In Africa, penis theft runs rampant. In Native American communities in the Northern US and Canada, people could be possessed by a cannibalistic spirit and experience an insatiable hunger for human flesh. In medieval Europe, outbreaks of dancing manias caused hundreds of people to dance themselves into exhaustion and even death. What do these phenomena have in common?
We like to think of illness as something that happens to all of us in the same way: tuberculosis or cancer do not recognize the differences between beggars and kings, Africans and Europeans, black or white, man or woman. But when it comes to mental illness, diseases may manifest in myriad culture-specific ways. Some mental illnesses, if not, radically, most of them, may be created by culture. Penis panics, Wendigo psychoses and dancing manias are examples of culture-bound syndromes.
First attested in China some 2,300 years ago, belief in genital theft goes a long ways back. Today, this belief or species of mass hysteria goes by the name koro, and most frequently shows up in African countries like Nigeria, Ghana and Benin. In China, penis theft was attributed to a mischievous spirit, but in Africa penis (or breast) thieves are generally sorcerers, practitioners of dark magic. People have been lynched to death on mere accusations of penis thievery. Of course, it doesn’t help that the victim’s member is usually magically restored upon inspection. Penis panics can resemble modern witch-hunts, and indeed, we find the belief in its European incarnation in the infamous witch-hunter’s manual Malleus Maleficarum. One of its chapters is titled, in one translation, How, as it were, [witches] Deprive Man of his Virile Member.
The Wendigo myth was introduced to horror fiction in a short story by Algernon Blackwood, but its origin lies in Native American mythology. The wendigo is a spirit that may possess humans, giving them an irresistible hunger for human flesh. The most common way to be afflicted would be to engage in voluntary cannibalism, which could have happened during frequent famines, but innocents could also be afflicted. Having a horrifying spirit to anchor a taboo against cannibalism may have served a social purpose, but it could also lead to innocent deaths. People who felt themselves thinking too much about human meat, suspecting possession, would request that they be executed before it was too late. In 1907, a Native American known in English as Jack Fiddler was, along with his brother, arrested for the murder of a woman they claimed was a wendigo. Jack, by then an old man, claimed to have killed fourteen wendigos in his lifetime. Until 1907, his tribe had been entirely self-governed. Jack committed suicide before the trial, but his brother was sentenced and died in prison.
There were several major outbreaks of dancing mania in the Middle Ages. In July 1374, in Aachen, now Germany, “A group of people were seen to dance uncontrollably in the streets, foaming at the mouth and screaming of wild visions. They kept on dancing until they collapsed from exhaution, but even then they flailed about in agony until forcefuly restrained.” One of the many hypotheses regarding the historical origins of the Pied Piper of Hamelin legend is that it was originally a dancing mania affecting children. The most significant outbreak happened in Strasbourg, now France, in 1518. In modern times, similar cases involving not uncontrollable dancing but laughing have been reported.
All of these point to the powerful effect our society has on our inner worlds. Whether these syndromes are culturally bound manifestations of underlying, universal mental illnesses, or they’re actually created and sustained by culture and meaningless without it, there’s no denying that culture pervades our mental space and can manifest in not only belief but also in our bodily actions.
Towards the end of his article In search of the magical penis thieves, Frank Bures provocatively suggests that maybe many of the psychiatric diagnoses we have enshrined in the DSM and the ICD standards and believe to be universal may, in fact, be just as culturally bound as dancing manias and penis panics. Using data on immigrants’ mental health, we find that the more accultured to one’s new culture an immigrant becomes, the more mental health suffers:
One study of Turkish immigrants to Germany showed the effect to last for at least a generation. A subsequent 2004 study of Mexican immigrants to the United States showed that “[w]ith few exceptions, foreign-born Mexican Americans and foreign-born non-Hispanic whites were at significantly lower risk of DSM-IV substance-use and mood-anxiety disorders compared with their US-born counterparts.” These included alcohol and drug abuse, major depression, dysthymia, mania, hypomania, panic disorder, social and specific phobia, and generalized anxiety disorder. The longer they lived in the United States, the more they showed the particular damage to the mind that our particular culture wreaks. People who come to America eventually find themselves subject to our own culture-related syndromes, which the DSM-IV can easily recognize and categorize, as acculturation forces their internal worlds to conform to the external world, i.e., the American culture that the DSM-IV knows best.
Whether this is correct or not, it’s certainly something to think about. My hunch is that the truth is somewhere in the middle: we need not give in to relativism completely and say that all mental illness is culture-bound, but neither can we trivially universalize all the tendencies we find in our own society.
dailymeh posted this on July 14, 2011
