Dartmouth Events

The Trauma Mantras is a memoir written by medical anthropologist, teacher, and writer Adrie Kusserow, who has worked with refugees and humanitarian projects in Bhutan, Nepal, India, Uganda, South Sudan, and the United States. It is a memoir of witness and humility, and ultimately a way to critique and gain a fresh perspective on Western approaches to the self, suffering, and healing. Kusserow interrogates the way American culture prizes a psychologized individualism, the supposed fragility of the self. In relentlessly questioning the Western tribe of individualism with a hunger to bust out of such narrow confines, she hints at the importance of widening the American self. As she delves into humanity’s numerous social and political ills, she does not let herself off the hook, rigorously reflecting on her own position and commitments. Kusserow travels the world in these poetic meditations, exploring the desperate fictions that “East” and “West” still cling to about each other, the stories we tell about ourselves and obsessively weave from what dominant cultural meanings surround us.

Adrie Kusserow is a cultural anthropologist and poet. She was born and raised in Underhill, VT and lives on the land on which she grew up. Most of her anthropological humanitarian work is on refugee health and resettlement, including working with refugees internationally and locally in Vermont. She is currently on the Board of Trustees at the Vermont Afghan Alliance and is a co-founder, (along with the Lost Boys of Sudan resettled in Vermont) of Africa Education and Leadership Initiative: Bridging Gender Gaps Through Education (www.africaeli.org) which supports refugee girls’ education in East Africa.