How Disaster Becomes Collective Trauma: Violence and Social Order from a Durkheimian Perspective

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.