Resilience — A useful tool/concept in studying societies and cultures, their change and challenges?
Introduction
In my exchange studies in University of Turku, Finland, my fisrt course is “Introduction to Social and Cultural Resilience”. In this course, we learned to understand resilience in Finnish-Nordic context. From the meta-concept of resilience, the history of Nordic modernity, collective memory in Finland, migration, to art /imagination/ literature and well-being and their relations with resilience. In this essay as a final essay, besides writing on the basis of class literature and slides introduced, I will also try to offer examples for understanding resilience through our literature and reflect on contexts of Taiwan and East Asia. I am glad to share this idea in the form of final essay with my friends and readers.
Defining resilience: What, Why, How
What is resilience? Resilience is a capacity to recover, restore, and bounce back from both natural or human-induced traumatic experiences such as war, political unrest, sexual assault/harassment, institutional discrimination, or famine, typhoons, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis and more. In Cyrulnik’s (2018) perspective, “resilience is the resumption of a healthy development path, a renewed development path, after experiencing psychic agony of trauma.” Developmental psychologists Hall & Lamont (2013) reviewed the term “resilience” can be discovered in three research areas- ecology, developmental psychology, and the response to disaster.
Resilience is an interdisciplinary research field, mainly including ecology, sociology, psychology, politics, economics, education, social working, and more. The actors can be individuals, families, communities, organizations, societies, countries, country alliances, even to global. The goal of resilience research is to understand how actors respond and adapt to the challenges and adversities they encountered. Social and cultural resilience has three characteristics: a lasting process toward social justice, a dynamic concept with various definitions varied, and a highly context-dependent tool in practice (Pickren,2014).
Examples
Collective memory and collective imaginaries are important ideas and tools in facilitating social and cultural resilience. Collective imaginaries promote a sense of shared social responsibility have provide cultural support for the social organizations and policies that contribute to social resilience. (Berman, 2006; Offe, 2011; Hall & Lamont, 2013) How a culture understand and interpret certain event or era implies to what extent it has gone through on the path of resilience. Collective memory and collective imaginaries embody narratives about the past and future of the community, who belongs to a certain culture, and what are the core values. (Bouchard, 2003; Hall & Lamont, 2013) Addressing and re-interpreting collective imaginaries by cultural production — such as literature, drama, TV series, movies, music, and more — can raise social awareness on issues and offer a space for further narratives and discourses. For example, Finnish novelist and illustrator Tove Janson created the imaginary world of Moomin with Finnish natural and cultural elements to imply the cruelty of war and pledge for peace. The following below, I introduce several examples from both East Asian and European modern historical events/ incidents and how the next generation of citizens produce collective memories to build social and cultural resilience.
War: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Gender
German — Nazi, Jews, and the concentration camps
During the time of the Second World War, The Holocaust is undoubtedly one of the most serious anti-humanitarian events throughout human history. Countless of Jewish people murdered for their ethnicity. And families and children fleed to other countries as political refugees. Anne Frank’s Diary edited by Anne’s father and has been read globally. In Boris Cyprlink’s interview, he conveyed why he has to by creating an inexisting role as a projection of his own experience of being oppressed by Nazis. “No one would believe me.” Hence, writing a novel is an exit that Cyprulink could escape from his nightmare to connect with the public readers. “We still need memories to make sense of what’s happening to us.”
Taiwanese, South Korean, the Dutch in Indonesia, Japanese, Chinese, American Filipino, Britsh Malayan: Comfort Women 1932–1945
In almost the same years, women in East Asian countries colonised by the Japanese army were forced to “serve” as sexual slaves to the soldiers. Life in a comfort place may far worse than in hell. Physically abused and mentally humiliated all bring tremendous agony toward the captured women and even young girls. Felt shamed and contaminated, it was extremely difficult for comfort women come back to ordinary social life, most of the time even being discriminated by her maternal society. Being silenced, had no opportunities to speak out, make many comfort women withered without apologies from the Japanese government. Women organizations in South Korea and Taiwan endeavour to accompany surviving “grannies” to rebuild their lives, building support groups, and offering mental counselling services.
Novelist and movie producers publish productions to raise social awareness and recall collective memories of societies. Taiwanese documentary Song of the Reed(2015), South Korean drama movie I Can Speak (2017), Herstory (2018), and documentary Shusenjo: The Main Battleground Of Comfort Women Issue (2018) are all works concerning comfort women issue. However, until today, few surviving grannies are still waiting for their justice, counting down their living days.
* For more information about comfort women, readers can refer to The War and Women’s Human Rights Museum (Seoul, South Korea) and AMA Museum (Taipei, Taiwan) websites.
Political Oppression
Taiwan — the White Terror and its nightmare
In 1949, After the Civil War with the Communist Party, government army, also known as KMT, retreated from Mainland China to Taiwan. With the ambition to fight back and restore “the Mainland”, and preventing from “communist spies”, KMT implemented 38 years of Martial Law. All publishing press should be examined. People do not have speech of freedom, the rights of strike and public assembly. In the school system, dialects are forbidden, and textbooks are filled with nationalism ideology. If someone was reported as “communist spy” or “Non-party public figure”, he or she may be arrested as a political criminal, locked behind the bars, interrogated with inhumane torture, or executed in public. During that period, peoples’ mouths are kept shut, being afraid of life-mattering troubles visiting. Even though the Martial Law had been abolished in 1987 and Taiwanese society embraced an era of democratisation process, freedom of speech is ensured, and thriving social movements happened on streets almost every day, the sequela nightmare still lingers in Taiwanese collective memories. So most of the people chose to forget, or more explicitly, to close our eyes and ears, becoming “Forgetful Taiwanese”. With the effort of new government and historians preserving, analyzing, and decoding record files, the forbidden history is under restoration. However, the public still didn’t seems to pay more on it. Sometimes those efforts even been criticized as a tool of political manipulation. In 2017, a start-up game studio published a 2D video horror game called “Detention” based on the high school background in the White Terror era, mingling Taiwanese local horror element, folk music, taboos, ghost stories and urban legendaries, becomes an overnight sensation in youth Taiwanese and oversea players. Thanks to Detention, more youth started to concern the transformative justice issue in Taiwan and reflect on past experiences. In 2019, the same name movie hit the silver screen, soon became a blockbuster of the year. The line “Did you forget or afraid to remember?” dawned on the audience that we can’t erase our past traumas and tragedies.
South Korea — May 18 Democratization Movement -Gwangju Uprising
Similar political oppression happened in South Korea as well. In 1980 May 18, a city of south-western South Korea, Gwangju, burst into civil disobedience protest against the military regime of Chun Doo-hwan appealing for realize democracy. Protestors including ordinary citizen, college students, high school students were shot by guns, beaten, raped by the government troops. In ten days of resistance, the citizen lost. 165 citizens, 41 soldiers and police officers killed. Although lost, the May 18 movement revealed and accelerated the process of democratization in South Korea. South Korean writer published a novel Human Acts: A Novel(2014) in a style of magical realism to lead readers to understand the movement from an ordinary young boy’s point of view. And managed an atmosphere as if readers are all experiencing the agony. A Taxi Driver (2017) depicts a German journalist’s Jürgen Hinzpeter a Korean taxi driver Kim Sa Bo’s reporting journey from the capital Seoul to the blocked Gwangju City on May 1980 based on real story. The cruelty of authoritarian politics and the vulnerary of humanity presented by the movie remind the audience of the treasure of freedom.
Social Incidents: Mental Illness and the Marginalized
Taiwan — Random Attack, Public opinion, Media and Cyberbullying
In May 2014, a man attacked passengers with knives at random in Taipei Metro, killing 4 people. With public media reporting day and night, the whole society was in panic. Many people worried that someone would mimic similar attacks and prevent from using public transportation. In 2016, another man carried a knife to attack an elementary school girl by neck on her way to school. The girl died immediately. The whole society burst into outrage. Later, the attacker was reported diagnosed with schizophrenia. Then arouse the society’s debate on the issue of to abolish the death penalty and even deepen the stigma of mental illness. Public opinion questioned the lawyers of the attackers, “how could you be “the devil’s” counsel for the defence”?
In 2018, scriptwriter Lu and director Lin consulted the victim families, lawyers in real life and created a TV series called The World between Us (2019). Adapting the elements of the social incidents and real reactions above, The World between Us reflects the severity of harsh comments on social media. Discussed ”Who is to blame? who’s guilty? who should take responsibility?” And questioning the public, “are we all free from guilty?” The World between Us not only succeeds in facilitating the publics’ reflect on the structure’s flaw, presenting the stigmatised social groups’ situation such as the poor and mental illness but also offer a platform for understanding everyone in the society and draws more attention on thinking strategies to solve social problems. Awarded the best drama of the year, Lu said that she wish this production can work as a platform for social discussion and never give up upon hope. The World between Us is undoubtedly a successful case of social-cultural resilience.
Challenges, critics and reflection toward social and cultural resilience
In this session, we are going to think about how to evaluate the effects of initiatives taken to build resilience. In their discussion on resilience and neoliberalism, Hall & Lamont (2013) pointed out that resilience is a framework for issues of social justice and an alternative to traditional right-left debates about threatened welfare states. resilience is also a social process of “possibilities and hopes”. However, like multiculturalism, the dilemma of resilience concept is also, trying to use a big umbrella to include everything in one concept. It results in blurring the meaning of the idea and making actors bewildered.
Social resilience is a tool for divided to mend up and to come across the past traumatic experience together. However, the goal is not difficult to set-up, the approach and method are the most challenging task to make changes in real practice. Social and cultural resilience facilitators’ endeavour may face backlashes like “It’s useless to spend time on debating over the past.” “Don’t talk about that kind of things.’ “Don’t look back, let the past be the past.” “Don’t consume and manipulate the suffering of the victims to realize political goals.” “You are tearing our society apart!”
To deal with the dilemma mentioned above, I think we can come back to the core of resilience research- an interdisciplinary research field to help those who suffered from traumatic experience and oppression to bounce back and thrive- where there is complicated and blur, where lies possibility, why not make resilience everywhere in our daily life, in every profession? Like gender studies promote “gender mainstreaming” to emancipate people from gender norms, so do make resilience as not only a study but also a social movement: “resilience mainstreaming” everywhere for everyone.
Conclusion
Resilience is a research approach to move forward and needs interdisciplinary concerns, models and approaches to realize. Through studying, reading, and thinking resilience, I would try to define resilience from my perspective and experience: “Resilience“ is the ability to ”bounce back” from trauma experience, either natural or human-induced; it enables people to clarify, understand, and find a strategy to coexist with trauma memories. Resilience meanwhile offers an opportunity for people to stand up or even acquire personal knowledge and wisdom from those traumatic experiences.
Living in the present era and the near future, we as human-being are all facing common and harsh challenges. First of all, deteriorating climate change prone to be the biggest human right crisis of the 21st century. Unrest political situation in the middle east countries led to European refugee crisis. And it casts tough humanitarian problems toward European countries. With the Fourth Industrial Revolution proceeds, artificial intelligence (AI) brings more complicated challenges toward humanity on global politics, economic, social, ethical, and cultural aspects. Fake news and deep-fake technologies are manipulated to intensify and deepen prejudice and stereotypes, resulting in more value-oriented conflicts, revenges, and oppression. Unexpected disasters or catastrophe are inevitable, while harsh political situations do not always have satisfactory response within a short time. What we can do is getting more understanding of the traumatic and harmful incidents, trying to co-exist with them, to find strategies to address them, instead of just ignoring or denying. In the social science aspect, although the democratic system is far from perfect, and I will never say that oppression will vanish through democracy because there are still countless problems lying to be discussed in democracy. Nevertheless, democracy at least assures basic human rights such as speech of freedom, to provide a safe environment for speaking out and sharing oppressed experiences. Hence, a civil and democratic society is one of the most crucial factors of building and proceeding resilience.
Resilience is a continuous process and can never be achieved within one night. Addressing collective memories can be a key strategy for building social and cultural resilience. Furthermore, schools, education systems, and public institutions such as media, libraries, museums, hospitals all play a critical role in delivering and practising on the concept of resilience. Global citizenship education, multicultural education, media literacy become long-term remedies for resilience, not only for pupils but for all citizens from walks of life. As the saying goes, “Where there is a light, there is hope.” while sounds cliche. Yet one of our challenges for building social and cultural resilience in future is how to keep existing resilience factors sustainable, how to “Keep the lights on.”
Reference
・Bauman, Z. (2011). Migration and identities in the globalized world. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 37(4), 425–435.
・Hall, P., & Lamont, M. (Eds.). (2013). Social Resilience in the Neoliberal Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
・Interview with Boris Cyrulnik: Director of studies at the Université du Sud, Toulon-Var. (n.d.). International Review of the Red Cross, 1–26.
・Jansson, T. (1945). The Moomins and the great flood.
・Pickren, Wade. (2014). What Is Resilience and How Does It Relate to the Refugee Experience? Historical and Theoretical Perspectives.
・Southwick, S., & Charney, D. (2018). What Is Resilience? In Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges (pp. 1–34). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
・Southwick, S., Litz, B., Charney, D., & Friedman, M. (Eds.). (2011). Resilience and Mental Health: Challenges Across the Lifespan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
・Walker, Brian & Salt, David & Reid, Walter. (2006). Resilience Thinking: Sustaining Ecosystems and People in A Changing World. Bibliovault OAI Repository, the University of Chicago Press.
