1 TRAUMA AND HEALING: CROSS-CULTURAL AND ... - UPCH

categorize as a clinical psychiatric or somatic syndrome, such as PTSD. Such categorizationwould do injustice to what the women experience. Through their bodies the women speak ofsocial suffering due to the war in a climate of fear that suppresses other forms of speaking.While silencing is a powerful mechanism of control enforced through fear, it can also operateas a survival strategy, since speaking other than through their bodies would contribute to theendangerment of their lives.The experience of violence has not only caused suffering and cultural alienation, butalso new possibilities to deal with both and to rebuild changing ways of lives. The fact thatalmost all women suffer from similar complaints results in a new community feeling. Thecomplaints include headaches, gastritis, stomach ulcers, weakness, diarrhea, irritability,insomnia, weak blood, and folk illnesses such as nervios (nerves), susto (fright) en pena (pain,grief, sorrow). The chronic pains have become a mechanism of social commentary andpolitical consciousness. Instead of completely demolishing the women, the illnesses havereduced experiences of powerlessness as a result. The women search together for herbs in themountains, even though their headaches will not disappear until justice has been done. Thewidows do more than revitalize Mayan traditions. They develop new social networks,extending beyond traditional family ties, which give them support. This happens throughweaving activities. The weaving of cloth has always served to transmit traditions and valuesfrom the past to the next generation. Now, women reconstruct through the weaving process afeeling of identity and community life. Through their weaving they also find temporaryemotional relief.The Mayan women also find a new way of developing social ties and social supportnetworks through alignment with new fundamentalist religious movements. These movementsgained territory from the Catholic Church, which had been marked by the State as subversivebecause of its fight for social justice. The new Christian fundamentalism instead can be seenas a very conservative movement, in which one has to surrender to authority and in whichcollective identity and social actions for justice are undermined. The Pentecostal churches,however, do give space for the collective expressions of suffering through catharsis. Thewidows find in these churches a certain degree of mutual trust, cooperation, communityfeeling, dignity, and a feeling of justice. In addition, they can integrate parts of theirtraditional cosmology into a new cosmology. Thus, they make syncretistic use of varioussources available for remaking their world.The main emphasis of Green’s study lies on women’s own perspective on theirsuffering due to organized violence and their own attempts to remake their everyday life.Given the topicality of the issue, it is striking that Green does not refer to sexual violence as asource of women’s suffering and women’s way of dealing with it. From other studies on thecivil war in Guatemala we know that sexual violence against women was used as part of thewar strategy. Perhaps the women participating in Green’s research were not exposed to thiskind of violence. Another explanation could be that they did not reveal their experiences withit out of shame or because for them sexual violence was less important than the destruction oftheir life world due to loss of, for instance, their loved ones. Or, perhaps, Green chose not todiscuss the issue. Also we do not learn much about external contributions to the healingprocess in her ethnography. While Green describes briefly the detrimental effects of outsideinterventions in the form of development projects, she does not refer to international and4