Trauma Work In Congo Using Local Metaphors

Here's a nice blog post from 'Beyond Trauma', the Somatic Experiencing blog. It describes a group intervention using local metaphors to educate people in Congo about the effects of trauma. Instead of the usual metaphor of "it's like having the brake and the accelerator on at the same time", the trainer uses a locally applicable metaphor of being chased by a wild animal. The audience responds from their experience.

Somatic Experiencing is a trauma therapy methodology developed by Peter Levine. Its basic premise is that PTSD happens as a result of the body's normal fight/flight reactions getting blocked. For example, after a scary event, the body naturally trembles. If we stifle the trembling, then the adrenalin 'locks in', and the fear stays in the body. It's better to allow the body's natural processes of trembling, tears, and so on to move through, bringing calm in their wake. Levine's practitioners focus on retraining the body, and safe release of previously stored trauma.

The Anthropology of Money

Students at the University of California at Irvine have created an online exhibition on the anthropology of money, drawing on information from relatives and friends in immigrant communities in Southern California. The home page says:

"This project took the student researchers to Little Saigon, Little India, the Cambodian Corridor of Long Beach, Los Angeles's Chinatown, Little Armenia, the clubs of Hollywood, the dorms of UC Irvine and the barrios of East LA. It also involved phone calls to far-away relatives and friends, and travels through memories contained in family photo-albums, scrapbooks, and sacred texts."

The exhibition discusses:

• various types and uses of lucky money in Hawaiian, Chinese and Muslim culture
• tandas and cundinas: Mexican-American and Latino-American rotating credit associations
• Lakshmi and ritual uses of money in Hindu culture
• the mid-Lent festival in Armenian culture
• ghost money in Chinese culture
• 'edible money' in the form of dumplings in Chinese culture.

Roots Trump Radiation? A Vital Lesson from the Ukraine

I came across a fascinating article about a community of elderly Ukrainian women who live in the Chernobyl dead-zone, in evident good health. After initially being relocated out of the radiation-contaminated area around the nuclear plant, these women decided within a few weeks to return home to the villages that had been their ancestral home. They have been there for the last twenty-five years.
The women farm beets, potatoes and other crops in the irradiated soil, forage for berries and mushrooms, and hunt game in the forest. Deer are said to be heavily contaminated, yet they are eaten. Although one of the women has thyroid cancer (which is treated), they have, on average, out-lived their peers who did not come back, by ten years.
The article suggests that the psychological effects of forced dislocation, separation from one's land and one's roots, and from one's community, are more dangerous than massive doses of radiation.
This is a deeply provocative idea, but in the context of massive doses of radiation in Japan, some of which have drifted to the US, it's a paradoxically comforting one.
Could it be that grounding into a deep relationship with the land, living in a close-knit community, eating humbly and locally, and living a very simple lifestyle, is in itself curative? These elderly Ukranian peasant women know something profound, and their indigenous wisdom holds an important lesson for the rest of us.