Narratives of Transformative Reconciliation : Exploring Contours of Happiness

This book looks at ethnographies of survival, reconciliation, and resilience in communities and individuals. It interrogates the definition of happiness, hope and despair and explores how communities and individuals navigate life when besieged by trauma and the processes they must go through to enable healing.

Devastations caused by violence force people to look for ways to deal with seemingly irreconcilable life circumstances. Sometimes these efforts are individual and sometimes collective. People draw on a variety of resources, such as religion, culture, family and kinship networks, friends, literature, storytelling, art, theatre, and counselling to come to grips with their circumstances. This volume discusses such efforts through a multidisciplinary lens. It looks at ethnographic accounts of communities and individuals that showcase methods used to renegotiate, reconfigure the pain and to enable a life of dignity, healing and social transformation. It also looks at violence, memory, trauma, dislocation through different prisms.

Part of the Social Movements and Transformative Dissent series, this book will be of interest to students, academicians, activists, and all those engaged with the study of trauma studies, mental health, philosophy of psychology, behavioural sciences, philosophy, humanities, clinical psychology, gender and peace and conflict studies.

Gopi Devdutt Tripathy is currently an Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, Maitreyi College, University of Delhi. She completed her doctorate on Shia Observation of Muharram from the Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research interests include religion, sociological theory, popular culture, gender studies, sociology of knowledge and literary studies. She has a number of publications in journals and books.

Anurita Jalan is an Associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Maitreyi College, University of Delhi. Her areas of interest are Sociology of Health and Medicine, Gender Studies, Family and Marriage, and Ethics in the everyday life of students. She was the Deputy Coordinator, D.S. Kothari Centre for Science, Ethics and Education, University of Delhi, for the year 2011. Programs were held under the guidance of the D.S. Kothari Centre in consultation with His Holiness the Dalia Lama and scientists/social scientists of national and international fame. She has presented papers in some national and international workshops and symposia related to her areas of interest. She has also written articles/chapters for some journals and books.