The Trauma Mantras

<i>The Trauma Mantras</i> 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 <i>widening</i> 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.