Adrie Kusserow

The Trauma Mantras is a memoir 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, reflecting rigorously 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 the dominant cultural meanings that surround us.

The Trauma Mantras is a memoir 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, reflecting rigorously 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 the dominant cultural meanings that surround us.

As an anthropologist, Adrie Kusserow's ethnographic poetry probes culture and globalization with poems about Sudanese refugees based in Uganda, Sudan, and the United States, especially the "Lost Boys of Sudan." The poet struggles with how to respond to suffering, poverty, displacement, and the brutal aspects of war. Much of this exploration is based in poems in which a mother is also bringing her family to a larger global arena. Adrie Kusserow is a professor of cultural anthropology at St. Michael's College. Her international fieldwork supports girls' education in South Sudan and youth media literacy in Bhutan. She lives in Underhill Center, Vermont.

Drawing from her work in comparative religion and cultural anthropology, Adrie Kusserow offers a collection of portraits of Westerners in the East and Easterners in the West struggling to relearn and relive their ideas of culture, religion, and God. These poems expose the human craving for the nourishment of a spiritual life. Celebrated poet Karen Swenson has written the Foreword. Adrie Kusserow received her Ph. D. in social anthropology from Harvard University in 1996 and is currently associate professor of cultural anthropology at St. Michael's College in Vermont. She continues to do cross-cultural field work on the spread of Eastern philosophies to the West.