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ABSCHNITT XXV.
GESCHICHTE, ARCHÄOLOGIE
UND KULTUROLOGIE
DOI 10.36074/logos-27.10.2023.82
HROMADA AS A MEANS AND GOAL
OF COLLECTIVE TRAUMA HEALING
ORCID ID: 0000-0001-8640-082X Rostyslav Fanahei
MA in Cultural Studies, PhD student in Cultural Studies,
researcher in the project “Contact2U”
NGO “Power of the Future”
UKRAINE
Abstract. The war as a common and total trauma is a fundamental problem for Ukrainian
society, which requires a holistic solution - togetherness/healing. The article aimed to show
at the level of theoretical analysis that the togetherness of people, as the main means of
healing and its main purpose, can be understood very differently. And that practical efforts
depend on this conceptual framework. In synthesis with Ukrainіan initiatives that already
advocate togetherness/healing in practice, it is argued here that the theoretical-practical
approach to it should be in terms of hromada.
For almost two years, the Ukrainians have been living in total war. What is this
war and what is its totality? There can be many answers, depending on the research
perspective. The common ground of all these views will be the biggest given of war
and its everyday understanding: weapons, death, and destruction. Totality will then
mean the potential destruction of everything, as well as the need for the total
involvement of society to counter it.
But, the everyday givenness of war doesn’t make it unintelligible. Moreover, it
becomes an obstacle to theoretical inquiry in general: why this waste of time and
empty words, when everything is already clear to everyone? Because it is impossible
not only to plan, but to act, here and now, without a broad socio-cultural
understanding of war: the totality of its effects, challenges and, however cynical it
may be, opportunities. The life of the people “in war” is not limited to the front or the
military economy, and, at the same time, both of them are never separated from
society. And especially in the conditions of a large mobilized army, which is the people
in the most obvious form. It should be said right away that radically different
experiences are definitely not equated here: those who are at the front and those who
are in the rear, those who have lost loved ones, limbs, or homes, and those who have
not lost any of these.
The main point is that war affects all of us. This means two things: 1) to varying
degrees, consciously or not, war affects and traumatizes everyone; 2) war is a
common thing and affair. In particular, in helping those who were more affected and
traumatized by the war.
The main problem of war now is existential, and its main solution is
unambiguous - to fight. Against this background, all other aspects may seem
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insignificant, and the solutions are too focused on the post-war future, the very
possibility of which is by no means guaranteed. But common trauma is a fundamental
problem, solutions for which must be sought now. This applies not only to the future,
in which internal conflicts and tensions will only intensify, and therefore strategic
decisions for normalization must be formed now. This is a problem here and now -
not only for each individual who has felt the impact of war but also for the ability to
act together in general.
How to solve this problem? The answer to this question should be specific
practical methods. But to create them, or to select them from the existing ones, and
to apply them as efficiently as possible, we need a general theoretical background
and a conceptual framework. The question “how?” must be preceded by the question
“for what?”. Trauma is not a problem in itself, it is a disruption of the whole order.
Restoration or the formation of a new order - a common way of life - is the main goal
of healing collective trauma. But this way of life can be understood in very different
ways.
The purpose of the article: is to substantiate that not only the goal but also the
main means of healing in the Ukrainian context is hromada - a common way of life,
which is fundamentally not identical to the established scientific understanding of
“community”.
The foundations of this study - war as total background - can be misunderstood
due to the ambiguity of the word “war”, which includes both a certain general “reality”
in which people live, and at the same time specific practices of war, or way of waging
it. And in everyday Ukrainian speech, it is the second that dominates. In English, it is
possible to distinguish between them with the words war and warfare, in Ukrainian -
unfortunately, not. But even such a distinction is insufficient, because “the way of
waging war” can mean a lot of things, apart from direct armed confrontation - a
problem in which a civilian researcher definitely has neither the competencies nor the
moral right to intervene. It all depends on what is meant by “war”. Or to be more
specific - what is this common affair for?
Here it will be appropriate to answer a possible question to the foundation of this
text. It is definitely not about the fact that the war started two years ago. On the
contrary, more and more Ukrainians realize that this war has been going on for
centuries, not even for nine years. Moreover, this war in various forms has always
been total towards us. And the flip side of this is the most important thing - we finally
understand who these We are, who, unfortunately, did not give a total answer before.
In the awareness of the existential threat, we realize and realize ourselves as
Ukrainians, as representatives of the Ukrainian nation, in the most radical way.
Someone will say: not all, or too late. This is true, but we should not forget that
throughout our history, the national liberation struggle was different: elitist (in the
times of the Cossacks), programmatic (in the socialist political and economic projects
of the early twentieth century), or marginal (in the times of dissidence), but never so
massive.
In short, we can say that this (far from the first) large-scale stage of the long war
finally becomes a total war, as national liberation in the most radical way. But it can
highlight even more questions. There are different concepts of nations, in particular
ethnic or institutional. In these cases, the most radical way of liberation will mean
different things: chauvinism or the establishment of statehood. If the second is already
complete and we are not talking about chauvinism, then what is meant? From a broad
socio-cultural perspective, a nation should be understood as a fictional abstraction: a
construct and an ideal. It does not exist by itself but is a continuation of the everyday
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way of life, which is formed into a whole and revealed to itself and the world at the
expense of this construct. And if this construct is recognized as significant, then it
should be strived for as common to all ideal form of ubiquity. In such a case, the “most
radical way” is the fusion of abstraction and reality in the words and actions by which
a person fulfills himself as a Ukrainian. Defends with arms in hand his country, which
is not abstract borders on the map, but is something greater than a local place of
everyday life. Realizes that language is not just communicative rules, but something
bigger than everyday speech itself.
This is the civic understanding of the nation, which is based on the idea of res
publica as a “common thing”. With its origins in ancient democracy, its modern form
takes place in the French Revolution. But the path of expanding civil rights and
responsibilities, political agency in general, to the entire society - the path to
democracy in its modern form - took another century and a half after that. In the case
of independent Ukraine, this civilizational achievement was already taken as a given,
but in many aspects, it became a formality. But now everything is radically changing.
Although no one can guarantee that the changes will be successful, it can be said
that the current stage of the war as a national liberation is a struggle for civil society.
Both from the external enemy, who is now leveling it with his autocracy, and from the
inside.
So a banal, at first glance, phrase about the life of the people in total war is
actually a general framework for the socio-cultural understanding of this war. But
theoretical reflections should not only formalize all the density of practical reality, but
also provide options for its transformations as carefully as possible. The preliminary
review can be summarized by two theses of Y. Hrytsak: war is a great crisis, and war
is a great opportunity. These theses are understandable and generally accepted if
we talk about the material dimension. Hardly anyone will doubt that in the last two
centuries, it is warfare that has been one of the greatest destructive forces and that
the destruction of technological development throughout history has been precisely
the need for war.
In socio-cultural optics, these two are combined in another way: at the expense
of “community” or broadly togetherness. The total war, in which the Ukrainians have
been living for almost two years, is a common trauma and a common affair. Moreover,
these two dimensions are inseparable from each other. Healing trauma must be a
shared endeavor, and without healing shared traumas, there is no productive
common endeavor. It is a great opportunity because crisis conditions make us realize
the need for togetherness and find ways to recreate or create it. But the most
important thing is that it is not just a means of overcoming the crisis, but the formation
of a new way of collective life, which has the opportunity to conduct the most radical
test of its productivity in life in a total war.
How can this multidimensionality be generalized? Short answer: healing
requires togetherness, togetherness needs healing. Or to put it even more briefly:
togetherness is healing. Both of these words denote both a certain desired state and
an ongoing process. Togetherness is not just “to be together”, first of all it is the
process: “to come in being together”. But such a holistic generalization is not a simple
answer. Both components of this basic formula are almost identical, but reveal this
unity in different ways.
If we talk about healing, then the productive ambiguity of such a term is
understood at the level of everyday language: it is the recovery of wholeness, both
collective togetherness and individual identity, in the interdependence of all these
dimensions. Given the common association with medical healing, when we talk about
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healing, we are talking more about practices, tools aimed at creating togetherness.
Such a short formulation is insufficient, it needs more explanations, practical
proposals and overcoming the limitations of domestic associations. But in this
presentation, more attention should be paid to “togetherness”.
If healing is easier to understand as a means, then the togetherness of
people - as a goal. At the same time, togetherness is a means and healing is a goal.
In general, they should not be separated, but then it is impossible to talk about them.
Therefore, such a simplification is needed, and this is the one chosen in this
presentation. But at first glance, it can be unclear what is the problem with
“togetherness”. The most common understanding of the togetherness of people is
“community”, which seems to need no explanation. But what is “community”? Should
this word be used to convey the totality of the togetherness in general and in particular
in the Ukrainian context? Maybe we have a better term?
Oppose to the problem with the word “war”, there are a few words for the
togetherness of people in the Ukrainian language - spil’nota, hromada, obshchyna -
but they have acquired quite specific connotations in everyday speech. On the
contrary in the English language, one word “community” is enough to express all the
density of human relations. But if in Ukrainian the problem lies in the plane of
everyday speech, then in English it lies in the multitude of scientific conceptualizations
that use this word. And this problem is much more opaque.
If the first part of the article outlined the practical need for a conceptualization of
togetherness/healing, now it is necessary to find a theoretical methodological basis
for it. And this is actually problematic. On the one hand, in general terms, the
proposed understanding is based on existing community-based approaches. But on
the other hand, these approaches are still quite isolated in the Western European and
North American intellectual field, too specialized, insufficiently conceptualized in their
practical orientation and, most importantly, not very suitable for the Ukrainian context.
That is why, the purpose of this part is a critical analysis of methodologies that are
relevant to the problem of togetherness/healing, but insufficient to cover it.
It is difficult and premature to generalize the interdisciplinary set of these
approaches under one name. What can be said for sure: they all lie in different ways
in the plane of community and healing. But in addition to the fact that each of these
concepts means quite different things in them, the understanding of the connection
between them is also quite diverse.
More revealing is a typology of these approaches according to their disciplinary
source. In the gravitation to interdisciplinarity, each of them has its own starting point,
which determines both the main practical goal and the means of theoretical
description. In the general features of these sources, three can be distinguished to:
psychotherapeutic, sociological, and anthropological.
a. Psychotherapeutic source. Traditionally, healing was the prerogative of
psychotherapy itself. Trauma was understood, first of all, as mental and individual
and needed appropriate specialized means of treatment. Two things have become
clear in the interdisciplinary progress of recent decades. First, mental trauma can be
collective. Moreover, very often, individual manifestations are the result of collective
trauma. Secondly, effective overcoming of individual trauma requires stability and
accumulation of social and cultural capital. And therefore, it should be inseparable
from the community.
So in the psychotherapeutic context it was recognized that healing needs a
community. The wider consequence was that the community, which was traditionally
defined and studied by the methods of sociology and anthropology, also needs
healing.
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But these two general insights remain separated in practical terms. If we refer
to specific approaches coming from a psychotherapeutic source, then community-
based mostly means opposition to detached treatment in medical institutes. And
therefore, community is understood, first of all, as a tool. Interdisciplinary interest in
the development of the community is primarily due to its improvement as a tool for
the holistic treatment of an individual. The problems addressed by such approaches
are to some extent “social” and not purely psychological: for example, overcoming
drug addictions [5] or the consequences of domestic violence [10]. They do not
bypass the wider problems of social reintegration as a result of military and/or
genocidal violence, but remain in the perspective of the individual and not the social
healing field.
b. Sociological/anthropological source. In this case, everything is more
confusing. In the traditional disciplinary division, these two sciences were clearly
distinguished from each other both in the object and in the research methods. At the
same time, socio-cultural changes during the last half-century made the boundary
between them blur. It cannot be said that this process was without problems, or that
it has ended. Nevertheless, fundamentally, modern understanding of community is
the result of the fusion of sociology and anthropology. But in the combination of
community and healing problems, old divisions and limitations emerge again.
Therefore, first, it is necessary to briefly consider the change in the understanding of
community in the merger of these two guidelines, and then to point out new
disagreements.
A question may arise here: why bother with terminological nuances and delve
into a purely theoretical issue at all? The short answer is that how we understand
reality determines how we interact with and influence it. And this understanding is
historically variable.
The basis of the traditional separation of anthropology and sociology was the
pair “community and society”. And the echoes of this binary division are still felt to
this day, when it seems to be a completely different plane of community and healing.
In today's everyday language, this distinction does not seem problematic: these are
two parallel dimensions of our existence. Society is something general and big, and
the community is local - determined by the place of residence, work, study, or
interests. But such inclusion in both dimensions, both in theoretical concepts and in
practice, was not a given. It had a long way to go.
At the end of the 19th century, these two dimensions were understood as
separate modes of collective existence that contradict each other. Community was
considered a traditional and outdated way of existence, while society was considered
modern. This distinction acquired spatial contrasts: society is urban and European in
general, community is rural and non-European in general, not yet modernized. The
reason for this distinction is generally clear. Just at this time, the “West” faced new
problems: industrialization and urbanization. Their connection formed a new way of
life: a person broke out of a traditional, self-sufficient community and became part of
a fairly homogeneous mass, on whose unknown elements personal survival started
to depend. But the more this mass “gained weight”, the more civil rights it began to
demand for each of its elements. That is, becoming a part of society means acquiring
not only dependence on a large and unfamiliar mass of people, but also the
opportunity to influence it, to have equal rights with everyone. And the struggle for
these rights, and therefore for one's agency, has been waged for centuries, and, what
is important, almost all this time not by minorities, but by social majorities: at first it
was the struggle of the third order, then it became class, feminist, later for the rights
of racial and ethnic “minorities”.
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Sociology is a relatively new science that arose directly in response to these
changes in sociocultural reality. The society itself is the object of its research, but for
quite a long time its adjacent feature was its limitation to the western and urban
context. In contrast to this, the object of anthropology was communities: non-
European, gathering or agrarian, those that have not yet achieved modernity- the
complexity of society. And this disciplinary division was long and carefully supported
by each of the parties.
In the second half of the 20th century, changes have begun. In addition to the
fact that such a Eurocentric division began to be considered more and more morally
inappropriate, reality itself also changed. Each approach in itself became increasingly
unproductive to the new reality. The most clear manifestations of this change are
decolonization and the problem of multiculturalism. The collapse of empires and the
emergence of new nation-states around the world made it obvious that society is not
a purely European phenomenon. And at the same time, it became clear that Western
societies are multiple, and now more and more conflictual, primarily along “traditional”
lines: ethnic and religious.
This is a good example of the influence of theory on our interaction with reality.
With certain temporary exceptions, modern Western European states have never
been mono-ethnic or mono-confessional societies. This applies even more to the
cities that have always and everywhere been a “melting pot” of differences with all
the positive and explosive consequences. But no attention was paid to this. What has
always been a real problem was not a theoretical problem at all, until recently. And
real problems, both spontaneously and institutionally, were always solved directly
through violence: pogroms, gatherings in ghettos, evictions outside the borders.
Briefly, the new insight can be expressed as follows: “it turned out” that Western
societies consist of communities. Moreover, it turned out that this entire complex
system is quite often conflictual and traumatic in various dimensions: in the “vertical”
connection of a separate community as a minority and society as an abstract majority
and in the local interaction of communities within the social integrity. But, despite the
gradual erasure of the classical boundary between the subjects of research,
anthropological and sociological guidelines regarding the community continue to
support the division: the cultural problem of collective identity is localized in the
horizontal dimension, and the social problem of agency - in the vertical. Although
these dimensions are interdependent, it is not problem for each of the guidelines. But
in the interdisciplinary plane of community/healing, this division becomes significant
and leads to contradictions and limitations when it comes to defining the main
problem and purpose.
Some approaches focus more attention on “sociological” structural traumas, and
others on “anthropological” historical ones. “Structural trauma refers to harm to
people that prevents them from meeting basic needs and is embedded in social,
political, and economic organizations and systems—including poverty, racism,
gender inequality, and other forms of human rights abuses…Historical trauma has
been conceptualized as an event or set of events perpetrated on a group of people
or their environment who share a specific group identity that cause catastrophic
upheaval (i.e., annihilation or disruption to traditional lifeways, culture, and identity)
with effects that can persist across generations”[9].
Of course, such a division is quite conditional, these are rather “ideal types” (M.
Weber). In most cases, they are intertwined: historical traumas usually lead to
structural consequences, and structural traumas often form the basis of historical
social cataclysms. In addition, in no case should one forget about the individual
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dimension. Even with the fact that trauma is beginning to be understood not as a
purely individual phenomenon, it directly manifests itself in the way of life of each
individual person. And so healing, however much it needs or strives for community
as a means, begins with each individual. Therefore, any approach to this problem
should be holistic. However, both research and practical intervention are always
forced to narrow their focus. This narrowing is the main goal, which is mutually
determined with the main problem, but together with this, determines the
methodological framework itself, in particular, the way of understanding the
togetherness of people.
In general terms, in the psychotherapeutic source, the goal is individual healing,
and in the sociological/anthropological source, it is collective. But the latter can be
understood very differently. With an emphasis on healing structural trauma,
everything is quite clear: the community struggles for a broad political agency. And it
seems (actually incorrectly) that the community itself does not have a special role
here. But what is the overcoming of historical trauma that is directly related to a
specific collective identity and war? In fact, this question should be asked differently:
how is it conceptualized in existing approaches? And the answer is actually very
limited: reconciliation. The reason for this is precisely the preserved “anthropological”
nature of these approaches, especially its narrowing understanding of the community,
which is determined by the wider context.
b.1 Community healing and Community-based social healing.
What is collective identity? For many reasons, identity is often understood
narrowly at the mental and individual level. But identity is integrity or wholeness in
general. This is the unity of common self-awareness and self-realization of people -
togetherness and integrity of lifestyle. Another, more comprehensive, word for this is
“culture” (a word that in everyday speech is usually incorrectly used about only art or
the spiritual).
But this understanding is quite new, it is a consequence of interdisciplinary shifts
in humanity sciences over the last 50-60 years. One of its origins was precisely
anthropology, but here it is worth mentioning the specifics of classical disciplinary
divisions: anthropology took care of traditional communities in which the integrity of
the way of life is evident. These communities are clearly localized, sufficiently closed
from external influences, not very specialized, and also are bearers of a mytho-
religious worldview in which the material and the spiritual are minimally separated. In
contrast, the “West” has traditionally been considered the embodiment of civilization,
the highest stage of development, which traditional cultures have simply not yet
reached. The flip side of this understanding was that Western societies were not
viewed through the lens of “culture” as a whole. And this is generally understandable:
how to find it in such complexity and homogeneity at the same time.
Of course, such an overview is simplified, there were also alternative concepts,
but it conveys the dominant trend of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. And its
echoes are present even now. In social pluralism, anthropological approaches pay
attention to those groups of people who lead a specific way of life, and therefore
clearly perceive themselves as separate communities based on traditional
characteristics: primarily religious and ethnic. And it is based on these differences
that the historical traumas of these communities usually occur: genocide and war,
which are often combined.
But there is an extremely important nuance here: for the “West”, or as it is now
more appropriate to say the “global North”, during the last hundred years, the conflict
between such differences has finally ceased to be a reason for waging war. This does
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not mean that violence on such grounds has disappeared. On the contrary, the term
“genocide” arose to denote crimes against humanity committed by European states
in the 20th century. But genocide (of Jews and Roma by the Third Reich or Ukrainians
by the Soviet Union) was a component or instrument of broader state policies. The
same can be said about the current war. And in general, a strong state with a
monopoly on violence tries to minimize any violent manifestations of conflicts. This
does not mean that communities, in this sense, have disappeared (on the contrary,
this problem only increases in a globalized world), nor that differences have ceased
to be a source of conflict and trauma. But in the “global North” these traumas mostly
take on a structural form: in the interaction of the cultural minority and the general
majority. This is most clearly manifested in solving the problems of Indigenous or the
Africana communities in North America. It was there that various theoretical concepts
and state programs of multiculturalism first appeared. They certainly did not become
a panacea, but the current neoliberal adjustment is trying to remove from the agenda
the conflict of cultural differences in itself and at the same time the classic
“anthropological plume” of its conceptualization. The primary problem is a struggle
for broad political agency by these minorities as the basis for maintaining their own
group identity and its social recognition [2]. Such approaches can be in general called
“community healing” [1]. Their social dimension is the legitimization of “traditional”
practices in modern social institutions [4], which have marginalized them for
centuries.
In contrast, violent conflicts based on purely ethnic and religious differences
continue in the global South, which supports classical anthropological guidance. The
European colonial struggle and the subsequent chaotic collapse of empires
(especially the Soviet Union) are directly responsible for this. This problem is
especially noticeable in Africa: both colonization and de-colonization of which was
the latest, and the borders between the future states were drawn on the map under
a ruler, without taking into account local differences. As a result, several cases of
genocide have occurred on the continent over the past half century, and ongoing civil
wars often take on the character of ethnic or religious cleansing.
Precisely for healing collective traumas in Africa [3] have emerged most
conceptualized healing/community approaches with the aim of reconciliation. It
seems that they could be considered by themselves, but it is in the broad historical
and methodological context that their ambiguous features, which are summarized
here in connection with anthropology, become apparent.
The most conceptualized case of this reconciliation “wing” of community/healing
is overcoming the consequences of the genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda [6,8], another
significant source is work with the collective memory of the apartheid regime in South
Africa [7]. Apartheid itself is merely a structural trauma, but the dimension in which
the work is currently being done has more “anthropological” features. The approach
presented on this ground is called community-based social healing. And if you look
at this wording, taking into account the described context, it becomes clear that it is
aimed at healing as social reconciliation, which must take place at the community
level. But the primary source of the problem from this point of view is conflict between
communities. So community here is understood primarly as a source of trauma and
means of healing, but not the goal.
Of course, such practical intentions are necessary in any case. But it is not
necessarily that at the level of conceptualization such an approach is a useful
framework. After all, it is not so obvious, but it preserves the classical assessment of
the society-community dichotomy. “Anthropologists” are not to blame (although
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anthropology arose as one of the tools of colonization) that historical traumas are
revealed in a non-European context. Moreover, they want to help. But even if the
intervention is not created from the outside, as in the case of the Institute for Healing
of Memories in South Africa [7], but is based on a recognizing community as a
problem that shakes society, such intervention is external in the “best” traditions of
anthropology and inappropriate from a moral point of view. The main problem is that
the community is objectified by social issues.
And if we are talking about the need for healing, it is accompanied by the
question: “if and how interventions from outside these communities can and should
assist in this process. Can these interventions effectively mediate in the mending of
the wounds to the social body and its cultural frame and thereby strengthen
community resilience?”[8].
But even regardless of these nuances, should reconciliation be the main goal of
healing in the Ukrainian context? Reconciliation with whom? Of course, it can be well
understood in a broad way as the overcoming of all kinds of everyday tensions, which
are often, and especially in the case of a war, revealed through the
incomprehensibility of the experiences. But in these approaches, reconciliation has a
rather clear meaning, which involves enmity, an offender and a victim.
The given brief overview shows that the problem of togetherness/healing is
conceptualized in the theoretical-practical discourse from different starting points. But
all such approaches bear the imprint of a long intellectual history, remnants of old
disciplinary divisions, and are very much tied to specific contexts. One of the
consequences of this is a different understanding of healing as a goal, but this in itself
is not a problem for the involvement of this methodological base in the Ukrainian
context. A more important aspect of the problem is the limited understanding of
human togetherness as the “community” to which these approaches are directed.
In this context can be defined the most neutral understanding of community:
“community as locality (e.g., neighborhood) and community as a relational group
without place restrictions (e.g., membership in a labor union) are two salient
distinctions made in the social sciences”[1]. But these forms do not include the
cultural “filling”, the way of life of specific people, and without it and the general
context, they are a structural and functional abstraction.
The outlined approaches “fill” the understanding of community, but in such
contexts, togetherness is more or less identical to a traditional community in the
anthropological sense. As a result, the problematized community (one that is focused
on, and one that is traumatized) is realized as a definitively (though not necessarily)
localized and somewhat marginalized “minority”: in the domestic or global context. By
minority we can mean both a closed cultural minority in relation to a social majority
(for example, in the case of Native Americans and victims of genocide) and a smaller
number of rights (for example, in the case of apartheid). Added to this is the “minority”
in the value dimension: the “healers” in the missionaries' styles help to overcome the
historical traumas that are characteristic for non-European contexts.
This understanding of the togetherness of people is not suitable for the
Ukrainian context at all. Much more appropriate seems to be “hromada”. It can be
understood both as a territorial community in itself, and as a certain cultural
community or unity by social institutions, and in various combinations of these
aspects. The fundamental feature of hromada in comparison with the traditional
understanding of the “community” is that hromada can be created, not just restored.
Moreover, such a separate togetherness of people in a democratic system is not
opposed to society. Hromada is not just an inseparable part, but the basis of civil
society.
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Summarizing: the war as a common and total trauma is a fundamental problem
for Ukrainian society, which requires a holistic solution - togetherness/healing. At the
same time, the war as a complex crisis that creates new and radicalizes old problems
is a special historical opportunity for the implementation of systemic solutions and
means capable not only of restoring the damaged common way of life, but also of
“togethering” in a new way. This article aimed to show at the level of theoretical
analysis that the togetherness of people, as the main means of healing and its main
purpose, can be understood very differently. And that practical efforts depend on this
conceptual framework.
At the same time, theoretical constructions cannot and should not arise "out of
air": they are a continuation, design, and adjustments of practices. The definition of
the togetherness of people as hromada that was made here is an example of
theoretical-practical synthesis. Thanks to some organizations and initiatives in
Ukraine, on a practical level, the hromada is already being advocated as the core of
healing, both in the local dimension of the togetherness of people and in the general
dimension of civil society. And it is a practice that heals. But it needs a theory: to
increase its effectiveness through a clearer definition of its field of application, and to
scale through a broadening of the understanding of its value and necessity. And this
theoretical text is only one step on such a common path to healing.
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