In the mid-1990s, then Director Neil Smelser made me an offer I couldn’t refuse – the opportunity to work as his colleague on three-year project funded by the Hewlett Foundation, which would culminate in my organizing a year of collective research and book writing at the Center. We published a book from our first year of collaboration and a special journal issue from our second. For the third, I was on my own. I knew the people I wanted to invite. Bernhard Giesen, Ron Eyerman, Piotr Sztompka, and Bjorn Wittrock worked outside the U.S. – Germany, Sweden, and Poland – but they were fellow theorists, and we had known each other for many years. We shared an interest in thinking about cultural creativity and how symbolic codes and narratives can provide opportunities for democratic forms of social reintegration.
The five of us agreed to come to Stanford for part or all of the year 1998-1999. We scheduled a week to come together in September, 1998, for an open-ended discussion about our goals and procedures. After a couple of days, we abandoned each and every one of our initial proposals. We felt exasperated, and I began to worry that the collaboration would implode before it began. At dinner that evening, we asked one another “what are we really trying to think about here?” Piotr Sztompka said, “I think what we’re all talking about is some kind of trauma, something like a social trauma.” That clicked. We were on our way.
Some of us stayed on for the Fall term, others came back in the Spring, but we kept in constant touch and exchanged manuscripts and ideas, did background reading, and made sometimes outrageous extra-disciplinary explorations. From January onward, we were all in residence together, and we began holding weekly and biweekly sessions, hammering out a general model and reporting on the case studies each of us were committed to developing. This was an explosively creative period for all concerned. There was conflict, pain, repair, a giant learning curve, and a series of epiphanic moments that made it all worthwhile. We were in continuous conversation informally, in twos and threes, as we filtered information back from other fellows outside our circle. Neil Smelser made periodic appearances, confirming we were on the right path, providing valuable kernels of wisdom, and also offering fatherly restraint when the band of brothers threatened to get out of hand.
In May, we made a presentation to the entire CASBS community, and it was an exhilarating moment of public crystallization. Our colleagues were pleasantly surprised: so this is what you guys were going on about all this year. We were too. Collaboration among theorists in the social science is almost totally unheard of. We usually think on our own, and are congenitally competitive. This unforgettable year was an extraordinary exception.
Our collective book, Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, came out with University of California Press in 2004. Most of us published monographic case studies as well. In the years since its appearance, cultural trauma theory has been taken up by various scholars from different disciplines around the world, and gives every sign of continuing as a vital, cumulative research program.
It could only have happened at CASBS. What a place!
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