How Disaster Becomes Collective Trauma: Violence and Social Order from a Durkheimian Perspective
EDN: MECJXC
Abstract
This article examines the genesis of a foundational concept in the sociology of trauma — Kai Erikson's theory of collective trauma — which emerged in the context of the post-war American sociology of disaster. This field presented a curious paradox: rather than observing social collapse, scholars frequently documented a surge of community solidarity and altruism in the wake of disaster, phenomena they interpreted through a Durkheimian lens. Erikson’s seminal study of the 1972 Buffalo Creek flood revealed a profound unraveling of the social fabric — a condition he theorized as collective trauma. This distinction between disaster and trauma was achieved through two maneuvers. The first was the importation of a subject of violence from the psychological conceptualization of trauma — a framework that, as the article demonstrates, was itself deeply influenced by socio-economic factors concerning victim compensation. In the case of the Buffalo Creek dam collapse, this agent of violence was the coal mining company responsible for the dam’s maintenance. The second maneuver was the resuscitation of Durkheim’s original notion of violence as anomie — a pathological dissolution of norms and morality that unfolds during a collapse of the social order. While other disaster sociologists had moved away from this understanding of violence — which evokes a Hobbesian state of nature — Erikson used this Durkheimian lens to conceptually articulate the aftermath of a disaster marked by an unusually high number of casualties for its time, which resulted not in solidarity but in the total disintegration of the community.
Supporting agencies: The article was prepared within the framework of the RSF project No. 25-18-00901
About the Author
D. A. Bochkov
Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences
Russian Federation
Russian Federation
Dmitry A. Bochkov — MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology, is a researcher at the Center for Medical Anthropology at the N.N. Miklouho-Maclay
Moscow
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Review
For citations:
Bochkov D.A. How Disaster Becomes Collective Trauma: Violence and Social Order from a Durkheimian Perspective. Sociology of Power. 2025;37(3):97-125. (In Russ.) EDN: MECJXC
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