Ojai, California
June 13–16, 2002

The second FPR workshop took place on June 13–16, 2002, in Ojai, California. The twenty-nine participants included clinicians, UCLA faculty, and post-doctoral and graduate students in the areas of anthropology, psychiatry, neuroscience, psychology, linguistics, epidemiology, and history. The purpose of the workshop was to plan for a major interdisciplinary conference on biological, clinical, and cultural approaches to understanding trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder, which took place December 13–15, 2002, at UCLA. Participants also continued their discussions of topics and questions introduced at the 2001 workshop. The greatest challenge for attendees was the lack of integrative conceptual frameworks (e.g., good theories about how cultural settings and ecologies modulate brain and behavior).

Several participants from the 2001–2 workshops and 2002 conference contributed papers to a multi-authored volume published by Cambridge University Press in 2007, Understanding Trauma: Integrating Biological, Clinical, and Cultural Perspectives, edited by cultural psychiatrist Laurence Kirmayer, FPR president and psychological anthropologist Robert Lemelson, and neurobiologist Mark Barad. The book offers fresh thinking and challenging critiques of conventional wisdom in the field of trauma studies by offering a far more complex and nuanced view of the human response to trauma. In particular, this view incorporates in-depth field research over extended periods of time in very different cultural settings, close observations of everyday life, and first-person perspectives as well as those of family and others living in the same community. In an epilogue, the editors hoped that the book’s cross-disciplinary approach “will lead us to appreciate the multiple dimensions of a complex reality, while refining the use of our own disciplinary tools and perspectives.”