harmful" but rather just, "taboo looks to be the mechanism of a very low-entry communication system, both very valuable, but often resulting in goofy or problematic output."
Broadly speaking, there are many systems of taboo (broadly construed) which have shapes in common with what I've referred to as trauma smells: sub-clinical patterns of behavior, perception, and experience which appear to be caused by unmetabolized adverse experiences. Some examples:
- Taboos against sexual contact between young people, or contact at all between the sexes
- Taboos against emotional expression, eg. weakness, fear, sadness, etc., and especially crying
- Taboos against specific words or specific kinds of expression (loudness, anger, etc.)
- Taboos against specific foods, or specific rules about when food becomes impure
- Taboos against specific eye contact patterns (avoiding direct gaze with authority figures)
- Sexual shame, body-shame, taboos against nudity, etc.
- Menstruation taboos, virginity/purity taboos
- Taboos regarding feces that regard it as disgusting or shameful to be heard to fart, or especially to be seen defecating
- Perhaps, face and honor as reified constructs
To be clear, there are structurally pretty similar patterns which are functional, and there's lots of overlap among function and "superstitious" patterns. I'm sympathetic to theories that these are something like "holdovers" or "overupdates" from functional patterns in a given time or place, eg. proscriptions against drinking cold (ie., unboiled, disease-ridden) water.
Related, this still runs into the same questions I discussed in trauma smells, that identifying something as traumatic is nebulous and ambiguous, because indeed lots of things are dangerous or harmful and should be avoided. For what it's worth, there are spiritual traditions which see even eg. taboos around feces as a kind of burden, ignorance, or confusion, and some hypermodern western schools with similar spins on taboo in general.
Adaptation to exogenous conditions
Premodern agriculture probably fits nicely as a mostly exogenous social configuration which would have been traumatic for its members: people often went hungry or at least under-nourished for substantial portions of the year, they lived in fear of bad harvests and famine, and they were conscripted in an intensity and monotony of labor that excluded most of the breadth of human flourishing.
Two caveats: obviously such societies were practicing agriculture, and so this isn't quite an exogenous cause, but generally agricultural societies couldn't really just choose to move to another form of economy. Also, some of the burden of premechanized agriculture would have been due to theft and waste by feudal elites, but my impression is that wasn't quite most of the problem.)
Depending on how we draw the boundary of one society vs. another, another relatively exogenous pattern might be equilibria of violence between groups. This might include retaliatory personal violence like blood feuds, but also recurring war, as has been endemic in our species for at least thousands of years. In the epicenters of wars, we can probably reasonably assume clinical levels of trauma in all parts of society—both exposure to violence, and the threat of violent disruption to one's livelihood, of your land being taken as spoils, etc, should likely have been traumatic for most people. Such societies are likely to reify eg. martial virtue or submission to violent cultural imposition like forced religious conversion.
One more: coal mining communities adapt to the unhealthy and unsafe conditions that men working in mines are subject to, and to their likely early deaths, whether from collapses, explosions, or black lung. This affects both the psychologies of actual miners, but also their families and the communities as a whole, who understand that at least the lives of men will likely be harsh and short. Similarly, such communities will likely reify this as good or at least unavoidable.
Self-traumatization
"Exogenous" above is nebulous but at least worth contrasting with relatively more "endogenous" patterns, which are much more like culturally specific and contingent.
On the far end, the prototypical cases would probably be Female Genital Mutilation and Chinese foot binding. The basic shape here is that a society something like "actively" embodies a pattern which traumatizes its members, and especially that they see this as good, desirable, virtuous, etc. My understanding is that adult women saw these practices as good, so it's not quite (simply) a matter of one part of a society subjugating another.
These are some of the most extreme cases, but I'm more interested in the less glaring ones. Broadly speaking I'm interested in circumstances where normative socialization in a culture involves techniques, experiences, etc. that we would at a personal level call "abuse" or "neglect" and whose effects parallel those of trauma smells when observed at a personal level. I'm especially interested in contexts where that's still the case in our culture today.
It's salient here to look at changing cultural standards of abuse over time. Restricting it to American culture, as recently as 70 years ago it was commonplace to hit children, and my sense(?) is it was more common to verbally abuse children, to compel them with threat of force to all kinds of activities, etc.
I don't have definitive evidence here, but it should be at minimum plausible to say, "well, when people are subject to these experiences as individuals, at least in our modern culture, on average they get trauma or at least subclinical trauma-like effects, so it's reasonable to suppose that those effects should also apply when people in a culture as a whole have them, and vice versa for the absence of those experiences."
On vibes, collected anecdotes, and based on some sparse data I've seen, if you look at cultures that are more openly abusive by contemporary western standards, they indeed look more traumatized by the criteria I describe as trauma smells! The most salient examples to me here is east asian culture, which seems pretty obviously more dissociated and rigid than western culture, on average.
(Obviously, aggregating over large and diverse groups, etc., but the point still stands, assuming my sense is correct. Also, see below re my take on cross-anthropological considerations for this question.)
There's theories which suggest that trauma is less about the specific content of an adverse experience, as much as rejection and isolation in that experience. In these theories, having a traumatic but normative socialization results in better outcomes on average than trauma while isolated, that's so often reported in Western clinical psychology. I think this is probably moderately true, but I still think my claim that classically traumatic adverse experiences, when practiced by a culture in general result in trauma smells, is broadly correct.
Besides patterns of overt abuse, I'm especially interested in ways that cultures transmit baseline trauma-smelly affective and relational stances. In particular: a. there are patterns of basic affective/dispositional transmission, and b. there are patterns of social shaming, rejection, and exclusion which can be extremely steep, enough that I'm inclined to refer to them as a kind of cultural trauma.
Affective cultural transmission
Cultures seem to be able to transmit, besides specific practices and institutions, also (in the aggregate) baseline affect and disposition. Eg., high social trust, optimism or pessimism, tendency towards depression and neuroticism, conscientiousness, or availability of intimacy and vulnerability. In the subtlest cases I'm not mostly inclined to call this trauma, but the more intense cases have pretty characteristic trauma smells. In addition, while not really trauma smells, baseline optimism, felt-social-safety, etc. obviously contribute to some broader skewedness of a given culture, on average.
Some obvious extreme cases here would be eg. patterns of pessimism and neuroticism among Ashkenazi Jews, Puritan theology of original sin and suspicion of pleasure, and pervasive fear and self-censorship in the former Societ Union.
Even more relevant here are patterns of negative trauma: trauma incurred in the absence of a developmentally "necessary" input, eg. parental warmth and affection, safety, play, etc. Again on vibes, collected anecdotes, and some sparse data, there seems to be in the aggregate broad cultural patterns of atrophy or at least diminished sensitivity to a variety of ways of being, in culturally distinctive shapes.
Shame and social rejection patterns
Firstly, my sense is that there's a basic fear of social rejection in humans, which in productive cases leads to conformity and prosociality, and in more neurotic cases leads to anxiety and paranoia. Sometimes people will argue that this is a kind of "fundamental human trauma"—I'm open to this perspective but that's not quite what I'm getting at here.
Beyond that kind of baseline prosocial conformism, some cultures have constructed patterns of intense shame and rejection. In extreme cases, this can incentivize and valorize suicide or intra-familial murder, ie. Seppuku and honor killing, to restore honor. It feels to me... mostly unreasonable to even have to defend a position that this is a kind of cultural trauma. More specifically, I want to say that the culture (and therefore its members) carry a traumatic and exaggerated fear of, and inclination for, social rejection.
Another angle on this pattern would be eg. (relatively) high rates of suicide from stress, and fear of or actual failure in elite schools. Again it feels reasonable to assume that the differential rates of suicide signal an underlying hightened fear of failure and rejection in that cohort as whole, which is an indicative trauma smell.
Again here there are much less extreme cases which are more interesting. Even if they don't lead to murder or suicide, there are patterns in many cultures of greatly elevated inclination for, and fear of, social rejection, and associated patterns of anxiety and rigidity. My sense is broadly that a. the propensity of a society to deploy shame and rejection, b. the intensity of conformism and social rigidity, and c. corresponding trauma smells, are all fairly strong correlated. Examples that come to mind are the modern culture of Korea, elite society in Britain historically and perhaps still, or stereotypically modern American corporate culture.
WEIRD, developmental psychology otherwise
So there's an obvious critique of this perspecticve, that a. in principle this is culturally chauvanist or maybe "myopic" (prioritizing culturally specific notions of health and especially "spiritual health") and b. more specifically that results from Western psychology don't generalize outside of WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) societies.
I think this critique is basically correct as far as it goes, but I still stand by my schtick as mostly directionally correct, and pointing to a real cluster, at least insofar as it's narrowly descriptive.
Re a., my perspective is certaintly different from lots of traditional and culturally specific conceptions of the same phenomena, and especially highlighting certain features, and it's at least partially aligned with the contemporary liberal zeitgeist, but I don't feel like I'm aping the Western dogma here.
More interestingly re b.: it sure seems like the basic shape of trauma in general happens across all human cultures, though some seem to be either more susceptible to it or (more sympathetically) at least more forthcoming about it. Obviously, different cultures relate to and cope with their cultural trauma differently, and it also seems like cultures can express and foster neurotic and traumatized patterns in very specific ways; see later on culture-bound disorders.
Again, the specifics matter: my claim here is moderately sparse, namely that there seems to be cultural trauma in broad strokes, but is mostly agnostic with respect to any specific psychological model, like popular schticks based on developmental psychology, or especially "childhood developmental trauma" as the source of most of abnormal psychology. (It seems like the exciting claims of developmental psychology mostly haven't been borne out in the data1 even for Western culture, and almost certainly not cross-anthropologically.2 I'll add that I still think that something in the direction of negative trauma should apply in general, and I would be very surprised if this were actually just a cultural pattern.)
I'm less clear if trauma smells all line up, and I expect those to be more culturally specific. Still, based on my understanding I'm quite confident that there have to be behavioral and energetic consequences of trauma etc., and my depiction of "trauma smells" basically just tries to gesticulate at a bunch of clusters of those.