C A Kidron
Biographic Data
| ID | 36732 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C A Kidron |
| GIVEN NAMES | C A |
| FAMILY NAME | Kidron |
| SIGNATURE | KIDRON C A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Haifa |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5522-826X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 345 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal . Alexander L Hinton
Affective authentication: Transforming strangers into family
Modern distress and lifestyle migration: The false promise of a pure relationship with one's self
This study presents a qualitative ethnographic exploration of professionally successful lifestyle migrants' self-perceptions of premigration etiologies of "modern distress," and postmigration pathways of healing and outcomes in Guatemala. Reflexive accounts of perceived etiologies of distress include self-commodification, atomization, and disengagement from "true-selves" as stressors motivating relocation. Migrants depict postmigration healing pr…
Taking the soldier home: Sustaining the domestic presence of absent fallen soldiers in Israel
This study presents the lived memory work of Israeli bereaved parents who preserve the bedrooms of their children—fallen soldiers—intact after their deaths. Ethnographic semi-structured interviews and participant observation in the rooms point to an assemblage of interwoven practices that sustain the presence of the dead in the family lifeworld. Enactment of past habitual embodied movement, person-object interaction, and familial roles within the…
Emancipatory voice and the recursivity of authentic silence: Holocaust descendant accounts of the dialectic between silence and voice
This study traces the trajectory of Israeli grandchildren of Holocaust survivors (GCOS) as they give voice to their parents’ and their own previously silent embodied memory. Impacted by the pedagogic experience of state-engineered high school trips to sites of Holocaust atrocity and the promotion of GCOS testimony, ethnographic interviews disclose GCOS critique of parental silence. GCOS aim to usurp their parents’ role as ‘authentic’ carriers of …
Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic
I live in Jerusalem, but am chair of the Anthropology Department at Haifa University. We have had three major waves of coronavirus, and although we have had a relatively low number of deaths, during waves we have had a very high rate of cases per million in our population. We have been in full lockdown during the peak of each of our waves. We are currently in our third lockdown. In between lockdowns, schools and small businesses have been closed …
The politics of glocalised post-traumatic emotion worlds and the limits of Cambodian therapeutic subjectivity
This article traces the way in which a local Cambodian NGO disseminates psychological therapeutic discourse and practice in post-genocide Cambodia potentially laying the constitutive ground for a Cambodian therapeutic subject. Ethnographic interviews with Cambodian interlocutors allow for an examination of Cambodian perceptions of newly disseminated Euro-Western (EW) therapeutic practices and an evaluation of the potential friction between Buddhi…
Rebirthing' the Violent Past: Friction Between Post-Conflict Axioms of Remembrance and Cambodian Buddhist Forgetting
Problematising the vernacularisation of key mechanisms in post-conflict Human Rights (HR) regimes, ethnographic interviews with Cambodian interlocutors present resistance to victim-perpetrator outreach and reconciliation, truth telling, and memorialisation. Resistance stems from the incommensurability between Buddhist present and future-focused perspectives and Euro Western (EW) past-focused memory work so central to the above mechanisms of post-…
The "Perfect Failure" of Communal Genocide Commemoration in Cambodia: Productive Friction or “Bone Business
International audience
Global Mental Health and Idioms of Distress: The Paradox of Culture-Sensitive Pathologization of Distress in Cambodia
Transmitted trauma as badge of honor: Phenomenological accounts of Holocaust descendant resilient vulnerability
Resurrecting Discontinued Bonds: A Comparative Study of Israeli Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide Trauma Descendant Relations with the Genocide Dead
This comparative study examines the way Israeli Holocaust descendants and Cambodian genocide descendants differentially reconstitute "discontinued" descendant-ancestor relations with the genocide dead they never knew. Empirically examining the way distant bonds "discontinued" in contexts of warfare and mass suffering are restored in everyday life, this study fills a lacuna in the scholarship on genocide legacies, continuing bonds, and person-dead…
The Symbolic Type Revisited: Semiotics in Practice and the Reformation of the Israeli Commemorative Context
Revisiting Grathoff's theory of symbolic type (ST), we examine the personal evolution and commemorative work of Tsipi Kichler, a cultural entrepreneur and founder of an alternative Israeli Holocaust museum/geriatric center. As hybrid product of Israeli social cleavages, Kichler exteriorizes her paradoxical vision in the museum aiming to reform Holocaust-related discourse and practice. Early biographical positioning and resultant contradictions be…
Six. Global Humanitarian Interventions: Managing Uncertain Trajectories of Cambodian Mental Health - Carol A. Kidron
Critics of humanitarian intervention and the global dissemination of trauma-related therapeutic discourse and practice have problematized the politics of global mental health intervention in “high-risk populations.” Building upon the “Holocaust model” of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, according to the illness construct of Transmitted Effects of Trauma (TET) descendants of genocide, mass violence, terrorism, and natural disasters continue to be a…
Existential multiplicity and the late-modern smoker: Negotiating Multiple Identities in a Support Group for Smoking Cessation
To examine identity work of smokers attempting to quit, we undertook participant observation at an Israeli cessation support group. Grounded theory and thematic analysis of group dialogue permitted identification of recurring themes and the presentation of illustrative vignettes. We found that, rather than the linear, goal-oriented constitution of a univocal non-smoking identity, identity work entailed re-appraisals of the experience of liminalit…
Inheriting Discontinued Bonds: Trauma-Descendant Relations With the Genocide Dead
Despite the scholarship on continuing bonds with the dead and the critique of pathologizing paradigms in trauma theory, little is known of the engagement between trauma descendants and relatives who perished prior to their birth. A sample of 55 Holocaust descendants was recruited in Israel to participate in semistructured ethnographic interviews. Descendants reported on the normalized presence of and engagement with the dead and the restoration o…
Being There Together: Dark Family Tourism and the Emotive Experience of Co-Presence in the Holocaust Past
Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person-object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past
Deviating from foundational assumptions regarding the semiotic and performative role of material objects, mementos of traumatic pasts are conceptualized as resisting mnemonic re-presentation and inter-objectivity. In keeping with trauma discourse, souvenirs of deathworlds are depicted as incapable of encapsulating sublime suffering or breaching the wall of silence between survivors and descendants, failing to constitute a material legacy. Rather …
Alterity and the Particular Limits of Universalism: Comparing Jewish-Israeli Holocaust and Canadian-Cambodian Genocide Legacies
This study compares the genocidal legacies of Cambodian-Canadian and Jewish-Israeli trauma descendants. Despite important contextual sociopolitical and historical differences, both case studies similarly deviate from the reductionist descendant profile of the pathological, publicly enlisted witness in search of redemptive testimonial voice. Findings thereby allow for a grounded deconstruction of the Euro-Western universalized semiotics of sufferi…
Embracing the lived memory of genocide: Holocaust survivor and descendant renegade memory work at the House of Being
The House of Being is a Holocaust-survivor geriatric center and memorial museum in Israel, where lifeworlds and deathworlds coexist to create a "lived memory" of the Holocaust past. Its agenda, decor, and provocative commemorative practices engender movement between everyday life in the present and the genocidal past. Humor, for instance-the House genre-allows Holocaust descendants to explore contradictions between their familial lived experience…
Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel
Despite the abundant scholarship on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the memoropolitics entailed by testimonial accounts of trauma and genocide, little is known of the everyday experience of trauma survivors and their descendants. Survivor silence is thought to signify only psychological or political repression and the "unspeakability" of traumatic pasts. It is widely accepted that the everyday lives of trauma victims and their descendant…
The Homeric Hymn to Hermes: A journey across the continuum of paradox
The phenomenon of play is evaluated as key theme in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, where self-referential paradox is used as a passage way into play, game, and ritual. Hermes as hybrid, semi-divine God, embodies the metamessage ‘this is play,’ incessantly capitalizing on the chaotic ambiguity and generative power of play and paradox. Designing a sequence of paradoxes, Hermes moves processually along paradoxical contiunua to create a ‘play reality,’ …
Surviving a Distant Past: A Case Study of the Cultural Construction of Trauma Descendant Identity
Despite the abundance of psychological studies on trauma related ills of descendants of historical trauma, and the extensive scholarly work describing the memory politics of silenced traumatic pasts, there has yet to emerge a critical analysis of the constitutive practices of descendants of historical trauma. This article presents an ethnographic account of a support group for descendants of Holocaust survivors, proposing that the discursive fram…
Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel
Despite the abundant scholarship on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the memoropolitics entailed by testimonial accounts of trauma and genocide, little is known of the everyday experience of trauma survivors and their descendants. Survivor silence is thought to signify only psychological or political repression and the "unspeakability" of traumatic pasts. It is widely accepted that the everyday lives of trauma victims and their descendant…
Surviving a Distant Past: A Case Study of the Cultural Construction of Trauma Descendant Identity
Despite the abundance of psychological studies on trauma related ills of descendants of historical trauma, and the extensive scholarly work describing the memory politics of silenced traumatic pasts, there has yet to emerge a critical analysis of the constitutive practices of descendants of historical trauma. This article presents an ethnographic account of a support group for descendants of Holocaust survivors, proposing that the discursive fram…
Being There Together: Dark Family Tourism and the Emotive Experience of Co-Presence in the Holocaust Past
Alterity and the Particular Limits of Universalism: Comparing Jewish-Israeli Holocaust and Canadian-Cambodian Genocide Legacies
This study compares the genocidal legacies of Cambodian-Canadian and Jewish-Israeli trauma descendants. Despite important contextual sociopolitical and historical differences, both case studies similarly deviate from the reductionist descendant profile of the pathological, publicly enlisted witness in search of redemptive testimonial voice. Findings thereby allow for a grounded deconstruction of the Euro-Western universalized semiotics of sufferi…
Embracing the lived memory of genocide: Holocaust survivor and descendant renegade memory work at the House of Being
The House of Being is a Holocaust-survivor geriatric center and memorial museum in Israel, where lifeworlds and deathworlds coexist to create a "lived memory" of the Holocaust past. Its agenda, decor, and provocative commemorative practices engender movement between everyday life in the present and the genocidal past. Humor, for instance-the House genre-allows Holocaust descendants to explore contradictions between their familial lived experience…
Transmitted trauma as badge of honor: Phenomenological accounts of Holocaust descendant resilient vulnerability
Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person-object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past
Deviating from foundational assumptions regarding the semiotic and performative role of material objects, mementos of traumatic pasts are conceptualized as resisting mnemonic re-presentation and inter-objectivity. In keeping with trauma discourse, souvenirs of deathworlds are depicted as incapable of encapsulating sublime suffering or breaching the wall of silence between survivors and descendants, failing to constitute a material legacy. Rather …
Resurrecting Discontinued Bonds: A Comparative Study of Israeli Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide Trauma Descendant Relations with the Genocide Dead
This comparative study examines the way Israeli Holocaust descendants and Cambodian genocide descendants differentially reconstitute "discontinued" descendant-ancestor relations with the genocide dead they never knew. Empirically examining the way distant bonds "discontinued" in contexts of warfare and mass suffering are restored in everyday life, this study fills a lacuna in the scholarship on genocide legacies, continuing bonds, and person-dead…
The "Perfect Failure" of Communal Genocide Commemoration in Cambodia: Productive Friction or “Bone Business
International audience
Rebirthing' the Violent Past: Friction Between Post-Conflict Axioms of Remembrance and Cambodian Buddhist Forgetting
Problematising the vernacularisation of key mechanisms in post-conflict Human Rights (HR) regimes, ethnographic interviews with Cambodian interlocutors present resistance to victim-perpetrator outreach and reconciliation, truth telling, and memorialisation. Resistance stems from the incommensurability between Buddhist present and future-focused perspectives and Euro Western (EW) past-focused memory work so central to the above mechanisms of post-…
The Symbolic Type Revisited: Semiotics in Practice and the Reformation of the Israeli Commemorative Context
Revisiting Grathoff's theory of symbolic type (ST), we examine the personal evolution and commemorative work of Tsipi Kichler, a cultural entrepreneur and founder of an alternative Israeli Holocaust museum/geriatric center. As hybrid product of Israeli social cleavages, Kichler exteriorizes her paradoxical vision in the museum aiming to reform Holocaust-related discourse and practice. Early biographical positioning and resultant contradictions be…
Existential multiplicity and the late-modern smoker: Negotiating Multiple Identities in a Support Group for Smoking Cessation
To examine identity work of smokers attempting to quit, we undertook participant observation at an Israeli cessation support group. Grounded theory and thematic analysis of group dialogue permitted identification of recurring themes and the presentation of illustrative vignettes. We found that, rather than the linear, goal-oriented constitution of a univocal non-smoking identity, identity work entailed re-appraisals of the experience of liminalit…
Inheriting Discontinued Bonds: Trauma-Descendant Relations With the Genocide Dead
Despite the scholarship on continuing bonds with the dead and the critique of pathologizing paradigms in trauma theory, little is known of the engagement between trauma descendants and relatives who perished prior to their birth. A sample of 55 Holocaust descendants was recruited in Israel to participate in semistructured ethnographic interviews. Descendants reported on the normalized presence of and engagement with the dead and the restoration o…
Taking the soldier home: Sustaining the domestic presence of absent fallen soldiers in Israel
This study presents the lived memory work of Israeli bereaved parents who preserve the bedrooms of their children—fallen soldiers—intact after their deaths. Ethnographic semi-structured interviews and participant observation in the rooms point to an assemblage of interwoven practices that sustain the presence of the dead in the family lifeworld. Enactment of past habitual embodied movement, person-object interaction, and familial roles within the…
The politics of glocalised post-traumatic emotion worlds and the limits of Cambodian therapeutic subjectivity
This article traces the way in which a local Cambodian NGO disseminates psychological therapeutic discourse and practice in post-genocide Cambodia potentially laying the constitutive ground for a Cambodian therapeutic subject. Ethnographic interviews with Cambodian interlocutors allow for an examination of Cambodian perceptions of newly disseminated Euro-Western (EW) therapeutic practices and an evaluation of the potential friction between Buddhi…
Surviving a Distant Past: A Case Study of the Cultural Construction of Trauma Descendant Identity
Despite the abundance of psychological studies on trauma related ills of descendants of historical trauma, and the extensive scholarly work describing the memory politics of silenced traumatic pasts, there has yet to emerge a critical analysis of the constitutive practices of descendants of historical trauma. This article presents an ethnographic account of a support group for descendants of Holocaust survivors, proposing that the discursive fram…
The Homeric Hymn to Hermes: A journey across the continuum of paradox
The phenomenon of play is evaluated as key theme in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, where self-referential paradox is used as a passage way into play, game, and ritual. Hermes as hybrid, semi-divine God, embodies the metamessage ‘this is play,’ incessantly capitalizing on the chaotic ambiguity and generative power of play and paradox. Designing a sequence of paradoxes, Hermes moves processually along paradoxical contiunua to create a ‘play reality,’ …
Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past in the Everyday Life of Holocaust Trauma Survivors and Their Descendants in Israel
Despite the abundant scholarship on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the memoropolitics entailed by testimonial accounts of trauma and genocide, little is known of the everyday experience of trauma survivors and their descendants. Survivor silence is thought to signify only psychological or political repression and the "unspeakability" of traumatic pasts. It is widely accepted that the everyday lives of trauma victims and their descendant…
Embracing the lived memory of genocide: Holocaust survivor and descendant renegade memory work at the House of Being
The House of Being is a Holocaust-survivor geriatric center and memorial museum in Israel, where lifeworlds and deathworlds coexist to create a "lived memory" of the Holocaust past. Its agenda, decor, and provocative commemorative practices engender movement between everyday life in the present and the genocidal past. Humor, for instance-the House genre-allows Holocaust descendants to explore contradictions between their familial lived experience…
Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person-object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past
Deviating from foundational assumptions regarding the semiotic and performative role of material objects, mementos of traumatic pasts are conceptualized as resisting mnemonic re-presentation and inter-objectivity. In keeping with trauma discourse, souvenirs of deathworlds are depicted as incapable of encapsulating sublime suffering or breaching the wall of silence between survivors and descendants, failing to constitute a material legacy. Rather …
Alterity and the Particular Limits of Universalism: Comparing Jewish-Israeli Holocaust and Canadian-Cambodian Genocide Legacies
This study compares the genocidal legacies of Cambodian-Canadian and Jewish-Israeli trauma descendants. Despite important contextual sociopolitical and historical differences, both case studies similarly deviate from the reductionist descendant profile of the pathological, publicly enlisted witness in search of redemptive testimonial voice. Findings thereby allow for a grounded deconstruction of the Euro-Western universalized semiotics of sufferi…
Inheriting Discontinued Bonds: Trauma-Descendant Relations With the Genocide Dead
Despite the scholarship on continuing bonds with the dead and the critique of pathologizing paradigms in trauma theory, little is known of the engagement between trauma descendants and relatives who perished prior to their birth. A sample of 55 Holocaust descendants was recruited in Israel to participate in semistructured ethnographic interviews. Descendants reported on the normalized presence of and engagement with the dead and the restoration o…
Being There Together: Dark Family Tourism and the Emotive Experience of Co-Presence in the Holocaust Past
Six. Global Humanitarian Interventions: Managing Uncertain Trajectories of Cambodian Mental Health - Carol A. Kidron
Critics of humanitarian intervention and the global dissemination of trauma-related therapeutic discourse and practice have problematized the politics of global mental health intervention in “high-risk populations.” Building upon the “Holocaust model” of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, according to the illness construct of Transmitted Effects of Trauma (TET) descendants of genocide, mass violence, terrorism, and natural disasters continue to be a…
Existential multiplicity and the late-modern smoker: Negotiating Multiple Identities in a Support Group for Smoking Cessation
To examine identity work of smokers attempting to quit, we undertook participant observation at an Israeli cessation support group. Grounded theory and thematic analysis of group dialogue permitted identification of recurring themes and the presentation of illustrative vignettes. We found that, rather than the linear, goal-oriented constitution of a univocal non-smoking identity, identity work entailed re-appraisals of the experience of liminalit…
The Symbolic Type Revisited: Semiotics in Practice and the Reformation of the Israeli Commemorative Context
Revisiting Grathoff's theory of symbolic type (ST), we examine the personal evolution and commemorative work of Tsipi Kichler, a cultural entrepreneur and founder of an alternative Israeli Holocaust museum/geriatric center. As hybrid product of Israeli social cleavages, Kichler exteriorizes her paradoxical vision in the museum aiming to reform Holocaust-related discourse and practice. Early biographical positioning and resultant contradictions be…
Resurrecting Discontinued Bonds: A Comparative Study of Israeli Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide Trauma Descendant Relations with the Genocide Dead
This comparative study examines the way Israeli Holocaust descendants and Cambodian genocide descendants differentially reconstitute "discontinued" descendant-ancestor relations with the genocide dead they never knew. Empirically examining the way distant bonds "discontinued" in contexts of warfare and mass suffering are restored in everyday life, this study fills a lacuna in the scholarship on genocide legacies, continuing bonds, and person-dead…
Global Mental Health and Idioms of Distress: The Paradox of Culture-Sensitive Pathologization of Distress in Cambodia
Transmitted trauma as badge of honor: Phenomenological accounts of Holocaust descendant resilient vulnerability
The "Perfect Failure" of Communal Genocide Commemoration in Cambodia: Productive Friction or “Bone Business
International audience
Emancipatory voice and the recursivity of authentic silence: Holocaust descendant accounts of the dialectic between silence and voice
This study traces the trajectory of Israeli grandchildren of Holocaust survivors (GCOS) as they give voice to their parents’ and their own previously silent embodied memory. Impacted by the pedagogic experience of state-engineered high school trips to sites of Holocaust atrocity and the promotion of GCOS testimony, ethnographic interviews disclose GCOS critique of parental silence. GCOS aim to usurp their parents’ role as ‘authentic’ carriers of …
Anthropologists Answer Four Questions about the Pandemic
I live in Jerusalem, but am chair of the Anthropology Department at Haifa University. We have had three major waves of coronavirus, and although we have had a relatively low number of deaths, during waves we have had a very high rate of cases per million in our population. We have been in full lockdown during the peak of each of our waves. We are currently in our third lockdown. In between lockdowns, schools and small businesses have been closed …
The politics of glocalised post-traumatic emotion worlds and the limits of Cambodian therapeutic subjectivity
This article traces the way in which a local Cambodian NGO disseminates psychological therapeutic discourse and practice in post-genocide Cambodia potentially laying the constitutive ground for a Cambodian therapeutic subject. Ethnographic interviews with Cambodian interlocutors allow for an examination of Cambodian perceptions of newly disseminated Euro-Western (EW) therapeutic practices and an evaluation of the potential friction between Buddhi…
Rebirthing' the Violent Past: Friction Between Post-Conflict Axioms of Remembrance and Cambodian Buddhist Forgetting
Problematising the vernacularisation of key mechanisms in post-conflict Human Rights (HR) regimes, ethnographic interviews with Cambodian interlocutors present resistance to victim-perpetrator outreach and reconciliation, truth telling, and memorialisation. Resistance stems from the incommensurability between Buddhist present and future-focused perspectives and Euro Western (EW) past-focused memory work so central to the above mechanisms of post-…
Taking the soldier home: Sustaining the domestic presence of absent fallen soldiers in Israel
This study presents the lived memory work of Israeli bereaved parents who preserve the bedrooms of their children—fallen soldiers—intact after their deaths. Ethnographic semi-structured interviews and participant observation in the rooms point to an assemblage of interwoven practices that sustain the presence of the dead in the family lifeworld. Enactment of past habitual embodied movement, person-object interaction, and familial roles within the…
Modern distress and lifestyle migration: The false promise of a pure relationship with one's self
This study presents a qualitative ethnographic exploration of professionally successful lifestyle migrants' self-perceptions of premigration etiologies of "modern distress," and postmigration pathways of healing and outcomes in Guatemala. Reflexive accounts of perceived etiologies of distress include self-commodification, atomization, and disengagement from "true-selves" as stressors motivating relocation. Migrants depict postmigration healing pr…
Anthropological Witness: Lessons from the Khmer Rouge Tribunal . Alexander L Hinton
Affective authentication: Transforming strangers into family
Psychology (18 works) · Sociology (15 works) · Political science (14 works) · Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration (11 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · History (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Law (10 works) · History (9 works) · Epistemology (8 works)