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The Dug-Up Heart: Uncovering Trauma in an Indonesian Convent

Dates:6 February 2023
Times:16:00 - 18:00
What is it:Seminar
Organiser:School of Social Sciences
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  • In category "Seminar"
  • In group "(SoSS) Social Anthropology"
  • By School of Social Sciences

Dr Meghan Rose Donnelly The Dug-Up Heart: Uncovering Trauma in an Indonesian Convent Is everyone traumatized? What if we took trauma to be a fundamental aspect of human existence? Prominent in some strands of popular psychology, this is also the stance taken by an eastern Indonesian order of Catholic nuns who 'dig up' their hearts as part of a continual process of self-formation. Set against a backdrop of Christian theologies of discernment, state concerns for human development and local resonances of ritual sacrifice, nuns learn to interpret their childhoods as marred by emotional trauma sustained in the company of kin. Once excavated, this trauma must be addressed in the convent through conscious efforts of mutual care, making trauma a moral category that creates new forms of subjectivity. Nuns use what they know of each other’s trauma to try and ‘just understand’ each other. Through acts of acknowledgement and support, the idiom of trauma makes the company surrounding a nun directly responsible for her self-formation. This paper is about the ways Indonesian Catholic nuns conceptualize trauma as something that all humans sustain, how it moulds the self as it forms towards its Christian ideal, and how its causes—and cures—are rooted in the company of other people. I suggest that their experiences highlight the sociality of trauma more broadly and argue that trauma is one articulation of how people become themselves in the company of others.

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