According to an old Somerset maughm tale, the native people of Malaya (now Malaysis) are subject to an odd form of mental illness…caleed an “amoke”. usually, this happens to men who have been subjected to a lot of stress (divorce, job loss, etc.)…all of a sudden the guy cracks, and goes into a state of agitation, during which he may kill or injure others around him. After a period of time, he will return to his normal state, and have no memory of the violence he had perpetrated…frequently, he will be shocked at what he did.
Is this a bit of fiction? Do amokes still happen to people? And, what sentances do courts hand out for crimes committed while having an amoke?
Is that how Maugham spelled it? For as long as I’ve been aware of the word, it’s been spelled “amok”. It’s entered the English language spelled thus as an adjective (Trekkies will remember Amok Time) and also in the verbal phrase “to run amuck”.
To answer the OP, I’m from the Philippines and it seems that every year, the papers would have some story about a man (it’s always a man) who would suddenly, uh, run amuck for no apparent reason and kill a few neighbors before coming to his senses. Rather than being headline news, this would be unremarkable enough that the story would be buried in the back pages, only meriting a short paragraph or so. I don’t know what kind of sentences are handed down since there usually isn’t any kind of followup.
Just a guess, but folks in Malaysia probably “run amok” at the same frequency as Americans “go postal” or folks of any nationality go on a spree killing.
I’m certainly not an anthropologist nor a psychologist, but I understand that there are sometimes different parameters for expressions of mental illness in other cultures than there are for us. Amok may have a more specific set of behaviors attached to it than ‘going postal,’ and it may be (or have been, past-tense) an “appropriate” if extreme response for the cultural conditions. I think that’s what the OP was asking about, if that set of cultural conditions still exist.
We may need Malaysians and/or anthropologists for this one…
Actually, it does not seem to be so easily dismissed.
THe DSM-IV (“Diagnostic and Statistical Manual 4” - the current “Bible”, if there is one, of accepted psychopathology in the medical profession] list “amok” in the new category of “culture bound syndromes”, along with several others with far less familiar names, like locura (among Latinos), rootwork (across many cultures; one extreme manifestation may be “voodoo death”), ghost sickness (American Indian tribes), yak, latah, koro, and whitiligo (not to be confused with "vitiligo, a pigmentation disorder)
I have no particular expertise in these, but I can tell you that the DSM-IV does try to stick to psychopathologies that have clear scientific evidence or at least strong suggestive data, of being real, clinically distinct conditions. Though there have been cases where the DSM has changed its mind, it’s as good a guide as we have. (The DSM-III of the 1980s had so many questionable calls that work to revise it to a more reliable DSM-IIIR began before it was even officially published, but the DSM-IV has held up fairly well for 10 years)
If culture-bound syndromes don’t seem real to you, allow me to suggest ones that we might all be more familiar with: Body Dysmorphic and Eating Disorders. While these were not officially classed as “culture bound” when I last checked, I think they are among the clearest examples. We just don’t think of them as such, because they belong to the DSM’s “default” culture.
While neurophysiological, genetic, and psychodynamic factors may exacerbate or influence Anorexia, Bulemia, and distorted body image, the syndromes primarily occur within the context of “developed Western” culture. In Japan, for example, the incidence has been rising fast, and has a higher incidence in more “Westernized” social groups – if it were not culturally bound, we would not expect to see this, since the different populations are otherwise largely the same in terms of genetics, living conditions, diet, and environment [All urban Japanese have ample exposure to ‘Western’ culture, but the degree to which a subgroup or clique internalizes it determines their risk.]
Anyone who has had any contact with a victim of these disorders knows that they are “real” disorders, and of course potentially fatal. I don’t know why we find it so hard to believe that a culture can create psychopathology, since “sanity” is largely a cultural construct to begin with.
I suspect it is because we like to think of our minds, personality and identity as self-contained in our own heads, and rarely percieve how intensely cultural our species is. When we say “Man is a social animal”, it doesn’t just mean “humans like company”. It means that group interactions alter our fundamental behaviors as individuals and a species. Arguably, an isolated human (especially if raised apart from others) would not exhibit many traits or behaviors we consider “intrinsically human”.
Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not a touchy-feely New Age type. I’m a hard headed scientist, even compared to many of my colleagues. This aspect of human nature happens to be a hard fact that is often dismissed as “soft science” without any examination of the data. I’ll concede that many of the specific arguments or theories in the area are based on “soft”, limited, or ambiguous data (there are some experiments we won’t, and shouldn’t, ever do), but a human baby isn’t born knowing how to be “human” to the same extent many other animals are. Though we consider our malleable brains to be among our most prominent traits, we rarely don’t appreciate how remarkably malleable it actually is.
In this thread about violence among Malays who run amoke/amok/amuck, I wondered if the word melee (pronounced about the same as Malay) had come from this cultural violence. So, I looked it up. No connection.