Beyond Post-Traumatic Stress ─ Homefront Struggles With the Wars on Terror

When soldiers at Fort Carson were charged with a series of 14 murders, PTSD and other "invisible wounds of war" were thrown into the national spotlight. With these events as their starting point, Jean Scandlyn and Sarah Hautzinger argue for a new approach to combat stress and trauma, seeing them not just as individual medical pathologies but as fundamentally collective cultural phenomena. Their deep ethnographic research, including unusual access to affected soldiers at Fort Carson, also engaged an extended labyrinth of friends, family, communities, military culture, social services, bureaucracies, the media, and many other layers of society. Through this profound and moving book, they insist that invisible combat injuries are a social challenge demanding collective reconciliation with the post-9/11 wars.

Sarah Hautzinger earned her doctorate in anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University, and is associate professor of anthropology at Colorado College. A socio-cultural anthropologist, Hautzinger's research emphasizes the institutional processes related to interpersonal, state and transnational levels of violent conflict. She has published Violence in the City of Women: Police and Batterers in Bahia, Brazil (California, 2007) about the creation of all-women police stations in a newly democratizing Brazil, and in addition to her work on the Post-9/11 wars with Jean Scandlyn, she has published on tourist economies, research methods, and international community-based learning.

Jean Scandlyn worked as a registered nurse in a variety of clinical settings prior to earning her doctorate in anthropology at Columbia University. She is currently a research associate professor of health and behavioral sciences and anthropology at the University of Colorado Denver. A medical anthropologist, Scandlyn's research focuses on the transition from adolescence to adulthood, health care delivery to underserved populations, and global health. Along with her research work on the post-9/11 wars with Sarah Hautzinger, she has published on conflicts over spending for public education, homeless and runaway youth, child labor, ethnographic field schools and teaching qualitative research methods.