Doctoral Dissertation Research: The effects of psychic trauma on the narratives of emotions in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

University Of California-San Diego, La Jolla CA

Investigators

Abstract

Graduate student Allen L Tran, supervised by Dr. Thomas Csordas, will undertake a cognitive anthropological study of culture and Post Traumatic Stress among Vietnamese Vietnam War veterans in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He will investigate the hypothesis that those with PTS differ from those without it in how they interpret everyday emotional events in their lives. He builds on other research on PTS and American veterans, which found that one of the underlying causes of PTS is the inability to make meaning of events. The research will be conducted in three different districts of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam: a district undergoing rapid change, a poor district, and a middle class district. The researcher will choose a random sample of participants from government housing lists and interview them with standard cognitive anthropological techniques to determine local categories of emotions and their associated valuations. He also will administer psychological scales developed for Vietnamese in the United States to determine which participants have PTS and which do not. Finally, he will solicit narratives of emotional events from each group. The narratives will be analyzed for how they make use of the emotional frameworks. Other researchers have found that Vietnamese veterans who now live in the United States are less likely to suffer from PTS than are American veterans. This research may help us to understand why, which would be of social benefit; understanding the relationship between PTS and culture could aid policy makers and those who work with veterans. The study also will expand theories of trauma with perspectives from a non-Western culture and thereby contribute to scientific understanding of the relations between violence, culture, and emotions.