Publications

All Publications

Peer Review

Kidron, Carol A. (2003) “Surviving a Distant Past: A Case Study of the Cultural Construction of Trauma Descendant Identity.” Ethos: Journal of the Society for Psychological Anthropology 31:4, 513-544.

Kidron, Carol A. (2006) “The Homeric Hymn to Hermes: A Journey across the Continuum of Paradox.” Semiotica: Journal of the International Association for Semiotic Studies 158: 35-70.

Kidron, Carol A. (2009) "Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past among Holocaust Trauma Descendants in Israel." Current Anthropology 50:1, 5-27.

Kidron Carol A. (2009) "In Pursuit of Jewish Paradigms of Memory: Constituting Carriers of Jewish Memory in a Support Group for Children of Holocaust Survivors." Dapim: Studies on the Shoah. 23:4-35 (Bilingual Journal).

Kidron Carol A. (2010) "Response to - Research Forum: The Politics of Memory and the Pursuit of Jewish Paradigms of Memory – discussion and responses to an article by Carol Kidron" Dapim: Studies on the Shoah.. 24: 324-400. (Bilingual Journal).

Kidron, Carol A. (2010) "Embracing the Lived Memory of Genocide: Holocaust Survivor and Descendant Renegade Memory-Work at the House of Being." American Ethnologist 37:(3): 429-451.

Kidron, Carol A. (2012) "Breaching the Wall of Traumatic Silence: Holocaust Survivor and Descendant Person-Object Relations and the Material Transmission of the Genocidal Past. Journal of Material Culture 17 (1): 3-21.

Kidron, Carol A. (2012) "Alterity and the Particular Limits of Universalism: Comparing Jewish-Israeli Holocaust and Canadian-Cambodian Genocide Legacies." Current Anthropology 53 (6): 723-753.

Kidron, Carol A. (2013) “Being there Together: Dark Family Tourism and the Emotive Experience of Co-presence in the Holocaust Past. Annals of Tourism Research 41:175-194.

Kidron, Carol A. (2014) "Inheriting Discontinued Bonds: Trauma-Descendant Relations with the Genocide Dead" Death Studies 37 pp.

Nachtigal, Anat and Carol A. Kidron (2015) “Existential Multiplicity and the Late Modern Smoker: Negotiating Multiple Identities in a Support Group for Smoking Cessation.” Sociology of Health and Illness. 37: 452-467.

Kidron, Carol A. (2015) "Survivor Family Memory at Sites of Holocaust Remembrance: Institutional Enlistment or Family Agency?" History & Memory 27:45-73.

Kidron, Carol A. and Handelman, D. (2016) The Symbolic Type Revisited: Semiotics in Practice and the Reformation of the Israeli Commemorative Context. Symbolic Interaction 39: 421-445.

Kidron, Carol A. (2018). Resurrecting Discontinued Bonds: A Comparative Study of Israeli Holocaust and Cambodian Genocide Trauma Descendant Relations with the Genocide Dead. Ethos 46 (2):230-253.

Kidron, Carol A. (2020) The “Perfect Failure” of Communal Genocide Commemoration in Cambodia: Productive Friction or “Bone Business”? Current Anthropology. 1-57.

Kidron, Carol A. & Kirmayer, Laurence, J. (2019) Global Mental Health and Idioms of Distress: The Paradox of Culture Sensitive Pathologization of Distress in Cambodia. Culture Medicine and Psychiatry, 43(2), 211-235.

Kidron, Carol A., Kotliar, Dan & Kirmayer, Laurence, J. (2019). Transmitted Trauma as Badge of Honor: Phenomenological Accounts of Holocaust Descendant Resilient Vulnerability. Social Science and Medicine 239: 112524.

Kidron, Carol A. (2020). The “Perfect Failure” of Communal Genocide Commemoration in Cambodia: Productive Friction or “Bone Business”? Current Anthropology. 1-57.

Kidron, Carol A. (2020) Emancipatory Voice and the Recursivity of Authentic Silence: Holocaust Descendant Accounts of the Multidirectional Dialectic between Silence and Voice. History and Anthropology.

Kidron, Carol A. (2021) The Politics of Glocalized Post-Traumatic Emotion Worlds and the Limits of Cambodian Therapeutic Subjectivity. Emotions and Society 3 (1): 133-153.

Kidron, Carol A. (2021) 'Rebirthing' the violent past: Friction between post-conflict axioms of remembrance and Cambodian Buddhist forgetting. Anthropological Forum 31 (3): 291-311.

Shalev-Nizri, Osnat and Kidron, Carol A. (in press) Taking the Soldier Home: Sustaining the Domestic Presence of Absent Fallen Soldiers in Israel. Memory Studies 29pp.

Book Chapters

Kidron, Carol A. (2007) “The Social Construction of Second Generation Survivors: Support Group Narratives of Wounded Carriers of Memory.” In: Children in the Shadow of the Holocaust: Child Survivors and Second Generation. Z. Solomon and J. Chaitin (eds.) Tel-Aviv: Hakibbutz Hameuchad, 261-285. (Hebrew).

Kidron, Carol A. (2009) "Silent Legacies of Trauma: A Comparative Study of Cambodian Canadian and Israeli Holocaust Trauma descendant Memory Work." In Remembering Violence: Anthropological Perspectives on Intergenerational Transmission. Argenti N. Schramm, C. eds. New York: Berghahn Press. 185-220.

Kidron, Carol A. (2011) " Deconstructing the Second Generation Survivor Syndrome: Paradigm Shifts from Psychopathology to Embodied Presence." In Holocaust as Paradigm of Trauma in the 20^th Century. J. Brunner and N. Zajde eds. Wallstein Verlag Press. (German) 30pp.

Kidron, Carol A. (2011) Embodied Legacies of Genocide: Holocaust Descendant Sensual Memories of Inter-subjectivity and Inter-corporeality. In Fran Mascia Lees (ed.) Companion to Anthropology of Bodies/Embodiment. Wiley Blackwell. 451-466.

Kidron, Carol A. (2012) “Collective Memory, Traumatic Memory and Genocide: A Sociological and Anthropological Perspective. In Miriam Rieck (Ed.) The Holocaust: Its traumatic and intergenerational effects in comparison to other persecutions, its interpretations in different theories and its reflections in the arts. Berlin: Verlag Irena Regener. 37-62.

Kidron, Carol A. (2014) “Embodying the Distant Past: Holocaust Descendant Narratives of the Lived Presence of the Genocidal Past” in Alex Hinton and Devon Hinton (eds.) “Rethinking Trauma: Memory, Symptom, and Recovery after Genocide and Mass Violence.” Duke University Press. 29 pp.

Kidron, Carol A. (2015) “The Global Semiotics of Trauma and Testimony: A Comparative Study of Jewish-Israeli, Canadian-Cambodian and Cambodian Genocidal Descendant Legacies.” In Haim Hazan and Amos Goldberg (Eds.) Marking Evil: Holocaust Memory in a Global Age. New York: Berghahn Press. 39 pp.

Kidron, Carol A. (2015) "Cultural Translation and Cambodian Buddhist Subjectivity." In J. Brunner and G. Plotkin-Amrami (Eds.) Beyond the Consulting Room: Psychological Discourse in Contemporary Culture. Tel-Aviv: Resling. (Hebrew).

Kidron, Carol A. (2016) “Breathing Life into Iconic Numbers: Yad Vashem’s “Shoah Victims’ Names Recovery Project” and the Constitution of a Posthumous Census of Six Million Holocaust Dead. In Michal Kravel El Tovi (Ed.) Taking Stock: Cultures of Enumeration. Indiana: Indiana University Press.

Kidron, Carol A. (2016) "Universalizing Trauma Descendant Legacies: A Comparative Study of Jewish-Israeli and Cambodian Genocidal Descendant Legacies." In Broch-Due, Vigdis and Bjorn Enge Bertelson (Eds.) Violent Reverberations: Global Modalities of Trauma. London: Palgrave MacMillan.

Kidron, Carol A. (2016) "Domesticating Dark Tourism: Familial Tourism to the Holocaust Past". In Sabine Marschall (Ed.) Tourism and Memories of Home. Clevedon: Channel View.

Kidron, Carol A. (2018) "Cross-Cultural Discontinued Bonds with the Dead: Trauma-Descendant Relations with the Genocide Dead." In Antonius Robben (Ed.) Wiley-Blackwell.

Entries in Encyclopedias

Kidron, Carol A. “Memory.” (2016) In Oxford Bibliographies in Anthropology. Ed. John Jackson. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. 37pp

Book Reviews

Kidron, Carol A. (2008) "Psychic Trauma: Dynamics, Symptoms and Treatment." (Book Review, Brenner, Ira, M.D.) Transcultural Psychiatry 45: 342-347.

Kidron, Carol A. (2010) Feldman, Jackie (2008) Above the deathpits and beneath the flag: Youth voyages to Poland and the performance of Israeli national identity. New York: Berghan. Journal Royal Anthropological Institute

Kidron, Carol A. (2015) Slyomovics, Susan. 2015. How to Accept German Reparations. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2014. x-373 pp. Ethos 43: E21-E23.

Kidron, Carol A. (forthcoming) Hazan, Haim. 2015. Against Hybridity. Cambridge: Polity Press. Israeli Sociology.

Sample Publications and Abstracts

Kidron, Carol A. (2009). Toward an Ethnography of Silence: The Lived Presence of the Past among Holocaust Trauma Descendants in Israel. Current Anthropology 50:1, 5-27.

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 descendants entail only the “absence of presence” of the past and the absence of descendant knowledge of that past, while the familial social milieu is thought to foster only the wounds of transmitted PTSD. Contrary to the literature, ethnographic accounts of Holocaust descendants depict the survivor home as embedding the nonpathological presence of the Holocaust past within silent, embodied practices, person-object interaction, and person-person interaction. These silent traces form an experiential matrix of Holocaust presence that sustains familial “lived memory” of the past and transmits tacit knowledge of the past within the everyday private social milieu. The ethnography of silent memory may also provide a tentative model of nontraumatic individual and familial memory work in everyday life.

Kidron, Carol A. (2012). Alterity and the Particular Limits of Universalism: Comparing Jewish-Israeli Holocaust and Canadian-Cambodian Genocide Legacies. Current Anthropology 53 (6): 723-753

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 suffering. Set against the above similarities, key differences between Khmer and Jewish self-perceived sense of vulnerability/empowerment, lived experiences of memory and forgetting, and genocide-related moral modes of being not only challenge key axioms in the scholarship and in humanitarian practice but raise epistemological concerns regarding the constitutive role of cultural worldviews often marginalized in sociopolitical analyses.

Kidron, Carol A. (2013). Being there Together: Dark Family Tourism and the Emotive Experience of Co-presence in the Holocaust Past. Annals of Tourism Research 41:175-194.

This study examines the motivations and lived experiences of Israeli descendants of Holocaust survivors who set out on family roots trips to heritage sites and sites of atrocity accompanied by their survivor parents. Post-trip semi-structured interviews disclose the marginalization of historical heritage and post-tourist identity work. Instead, descendants highlight pathos-filled familial sociality. Co-presence in sites of atrocity enables the performance of survivor emotions tacitly present in the home thereby evoking descendant empathy and identification. Emergent ‘‘we-relationships’’ and family ‘‘home-making’’ while away calls for the deconstruction of binaries such as: ordinary/extraordinary, mundane/sacred, and home/away. Findings problematize the mystification of dark tourism and suggest the ‘domestication’ of secular pilgrimages. Finally a re-presencing of the family in mainstream tourism research is called for.

This comparative study examines the way Jewish-Israeli Holocaust descendants and Buddhist Cambodian genocide descendants differentially re-constitute dis-continued 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, continued bonds and person-dead contact. Descendants depict channels of engagement with the dead entailing person- person-dead contact, person-object interaction and imaginal conversations, constituting co-presence and inter-subjectivity. Contrary to trauma theory, Holocaust and genocide studies, and the anthropology of absence, that reduce relations with the dead to maladaptive identification or the burdensome presence of voided absence, the data points to normalized and empowering relations. Comparative findings contribute to our understanding of the way cross-cultural meaning making differentially conceptualizes the porous border between the living and their ancestors and informs the restoration of (dis)-continued bonds.