Death, trauma, and the 'event'

This chapter focuses on tensions around the ‘event’ in the literature on death and in the literature on trauma. In particular the chapter focuses on debates in trauma studies regarding whether trauma should be regarded always as the result of specific events, or if trauma should be extended to cover consequences of ongoing systematic processes; and whether trauma should be regarded always as the result of an external event, or if trauma can be linked to fantasies and the memory of events. Underlying different positions in these debates are different assumptions about the human being, the individual, social relations, and about death. It is these assumptions that this chapter seeks to investigate. It will do so by relating ethnographic material on natural disasters in Iceland and the perceptions of and reactions to those disasters.