The Trauma Mantras is a memoir by medical anthropologist, teacher, and writer Adrie Kusserow, who has worked with refugees and humanitarian projects in Bhutan, Nepal, India, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. It is a memoir of witness and humility and, ultimately, a way to critique and gain a fresh perspective on Western approaches to the self, suffering, and healing. Kusserow interrogates the way American culture prizes a psychologized individualism, the supposed fragility of the self. In relentlessly questioning the Western tribe of individualism with a hunger to bust out of such narrow confines, she hints at the importance of widening the American self. As she delves into humanity’s numerous social and political ills, she does not let herself off the hook, reflecting rigorously on her own position and commitments. Kusserow travels the world in these poetic meditations, exploring the desperate fictions that “East” and “West” still cling to about each other, the stories we tell about ourselves and obsessively weave from the dominant cultural meanings that surround us.
- Cover
- Contents
- Foreword / Yusef Komunyakaa
- I
- The Trouble with Stories: Indian Brothel Raid
- The Sweaty Tribe
- Revised Lonely Planet Guide to Holy Men
- Patchwork Quilt for a Congolese Refugee
- Trigger Fields
- Quarantine Dreams
- Getting the Story Just Right
- Calla Lily, Condom
- Western Psychonauts of the Postpartum Period
- Refugee Christmas Eve
- While Teaching Anthropology Class, I Think of Indra’s Net, My Mother, and Try to Redefine ADHD
- Ethnography of Horror, Domesticated
- One Life to Live
- Stale Refugee
- What Counts as Trauma
- Trauma, Inc.
- The Day I Really Became an Anthropologist
- Skull Tree Stories
- Speaking in Tongues: Kickboxers
- The Fat Claw of My Heart
- NGO Elegy
- Those Days We Played God
- Home of Confident Children Out of Conflict (CCC)
- II
- On the Brilliance of Your Story
- I Watch My Daughter Snort Google
- Bhutan: East Wants West Wants East
- Psychocolonialism
- The Trauma Mantras
- Tulip Fever
- Field Notes: Nursing Home Fieldwork with Students
- Himalayan Facebook Fiction
- Prostrations
- Love Poem to America, Quarantined
- What Makes Us (Not) Buddhists
- Anthropology of American Yoga: The Dalai Lama Looks Down on a Yoga Class
- Monsoon Clouds
- American Bardo
- Refugee Encounters with Feelings of a Capitalist Kind
- Happiness
- American Skateboarders
- Breathe with Me Barbie
- Jésus, Immaculée, and the Pig
- Instructions for Doing Fieldwork: Tracking American Buddhists for Interviews at the Stupa
- Between Waking and Sleeping, I Look Outside as It Snows, Think about the Blunt Tool of the English Language
- Crossing the Great Divide
- This Is What Sorrow Looks Like
- Ringtone Trauma
- Mushrooms, Jungle, Yoga
- The Choice
- COVID Subnivean
- Don’t Let Anyone Tell You Anything Is Separate in This World
- Aborted Ethnographic Fieldwork: Nonparticipant Observation
- War McMetaphors
- Technotropic
- Mating Knot
- Humpty Dumpty Had a Great Fall
- Coming Home, I Dig around My Pharmaceutical Bag
- The Careful Preservation of Child Atoms
- Cybirds
- Mismatch Theory: A Message from a More Mindful America
- The Human TechnoBody Meets Quarantine
- Our Evolution Cannot Be Digitized
- A Brief Respite from the Usual Perceptual Divides: After Chemo I Ski through the Vermont Woods in Another Climate Change Storm
- Last Week, Tied to My Intravenous Pole
- The Trouble with Anthropocene Grammar
- Hush, Humans
- Fontanelegy
- Acknowledgments
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