[Editor's note: If this post is a little bit mystifying, it's only because the specifics of this project are a little unclear.]
The Emory Center for Myth and Ritual in American Life ("MARIAL") near Atlanta, Georgia, has a research project underway called Heroes at Home?: Experiences of Combat Trauma among Returning Veterans and Their Families
According to the website,
This research uses a combination of ethnographic and epidemiological methods to consider lived experiences of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) among Anglo-American, Mexican-American, and African-American male veterans of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. F ieldwork in San Antonio, Texas will explore how PTSD-diagnosed male veterans and their families understand and respond to trauma-related mental illness, as well as how PTSD illness experiences are shaped by individual and family members’ met and unmet expectations of veterans’ military service and performance of adult male roles within the family, particularly as related to work and economic providership. Interviews and participant observation conducted in clinical, family, and community settings will consider how veterans and their families situate lived experiences of PTSD, combat trauma, and personal and family well-being in the context of lay and clinical ethnopsychiatries around PTSD, expectations and experiences of military service in the “War on Terror,” and cultural norms for successfully functioning as an adult male. Findings will provide insight into individual- and family-level negotiations around illness, work, and gender roles; the negotiation of explanatory models of illness within pluralist cultural settings; and the ways in which cultural representations of war and PTSD are adopted, resisted, and lived out by a multiethnic group of participants.
By examining how patterns of work and socioeconomic status shape the experience of individuals and families dealing with combat-related PTSD, this research contributes to research on working families already ongoing at the MARIAL Center. The planned study will elaborate a multifaceted and diachronic view of how work is done and made sense of within families whose expectations and practices have been shaped by past military work, who have suffered the disruptions of long-term deployment, and whose well-being remains enduringly altered as a result.
Erin Finley, from the Department of Anthropology at Emory University, seems to be conducting the research study. Her contact information is available on the website, linked here.
