Today we are accustomed to psychiatrists being summoned to scenes of terrorist attacks, natural disasters, war, and other tragic events to care for the psychic trauma of victims--yet it has not always been so. The very idea of psychic trauma came into being only at the end of the nineteenth century and for a long time was treated with suspicion. The Empire of Trauma tells the story of how the traumatic victim became culturally and politically respectable, and how trauma itself became an unassailable moral category. Basing their analysis on a wide-ranging ethnography, Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman examine the politics of reparation, testimony, and proof made possible by the recognition of trauma. They study the application of psychiatric victimology to victims of the 1995 terrorist bombings in Paris and the 2001 industrial disaster in Toulouse; the involvement of humanitarian psychiatry with both Palestinians and Israelis during the second Intifada; and the application of the psychotraumatology of exile to asylum seekers victimized by persecution and torture. Revealing how trauma has come to authenticate the suffering of victims, The Empire of Trauma provides critical perspective on some of the moral and political issues at stake in the contemporary world.

This engaging book tells the story of human evolution, asking if man is indeed the “chosen species” or merely an evolutionary accident. Written by world-renowned paleoanthropologists who are co-directors of the excavations at Atapuerca---a World Heritage Site and Europe’s oldest known burial site---where a new human species, homo antecessor, was discovered Discusses various hypotheses of human evolution, drawing conclusions from verifiable facts and well-founded argument Offers a compelling narrative written for nonspecialists and students of human evolution Includes over 60 illustrations Sold over 100,000 copies in the original Spanish-language edition