". At the risk of sounding like a judgmental Westerner who thinks other societies are worse than his own, Eskimo society is worse than mine. There is no privacy - after all, igloos have no walls. Nobody ever gets a moment alone, except on hunting trips. Everyone is watching each other and talking to each other all the time. In all this watching and talking, nobody ever compliments or praises anyone else, or expresses happiness or gratitude (the closest Foulks comes to admitting an exception to this rule is that a wife may sometimes smile when her husband arrives home from a weeks-long hunt). But they mock each other’s failures all the time, forever. That quote about qivitoq at the top of this post is pretty typical. Any Eskimo who makes a mistake or just fails to conform will be the butt of everyone’s barbs until they die - often of suicide"
Probably has something to do with living in a hard and unforgiving environment where someone who fails to conform to group standards may put the entire group at risk. In this, it is something like being a feral cat, although we are much more solitary and independent, because we are able to be so.
I have read of pioneer humans going stir crazy in the long Dakota winters.
"Knud Rasmussen asked his guide and friend Aua, an angakkuq (spiritual healer), about Inuit religious beliefs among the Iglulingmiut (people of Igloolik) and was told: "We don't believe. We fear.""
> This sort of training still persists today. The young hunter accompanies older men on their hunting trips and learns by observing them. If he succeeds in duplicating their actions properly, he is rewarded by silent acceptance. If he should make an error, he is chastised and teased. This ridicule continues beyond that which takes place at the time. The other men are also told of his failings so that they can join in
This reminds me of the guy who went to Japan to learn how to craft bonsai form the masters – they acted in ways that strike me as brutal and abusive. He became very good, returns to the States, won acclaim, and when he attempted to teach the American disciples who came to him in the same fashion he had been taught, they all left.
So I'm wondering how this seeming lack of positive interactions is perceived by the traditional tribe members. I mean, do they perceive it as bleak or as a kind of warm group acceptance which doesn't need to be voiced?
Still, something about it seems weird to me. I mean I don't think one sees similar behavior in isolated indigenous tribes in the tropics and while in some sense food might be easier to find in that environment presumably human tribes grow until birth and death rates even out (whether because of war, food limits or disease) so it doesn't seem like the lack of positive affect interactions can be an essential feature of the level of danger/reliance.
Ice on face is definitely helpful with vagus nerve malfunction and migraine onset, at least for me; seems connected to sympathetic nervous system going haywire. Works best on the cheekbones for some reason.
Clearly there was a lot of pent up frustration with life before, and there is now, and all that pressure wants to get out one way or another. The form of course depends on the culture, and the degree that the psyche is warped by the inability to blow off steam depends on the person and on the society. It makes sense that addictions mostly replaced an occasional running amok.
Are there good explanations why some strange phobias like fear of dentists or flying are catered to in Western culture and sometimes even clinically diagnosed?
Scott, I like your work so much. And I am sorry, cannot seem to reach you or substack any other way. I was charged recently $100 even though I am not a paid subscriber. I need to fix this immediately. I am sorry, you are really important to me and others, but I cannot afford to be a paid subscriber at this time. What do I do? I cannot find help for this anywhere, and certainly this is where substack is most unavailable and its help services ridiculous.
Isn't stripping clothes off, or wanting to, a common symptom of hypothermia? Paradoxically, sufferers of that in its final stages think they are too hot. Presumably this piblokto can't really be hypothermia, or the other symptoms would be obvious to bystanders. But could it be some similar brain impulse triggered by a subconscious feeling of being "cooped up" in a hut or constrained to sit in a kayak.
I guess it also makes sense for Eskimo society to have developed a taboo against overt displays of anger, because a flushed face must lose more heat, hence the phrase "hot under the collar"!
Meeting traditional Cree people is a good way to have it driven home, hard and fast, that it is perfectly possible for people to Not Think Like You. I am not surprised the Inuit are even more different, because the context is even more different.
Anybody remember when Jean Briggs' book "Never in Anger" got some media attention a few years ago? It was about how Inuit parents teach their children to never ever show anger. Briggs was there in the 1960s. Her account makes the culture sound pretty different from Foulks' version, but I suppose forty years of contact with the West could change things dramatically. Here's a quote from an NPR piece about it from 2019: "Traditional Inuit parenting is incredibly nurturing and tender. If you took all the parenting styles around the world and ranked them by their gentleness, the Inuit approach would likely rank near the top. (They even have a special kiss for babies, where you put your nose against the cheek and sniff the skin.)"
One way of reading this: the conditions described are real but have a straightforward explanation that isn't especially "cultural." In particular, humans have failure modes that are probabilistically elicited by various stressors, and different populations are subjected to different kinds and degrees of stress.
The arctic environment is harsh, perhaps the most harsh in which humans live. It is quite far from the environment in which humans mostly evolved. As a result, Eskimos are subjected to kinds and degrees of stress that most people are not, and so psychologically decompensate in particular ways at much higher rates than others.
From this perspective, it's no more mysterious than noting that long-distance runners have much higher rates of plantar fasciitis, tibial stress syndrome, and patellofemoral syndrome than non-runners.
This post reminds me of a podcast I listened to recently on the mystery of missing hikers at Dyatlov pass in Russia. Apparently the hikers suddenly panicked and ran out into the Siberian elements and died but no knows what caused the panic.
> This sounds plausible to me, but I don’t know how to square it with the official Greenland data suggesting low suicide rates at the very beginning of contact.
I would propose that first contact with an external group radically enhances fellow-feeling by constructing a very obvious "them" and a potentially threat to rally against
Reminds me of Thesiger's account of traditional Bedouin culture, in a similarly harsh environment. I seem to remember Thesiger describing one of the Bedu he travelled with being mocked and shamed by his fellow tribesmen because his grandfather had once, many years ago, accidentally farted in public.
The transition to modernity for that culture seems to have been a happier one. Partially because oil made them all fantastically rich, but you get the impression that even more important was the fact that centuries of banditry had left them with both an understanding of, and a lively contempt for, more civilised, settled peoples. Not victims, but predators.
The closest I’ve come to a mental breakdown has been during long periods of no privacy. As an introverted person I really really need time alone. I feel like I’d be rolling around naked in the snow as well if I lived in very close quarters with many others my entire life.
It seems to me that if most of the people whom the term refers to find "Eskimo" offensive or insulting, then it is, regardless of its origin or etymology, which was never absolutely certain.
Also, according to Wikipedia, the Inuit Circumpolar Council includes the Yupik, so the term "Inuit" can be used collectively to refer to all of them, which was already my understanding. It doesn't include the Aleut, but the Aleut weren't usually considered Eskimos back when that was the regular term either.
I couldn't help thinking of latah in Southeast Asia. It's a heightened sensitivity to shock or surprise that leads to a stylized over-reaction. Interestingly, it's also found in Maine where it is known as Dancing Frenchman Disorder and usually associated with logging camps. In both cases, when sufferers are startled, they don't just jump with surprise but do a whole dance that can go on for a while.
A lot of disorders, and one would expect especially mental disorders, have culturally prescribed symptoms. Schizophrenia may look different in different cultures. People may have sworn when injured from time immemorial, but they sure were crying out "Oh, Jesus!" back in the BCs.
Edit: "Reading this book, I was left with a sense of hopelessness, like these people are cursed, and all the West has done is offer them a new poison to break the monotony of the old." You should read Arctic Adventure for a different perspective.
Just out of curiosity: Any word on the book about what these young guys who couldn't make it in town, but also have zero interest in joining the hunting groups, end up doing all day back at the village? I have a hard time believing they're allowed to just chillax in the igloo all day, but if not that then what?
When my mom got bipolar she packed the kids into the car and started driving, for some reason she didn't get far and that was that. In a subsequent episode she ended up raving wildly and was physically dragged to the ambulance. Much later we were on the highway in winter and when we stopped, perhaps at her request, she got out of the car barefoot and started to run into a field. I got it and ended up in a fight with the police which I have never had any memory of. Very likely the manic state I was in caused me to use more strength than your mind usually allows to provide a proper buffer for not injuring yourself
I guess I should specify that we are Canadian from northern Europe. These mostly sound pretty bipolarish to me perhaps with cultural inflections. I do think the kayak fear sounds like a packaged release of tension that your community cannot allow to happen except by such a costly signal
If "a case of piblocto lasts from five minutes to half-an-hour or more" or "after a few minutes, the victim returns to her normal self," and "when it occurs under cover of a hut, no apparent concern is felt by other inmates, nor is any attention paid to the antics of the mad one" then how many cases would, in fact, be admitted to a psychiatric hospital for Foulks to find? If it's a frequently short-duration condition, it sounds as if the attack would usually be over significantly before you get the sufferer to the hospital, and if it's an insular community which does not trust Westerners and has its own understanding of what's going on they may not be inclined to start by rushing people off to the hospital in the first place.
The obvious problem with this theory is that if Foulks spent a while asking around the communities (ideally with the communities having some trust in him) and wasn't just looking at hospitals, he should have found as many cases as the original explorers. He isn't stupid, so presumably he did this? But the article doesn't say so, and by the description given the syndrome seems like a fairly bad fit for psychiatric hospitals (modulo how often it reoccurred in the same person, but that's also dependent on trust for the hospitals on the part of the sufferer and those involved in his/her care).
I personally know of two women who in a disassociative state stripped and walked into a lake in winter. Neither "Eskimo". One in her early 20s (within the last decade), the other in her late 30s (25 years ago). The 20 year died.
I was under impression that there was rare but known phenomena associated with certain mental illness. And, I have vague memories of reading about such similar incidents over by the last 4 decades - usually involving women. I am unwilling to take the time to do search of news articles, but I am sure this is a known thing. So the idea that it is culturally bound seems very dubious.
As to hidden shame about a phobia or less than stereotypical male courage leading to suicide, seems to be the basic archetypal male suicide and/or spousal abuse story. Hidden shame leading to violence whether against oneself or against someone - is a documented phenomenon. Again not willing to take time to reacquaint myself with literature but a fellow from some California university I think in 70s or 80s documented this idea (hidden shame and violence (inward or outward) while studying prisoners.
None of this sounds culturally bound at all when you strip away the setting of snow and igloos or kayaks (I'm sure there are military, fire fighters, police, construction workers, high rise windows washers, etc who "lose their nerve".)
I had an experience when I was 15 that was fairly similar to this.
I'd been depressed and not attending school for about a month, Mum had confiscated my computer for said month in an attempt to motivate me, and she hadn't fed me in a week or so (I'd been surviving, barely, on cereal because I didn't know how to cook).
I walked out into the living room stark naked and asked for my computer back. She was working on her own computer and ignored me. I fetched the duvet from my bed and threw it over her in order to force her to react. She brushed it off and kept working. After a dozen or so more tries with the duvet I went over to one of the bookcases and threatened to topple it unless she started paying attention. She tried to call the police, I wrestled the phone away, she went for the other phone, I wrestled that away (not entirely sure how I managed that, since I recall her being stronger even a year or two beforehand; maybe I'd caught up on testosterone alone, or maybe it was hysterical strength), she fled the house, I deadlocked the door, retrieved my computer and started playing games. About 15 minutes later the police showed up, I let them in, and, after demanding I put some underwear on (because I was still stark naked when they arrived) they gave me this long lecture about how I was going to become a domestic abuser.
There was a story here some time ago about an African guy who went to live with the Inuit, and the culture described seems rather different. Maybe there are different Inuit, I suppose.
I'd never heard of the "Ice Diver Technique" as a treatment for panic attacks, but it makes a sort of sense. The diving reflex is real and powerful, and two of the major effects are reduced heart rate and reduced desire to breath. Which are obviously advantageous if you suddenly find out that you might not be able to breath for the next minute or two, but one can easily see how it might be at least a symptomatic treatment for a condition associated with high heart rate and hyperventilation.
More generally, panic burns oxygen, so any adaption to "hey oxygen just got real scarce" is probably going to have an element of "don't panic".
Maybe I'm missing something, but "getting bullied into suicide" doesn't strike me as uniquely culture-bound. Is it the particular style of bullying or something?
As a physician who has worked in remote parts of Northern Canada -- the indigenous people there have a shocking rate of acute otitis media, often as adults and often presenting with a ruptured tympanic membrane. I do not know why this is. Maybe there is an anatomic difference, or the roads are so dusty that they cause irritation to the respiratory tract which causes Eustachian tube dysfunction.
I can see that, if you're interested in the interaction of culture, biology and response to external reality in mental health disorders, then looking at those which seem particularly culturally specific might be illuminating.
Would the same apply to the study of those disorders whose prevalence and symptoms are unaffected by the culture and experiences of the individual sufferer? Or those that are reliably caused by certain experiences, with little variation due to culture or biology? And what disorders would fall into those categories?
I wonder if some of the weirdness surrounding first contact with western culture might be caused by infectious disease. Probably not many diseases cause psychiatric symptoms, but I don't know offhand.
Wow. This is an amazing read. Thank you for your carefully-sourced, curated quotes! I very much enjoyed this. Never heard about any of this stuff besides for the running amok.
Time to reread Jack London's 'The Son of the Wolf', I think. That captures the mystery, madness and hardship of the far north pretty well.
Given the prolonged darkness (or light), extreme cold, the deadening quiet of snow, the deathly sterility of the tundra, and the brutal violence of the hunt, it isn't hugely surprising to me that Eskimos suffer unusual maladies.
I'm from Estonia which is quite far north and this sort of public-only-hazing is a very real cultural phenomenon that still very much exists. For example, you go a post about a girl on an e-scooter being hit by a car on facebook. The comments are precisely this sort of hate and ridicule. I can absolutely see how that sort of thing could be implemented as a basis for organizing a large grouping of people pre-internet.
"Young men, as have been pointed out, seem to find it more difficult assuming the academic or technical skill necessary to making a living outside the village."
"While many look forward to this experience as a chance to get out of their small, “boring” village into the hub of “excited” Western living, in most cases they return home disillusioned about their seeming inability to fit into life outside."
"It might be mentioned, however, that attending university is extremely exceptional for these villagers, there having been only two individuals during the past fifteen years having done so, and unsuccessfully at that."
These seem like very consistent themes in the all accounts I've read, from different parts of the world, about integrating (recently) previous hunter-gathers.
Is there any group of people that has adapted well to modern civilisation who didn't already have a history of living as settled farmers under a sate for several thousand years?
Also, it reinforces my belief in Bryan Caplan's argument that the main function of the education system is to test people on their ability to cope with the demands of modern work life.
Canadian and Greenland indigenous people are all Inuit, and 'Eskimo' or 'Esquimaux' is seen as insulting by them. I would be very interested in this book if it covers them too, rather than just concentrating on the Alaskan Eskimos.
In re otitis media: psychosis of all kinds is much commoner in the deaf, as are states of delirium. One less anchor to reality I guess.
And as for residential schools: the Canadian take on them is a form of Arctic Hysteria in itself. It is forbidden to suggest the a single pupil ever had benefit, or, God forbid, enjoyed his or her time there. They were pure genocide machines, equivalent in our moral landscape to Auschwitz, or so we are told. I'd be a little more nuanced, and agree that they were designed to drag the northern peoples into mainstream Canadian culture, and in so doing paid no respect to the culture they were eroding. But they certainly did not operate to kill by neglect. You will note that of all the discoveries of 'hundreds' of graves detected by ground penetrating radar, not one has been excavated, nor has any attempt been made. I understand this to mean the power of the putative grave sites only remains (a pun!) if they are believed to be there, but dissipates if they are shown to be other ground anomalies.
It is a fascinating suggestion that phenomena like piblokto were triggered by the arrival of the white explorers, the realisation that the Inuit ('the People') were not the only inhabitants of a world that was not all a white wasteland. I believe, though, there is an oral tradition of such things pre-dating white explorers. The Inuit lived closer to the edge of personal extinction than any other group of humans. Rules of behaviour, especially pertaining to group co-operation, were extremely important. A negligent mistake could not only kill you, but wipe out your extended family group. Living with that kind of pressure, with no privacy, and little opportunity for individuality would certainly account for sudden explosive disorders. I'd see piblokto as a culturally-sanctioned way of blowing off steam before returning to the daily grind.
I've saw some mini-versions of this sort of thing when I was in clinical psychology grad school in Durham, NC. We had an outpatient clinic where students provided psychotherapy, and most of our patients were locals. So my patients often talked about someone "making themselves ill," (with "ill" pronounced "ee-yul"), which I took to mean "making themselves sick." Also, certain subgroups, such as pregnant women, were thought of as being prone to being "ill." Anyhow, eventually I figured out that "being ill" meant having something like a low-grade, temporary, agitated depression -- the person became negativistic, irritable, unreasonable, tense, & loud and dramatic in manifesting all this. And there was a certain tolerance for this behavior -- it was thought of as a temporary bad state that came over people.
Also, just for your amusement, there was a sort of opposite thing called "sopping on out." That meant really enjoying the out hell out of your meal. "You get you some biscuits and gravy and just sop on out."
Not the point of the post, but I found this bit interesting: "The fear of death by drowning is of constant concern to the Eskimo, AND WITH GOOD REASON. Between 1901 and 1930 there were 1023 deaths by accident in Greenland; eight percent were due to drowning and ninety-four percent of these were kayak accidents."
(bolding added by me).
The top three preventable causes of death in the US seem to be: poisoning, motor vehicle and falls. These three account for 86% of preventable deaths.
I don't think of the US population as having a constant concern about these things. Maybe falls for the elderly? And the Eskimos have a "constant concern" about a specific form of accidental death that accounts for 8% of accidental deaths?
>there were too many clear stories by too many different explorers, all similar to each other and to Foulks’ own report.
I mean, how many extremely similar accounts of wealthy people torturing children and harvesting their adrenochrome could you find online?
Or, how many similar stories of a child developing extreme autism symptoms right after getting a vaccine?
Once there's an established story within a community that has a lot of attention and grants a lot of social capital within that community, lots of similar stories of it will start to pop up -some outright fabrications, some people applying a narrative to coincidence or other events that look superficially similar.
Maybe 'Artic explorers during this time period' were just such a community.
> Rasmussen mentions a young man who was told by his foster father, “I wish you were dead! You are not worth the food you eat.” And they young man took the words so seriously that he declared he indeed would not eat again. To make the suffering as brief as possible, the same young man lay down stark naked in the bare snow and was frozen to death.
So... Eskimos invented Twitter long before we Westerners did ? :-/
"This sounds plausible to me, but I don’t know how to square it with the official Greenland data suggesting low suicide rates at the very beginning of contact."
I suspect the conservative Eskimo argument would be that more people are bad at hunting than they used to be.
This is fascinating. One wonders how many different ways there are to be human. Are we kinda stuck in one big mono-culture? Or do we have two cultures here in the US?
It sounds very plausible to me that kayak phobia is panic disorder: Sitting, bored and chronically anxious, with a weird light and glassy water thing going on that makes the world look bleak and weird seems to me like an excellent setting for someone with the right wiring to have their first panic attack. Seems quite plausible to me that those who do not have the right wiring to have their anxiety go FOOM! might still develop a haunting fear that *something* awful is going to happen to their head if they go out that kayak. So some people have full-blown panic disorder and an associated dread of getting in that kayak again, others have more a phobia of going out in the kayak based on what it's done to other people, but the 2 groups' current symptoms are almost exactly the same. So here's a question about culturally transmitted interpretations of feelings, and culturally transmitted ideas of how somebody with those feelings acts: What about the other FOOM, the good Foom, orgasm? Like a panic attack, it's preceded by a lower-grade version of the ultimate feeling -- in this case, pleasure -- and then, Foom! the full-blown version happens. Do you get all the same culturally-related phenomena? Like some people have the real thing, others have via contagion a sort of placebo version which nonetheless they fully believe in and find important? Are there different conventions in different cultures about how people act during orgasm -- like in New Guinea people tear out handfuls of their own hair at the supreme moment, in Eskimo culture people bite their partner's nose, and in New York they say "mmmm . . . honey, is there any diet Pepsi left?" I'm being funny about this but actually it's a serious question. Seems like a good companion question to the culturally-determined psychiatric syndrome one.
Maybe Kayak Phobia has to do with sound (the lack thereof) rather than light? I've read that being in an anechoic chamber can "drive you crazy" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/earths-quietest-place-will-drive-you-crazy-in-45-minutes-180948160/ and I believe it. I was moose hunting in northern BC, and found myself in the middle of an open grassy field on an especially windless day. There were no birds chirping and the tall grass absorbed and deadened any other sound. When I wasn't moving, it was utterly silent, and my heartbeat sounded deafening. It was /extremely/ disconcerting. I can imagine that the sensation (or rather lack thereof) would be similar sitting in a kayak in open water on a windless day.
I would think their society operated on a narrow ledge they didn’t know existed because they were so isolated. The kinds of dramatic cultural and small scale diplomatic changes as the subsequent cultural infusions of news ideas and practices were not skills they had a developed. If you look to a Silk Road hot spot like Istanbul which had to deal with and develop societal skills around dealing with unfamiliar people and practices, the contrast with isolated communities who lack these skills are stark.
While it might sound strange or colonialistic in mindset, the idea of a mental disorder associated with stress around first contact isn’t so outlandish, nor the idea that those same circumstances wouldn’t repeated or propagate through time. A rare temper tantrum of the pre contact past could be what they called it when the stresses of cultural exposure after such extreme isolation occurred. It seems like this could be a good explanation and doesn’t need to fit into the psychological disorder taxonomy one would find in and within western contexts. Certainly the idea has merit and while science and its methods might not like it, unique phenomena or ones which cannot be readily or ethically replicated do indeed occur.
I’d also think to look towards real environmental pressures. While it may be true the western settlements and resource exploitation in the region want focused on whales, caribou, or seals, it doesn’t mean there were no impacts. Certainly western finishing ramped up along with oil contamination and other major impacts to their food supplies.
If you combine that with the cultural pressures to succeed, the mindset distance and difficulty older hunters had with the younger hunters, plus even a small decline in the availability of wives, the addition of alcohol to worsen the effects of despair into a pattern, and simply having many many more options as a young man with pretty much none of them being good. You can see how this led to a downward spiral of despair in the young men and distaste and resentment in the older men. Aka the near total breakdown of their society with food being even more scarce which activates cultural norms to reduce the population. It all adds up to a unique pedicure of events for those people at that time, and isn’t confusing, only sad.
Perhaps/likely there was a true reduction in their traditional food sources which was simply another factor in their old lives not being sustainable. Maybe hunting being harder made a young hunter get fewer chances per hunt and 10 insults was 5 too many versus what they’d have had to endure in the past, along with being western schooled and missing out on years of hunter education. Alcohol was a new option and a detriment, fewer women were around to marry, it makes me feel despair just thinking about it, much less living that life of a hopeless young man with no future.
Very interesting and informative. One thing that I thought might ought to be mentioned that isn't, is the lack of suicide stigma in many traditional societies. I don't know, and I am not sure that anyone does, about pre-Western contact Eskimos but the stigma around suicide is a late development. A great many human societies view it something like the Martians in Stranger in a Strange Land, or as it seems these Eskimos do, a way to conserve resources and for the person committing suicide to sort of bury his mistakes in oblivion. I suspect the suicide stigma requires something like a belief in the afterlife or some sort of 'survival of death' soul type concept. So, we should probably realize that what appears to us as cruel may have seemed entirely practical to the people involved. While in many 'trad' communities it could be expected to go exactly as it does in the Eskimo community as Scott suggests, I would say that this has less to do with 'trad' than it does with a community where the collective is everything and the individual is expendable.
Something to which Americans (perhaps other societies in other times, but Americans is what I know) constantly give too little attention is how much "response to stress" is culturally learned. As an outsider I see so many (mostly destructive and self-destructive) patterns in the US where it's considered more or less the appropriate response, when life gets tough, to engage in one or more of
- alcoholic bender
- drug-fueled bender
- gambling bender
- sexual (with or without payment involved) bender
Give me 10 recent Hollywood movies and probably half of them will involve this pattern, frequently suggesting that this is precisely the right thing to do, ie (depending on the exact movie) the correct thing to do on failing an exam or losing your job/girlfriend is one of the above.
Then of course we get the more underground cultural response, not encouraged in movies but we're all aware of them in the air, of going on a shooting bender of some sort.
Point is, this is all learned. It's not inevitable that people respond this way. And as I read the accounts, to me this all looked like learned responses (cf the earlier reviews about learned Western hysterical responses like anorexia); the culture taught people that when you feel especially (angry| frustrated| powerless| whatever) you run about engaging in a half hour of piblokto. The culture may (or may not, who knows?) result in feelings of this sort more often than Western culture, but I don't see any qualitative difference between this and Westerners believing that when you feel especially (angry| frustrated| powerless| whatever) the appropriate thing to do is get blackout drunk along with (depending on your precise society) having random sex or picking random fights.
As for the first one, kayak phobia, I think we've all experienced "driving hypnosis" where you almost lose track of what you are doing while driving. I've certainly heard comedians talk about this and how you can start to wonder "what would happen if I just took my hands off the wheel and let what happens happen". I suspect again this is a culturally-specific response to a more universal phenomenon (in this case something about being alone in a specifically monotonous environment?)
Some people have touched on this in the comments, but it seems like talking to a few Inuit elders about the questions above would yield a more nuanced understanding than speculation from people outside the culture.
So after reading this, I started reading up on culture-bound syndromes (as defined in the DSM-IV) and I've come to the conclusion that the DSM-IV has a lot of stuff that some guy heard about one time and threw in just to be safe.
The sheer number of culture-bound syndromes that did not survive the jump to DSM-V (cataloged there as "cultural concepts of distress") feels like it should be notable. Gone, of course, is piblokto, and running amok, and other such things, but also gone is sangue dormido ("sleeping blood"), a condition allegedly attested in Cape Verdeans -- there is literally ONE case study I've found in the scientific literature online, and every book-length source either cites that one specific case or they quote nearly verbatim the sentence-long list of symptoms found in the DSM-IV (usually because the book is a dictionary of psychiatry or whatever and they need to be sure to have something on every culture-bound syndrome that's out there).
I was only looking because I was gonna make a Wikipedia article for sangue dormido (it currently lacks one) but shit, it looks like there aren't enough sources for me to do that!
I'm so pleased at the Robert Service reference. The Cremation of Sam McGee is the first long poem I memorized.
". At the risk of sounding like a judgmental Westerner who thinks other societies are worse than his own, Eskimo society is worse than mine. There is no privacy - after all, igloos have no walls. Nobody ever gets a moment alone, except on hunting trips. Everyone is watching each other and talking to each other all the time. In all this watching and talking, nobody ever compliments or praises anyone else, or expresses happiness or gratitude (the closest Foulks comes to admitting an exception to this rule is that a wife may sometimes smile when her husband arrives home from a weeks-long hunt). But they mock each other’s failures all the time, forever. That quote about qivitoq at the top of this post is pretty typical. Any Eskimo who makes a mistake or just fails to conform will be the butt of everyone’s barbs until they die - often of suicide"
Probably has something to do with living in a hard and unforgiving environment where someone who fails to conform to group standards may put the entire group at risk. In this, it is something like being a feral cat, although we are much more solitary and independent, because we are able to be so.
I have read of pioneer humans going stir crazy in the long Dakota winters.
Eskimos are assholes.
"Knud Rasmussen asked his guide and friend Aua, an angakkuq (spiritual healer), about Inuit religious beliefs among the Iglulingmiut (people of Igloolik) and was told: "We don't believe. We fear.""
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inuit_religion
The harsh Arctic environment seems, from my vague impressions, to be a common thread in all these strange Arctic anthropological phenomena.
> This sort of training still persists today. The young hunter accompanies older men on their hunting trips and learns by observing them. If he succeeds in duplicating their actions properly, he is rewarded by silent acceptance. If he should make an error, he is chastised and teased. This ridicule continues beyond that which takes place at the time. The other men are also told of his failings so that they can join in
This reminds me of the guy who went to Japan to learn how to craft bonsai form the masters – they acted in ways that strike me as brutal and abusive. He became very good, returns to the States, won acclaim, and when he attempted to teach the American disciples who came to him in the same fashion he had been taught, they all left.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/11/21/the-beautiful-brutal-world-of-bonsai
So I'm wondering how this seeming lack of positive interactions is perceived by the traditional tribe members. I mean, do they perceive it as bleak or as a kind of warm group acceptance which doesn't need to be voiced?
Still, something about it seems weird to me. I mean I don't think one sees similar behavior in isolated indigenous tribes in the tropics and while in some sense food might be easier to find in that environment presumably human tribes grow until birth and death rates even out (whether because of war, food limits or disease) so it doesn't seem like the lack of positive affect interactions can be an essential feature of the level of danger/reliance.
Ice on face is definitely helpful with vagus nerve malfunction and migraine onset, at least for me; seems connected to sympathetic nervous system going haywire. Works best on the cheekbones for some reason.
Clearly there was a lot of pent up frustration with life before, and there is now, and all that pressure wants to get out one way or another. The form of course depends on the culture, and the degree that the psyche is warped by the inability to blow off steam depends on the person and on the society. It makes sense that addictions mostly replaced an occasional running amok.
Are there good explanations why some strange phobias like fear of dentists or flying are catered to in Western culture and sometimes even clinically diagnosed?
Scott, I like your work so much. And I am sorry, cannot seem to reach you or substack any other way. I was charged recently $100 even though I am not a paid subscriber. I need to fix this immediately. I am sorry, you are really important to me and others, but I cannot afford to be a paid subscriber at this time. What do I do? I cannot find help for this anywhere, and certainly this is where substack is most unavailable and its help services ridiculous.
Isn't stripping clothes off, or wanting to, a common symptom of hypothermia? Paradoxically, sufferers of that in its final stages think they are too hot. Presumably this piblokto can't really be hypothermia, or the other symptoms would be obvious to bystanders. But could it be some similar brain impulse triggered by a subconscious feeling of being "cooped up" in a hut or constrained to sit in a kayak.
I guess it also makes sense for Eskimo society to have developed a taboo against overt displays of anger, because a flushed face must lose more heat, hence the phrase "hot under the collar"!
Meeting traditional Cree people is a good way to have it driven home, hard and fast, that it is perfectly possible for people to Not Think Like You. I am not surprised the Inuit are even more different, because the context is even more different.
Anybody remember when Jean Briggs' book "Never in Anger" got some media attention a few years ago? It was about how Inuit parents teach their children to never ever show anger. Briggs was there in the 1960s. Her account makes the culture sound pretty different from Foulks' version, but I suppose forty years of contact with the West could change things dramatically. Here's a quote from an NPR piece about it from 2019: "Traditional Inuit parenting is incredibly nurturing and tender. If you took all the parenting styles around the world and ranked them by their gentleness, the Inuit approach would likely rank near the top. (They even have a special kiss for babies, where you put your nose against the cheek and sniff the skin.)"
One way of reading this: the conditions described are real but have a straightforward explanation that isn't especially "cultural." In particular, humans have failure modes that are probabilistically elicited by various stressors, and different populations are subjected to different kinds and degrees of stress.
The arctic environment is harsh, perhaps the most harsh in which humans live. It is quite far from the environment in which humans mostly evolved. As a result, Eskimos are subjected to kinds and degrees of stress that most people are not, and so psychologically decompensate in particular ways at much higher rates than others.
From this perspective, it's no more mysterious than noting that long-distance runners have much higher rates of plantar fasciitis, tibial stress syndrome, and patellofemoral syndrome than non-runners.
This post reminds me of a podcast I listened to recently on the mystery of missing hikers at Dyatlov pass in Russia. Apparently the hikers suddenly panicked and ran out into the Siberian elements and died but no knows what caused the panic.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/jimmy-akins-mysterious-world/id1423288932?i=1000428468849
> This sounds plausible to me, but I don’t know how to square it with the official Greenland data suggesting low suicide rates at the very beginning of contact.
I would propose that first contact with an external group radically enhances fellow-feeling by constructing a very obvious "them" and a potentially threat to rally against
Reminds me of Thesiger's account of traditional Bedouin culture, in a similarly harsh environment. I seem to remember Thesiger describing one of the Bedu he travelled with being mocked and shamed by his fellow tribesmen because his grandfather had once, many years ago, accidentally farted in public.
The transition to modernity for that culture seems to have been a happier one. Partially because oil made them all fantastically rich, but you get the impression that even more important was the fact that centuries of banditry had left them with both an understanding of, and a lively contempt for, more civilised, settled peoples. Not victims, but predators.
The closest I’ve come to a mental breakdown has been during long periods of no privacy. As an introverted person I really really need time alone. I feel like I’d be rolling around naked in the snow as well if I lived in very close quarters with many others my entire life.
It seems to me that if most of the people whom the term refers to find "Eskimo" offensive or insulting, then it is, regardless of its origin or etymology, which was never absolutely certain.
Also, according to Wikipedia, the Inuit Circumpolar Council includes the Yupik, so the term "Inuit" can be used collectively to refer to all of them, which was already my understanding. It doesn't include the Aleut, but the Aleut weren't usually considered Eskimos back when that was the regular term either.
I'm writing about culture bound products this week with regards to Japan and toilets
https://hiddenjapan.substack.com/p/japanese-idiosyncrasies-and-the-galapagos
> Piblokto is a form of temporary insanity to which the Highland Eskimos are subject,
Highland? Don't they all live on the coast?
I couldn't help thinking of latah in Southeast Asia. It's a heightened sensitivity to shock or surprise that leads to a stylized over-reaction. Interestingly, it's also found in Maine where it is known as Dancing Frenchman Disorder and usually associated with logging camps. In both cases, when sufferers are startled, they don't just jump with surprise but do a whole dance that can go on for a while.
A lot of disorders, and one would expect especially mental disorders, have culturally prescribed symptoms. Schizophrenia may look different in different cultures. People may have sworn when injured from time immemorial, but they sure were crying out "Oh, Jesus!" back in the BCs.
Kayak phobia sounds like the paralysis in Stanislaw Lem's short story "On Patrol" with pilot Pirx. I wonder whether he knew about it.
Sorry, no direct link, the best I could find is this:
https://isfdb.org/cgi-bin/pl.cgi?34346
Freuchen's Arctic Adventure is pretty great.
Edit: "Reading this book, I was left with a sense of hopelessness, like these people are cursed, and all the West has done is offer them a new poison to break the monotony of the old." You should read Arctic Adventure for a different perspective.
Just out of curiosity: Any word on the book about what these young guys who couldn't make it in town, but also have zero interest in joining the hunting groups, end up doing all day back at the village? I have a hard time believing they're allowed to just chillax in the igloo all day, but if not that then what?
>>”If this were true, we should expect to see similar conditions in other shame cultures.”
Is it a coincidence that piblokto declined with the introduction of alcohol?
Getting drunk is a socially acceptable release valve in many shame cultures.
When my mom got bipolar she packed the kids into the car and started driving, for some reason she didn't get far and that was that. In a subsequent episode she ended up raving wildly and was physically dragged to the ambulance. Much later we were on the highway in winter and when we stopped, perhaps at her request, she got out of the car barefoot and started to run into a field. I got it and ended up in a fight with the police which I have never had any memory of. Very likely the manic state I was in caused me to use more strength than your mind usually allows to provide a proper buffer for not injuring yourself
I guess I should specify that we are Canadian from northern Europe. These mostly sound pretty bipolarish to me perhaps with cultural inflections. I do think the kayak fear sounds like a packaged release of tension that your community cannot allow to happen except by such a costly signal
If "a case of piblocto lasts from five minutes to half-an-hour or more" or "after a few minutes, the victim returns to her normal self," and "when it occurs under cover of a hut, no apparent concern is felt by other inmates, nor is any attention paid to the antics of the mad one" then how many cases would, in fact, be admitted to a psychiatric hospital for Foulks to find? If it's a frequently short-duration condition, it sounds as if the attack would usually be over significantly before you get the sufferer to the hospital, and if it's an insular community which does not trust Westerners and has its own understanding of what's going on they may not be inclined to start by rushing people off to the hospital in the first place.
The obvious problem with this theory is that if Foulks spent a while asking around the communities (ideally with the communities having some trust in him) and wasn't just looking at hospitals, he should have found as many cases as the original explorers. He isn't stupid, so presumably he did this? But the article doesn't say so, and by the description given the syndrome seems like a fairly bad fit for psychiatric hospitals (modulo how often it reoccurred in the same person, but that's also dependent on trust for the hospitals on the part of the sufferer and those involved in his/her care).
I personally know of two women who in a disassociative state stripped and walked into a lake in winter. Neither "Eskimo". One in her early 20s (within the last decade), the other in her late 30s (25 years ago). The 20 year died.
I was under impression that there was rare but known phenomena associated with certain mental illness. And, I have vague memories of reading about such similar incidents over by the last 4 decades - usually involving women. I am unwilling to take the time to do search of news articles, but I am sure this is a known thing. So the idea that it is culturally bound seems very dubious.
As to hidden shame about a phobia or less than stereotypical male courage leading to suicide, seems to be the basic archetypal male suicide and/or spousal abuse story. Hidden shame leading to violence whether against oneself or against someone - is a documented phenomenon. Again not willing to take time to reacquaint myself with literature but a fellow from some California university I think in 70s or 80s documented this idea (hidden shame and violence (inward or outward) while studying prisoners.
None of this sounds culturally bound at all when you strip away the setting of snow and igloos or kayaks (I'm sure there are military, fire fighters, police, construction workers, high rise windows washers, etc who "lose their nerve".)
I had an experience when I was 15 that was fairly similar to this.
I'd been depressed and not attending school for about a month, Mum had confiscated my computer for said month in an attempt to motivate me, and she hadn't fed me in a week or so (I'd been surviving, barely, on cereal because I didn't know how to cook).
I walked out into the living room stark naked and asked for my computer back. She was working on her own computer and ignored me. I fetched the duvet from my bed and threw it over her in order to force her to react. She brushed it off and kept working. After a dozen or so more tries with the duvet I went over to one of the bookcases and threatened to topple it unless she started paying attention. She tried to call the police, I wrestled the phone away, she went for the other phone, I wrestled that away (not entirely sure how I managed that, since I recall her being stronger even a year or two beforehand; maybe I'd caught up on testosterone alone, or maybe it was hysterical strength), she fled the house, I deadlocked the door, retrieved my computer and started playing games. About 15 minutes later the police showed up, I let them in, and, after demanding I put some underwear on (because I was still stark naked when they arrived) they gave me this long lecture about how I was going to become a domestic abuser.
There was a story here some time ago about an African guy who went to live with the Inuit, and the culture described seems rather different. Maybe there are different Inuit, I suppose.
I'd never heard of the "Ice Diver Technique" as a treatment for panic attacks, but it makes a sort of sense. The diving reflex is real and powerful, and two of the major effects are reduced heart rate and reduced desire to breath. Which are obviously advantageous if you suddenly find out that you might not be able to breath for the next minute or two, but one can easily see how it might be at least a symptomatic treatment for a condition associated with high heart rate and hyperventilation.
More generally, panic burns oxygen, so any adaption to "hey oxygen just got real scarce" is probably going to have an element of "don't panic".
Maybe I'm missing something, but "getting bullied into suicide" doesn't strike me as uniquely culture-bound. Is it the particular style of bullying or something?
As a physician who has worked in remote parts of Northern Canada -- the indigenous people there have a shocking rate of acute otitis media, often as adults and often presenting with a ruptured tympanic membrane. I do not know why this is. Maybe there is an anatomic difference, or the roads are so dusty that they cause irritation to the respiratory tract which causes Eustachian tube dysfunction.
I can see that, if you're interested in the interaction of culture, biology and response to external reality in mental health disorders, then looking at those which seem particularly culturally specific might be illuminating.
Would the same apply to the study of those disorders whose prevalence and symptoms are unaffected by the culture and experiences of the individual sufferer? Or those that are reliably caused by certain experiences, with little variation due to culture or biology? And what disorders would fall into those categories?
I wonder if some of the weirdness surrounding first contact with western culture might be caused by infectious disease. Probably not many diseases cause psychiatric symptoms, but I don't know offhand.
Wow. This is an amazing read. Thank you for your carefully-sourced, curated quotes! I very much enjoyed this. Never heard about any of this stuff besides for the running amok.
Time to reread Jack London's 'The Son of the Wolf', I think. That captures the mystery, madness and hardship of the far north pretty well.
Given the prolonged darkness (or light), extreme cold, the deadening quiet of snow, the deathly sterility of the tundra, and the brutal violence of the hunt, it isn't hugely surprising to me that Eskimos suffer unusual maladies.
I'm from Estonia which is quite far north and this sort of public-only-hazing is a very real cultural phenomenon that still very much exists. For example, you go a post about a girl on an e-scooter being hit by a car on facebook. The comments are precisely this sort of hate and ridicule. I can absolutely see how that sort of thing could be implemented as a basis for organizing a large grouping of people pre-internet.
"Young men, as have been pointed out, seem to find it more difficult assuming the academic or technical skill necessary to making a living outside the village."
"While many look forward to this experience as a chance to get out of their small, “boring” village into the hub of “excited” Western living, in most cases they return home disillusioned about their seeming inability to fit into life outside."
"It might be mentioned, however, that attending university is extremely exceptional for these villagers, there having been only two individuals during the past fifteen years having done so, and unsuccessfully at that."
These seem like very consistent themes in the all accounts I've read, from different parts of the world, about integrating (recently) previous hunter-gathers.
Is there any group of people that has adapted well to modern civilisation who didn't already have a history of living as settled farmers under a sate for several thousand years?
Also, it reinforces my belief in Bryan Caplan's argument that the main function of the education system is to test people on their ability to cope with the demands of modern work life.
"history of severe otitis media": Which hurts really really bad. Maybe traditionally treated with psychoactive drugs?
Canadian and Greenland indigenous people are all Inuit, and 'Eskimo' or 'Esquimaux' is seen as insulting by them. I would be very interested in this book if it covers them too, rather than just concentrating on the Alaskan Eskimos.
In re otitis media: psychosis of all kinds is much commoner in the deaf, as are states of delirium. One less anchor to reality I guess.
And as for residential schools: the Canadian take on them is a form of Arctic Hysteria in itself. It is forbidden to suggest the a single pupil ever had benefit, or, God forbid, enjoyed his or her time there. They were pure genocide machines, equivalent in our moral landscape to Auschwitz, or so we are told. I'd be a little more nuanced, and agree that they were designed to drag the northern peoples into mainstream Canadian culture, and in so doing paid no respect to the culture they were eroding. But they certainly did not operate to kill by neglect. You will note that of all the discoveries of 'hundreds' of graves detected by ground penetrating radar, not one has been excavated, nor has any attempt been made. I understand this to mean the power of the putative grave sites only remains (a pun!) if they are believed to be there, but dissipates if they are shown to be other ground anomalies.
It is a fascinating suggestion that phenomena like piblokto were triggered by the arrival of the white explorers, the realisation that the Inuit ('the People') were not the only inhabitants of a world that was not all a white wasteland. I believe, though, there is an oral tradition of such things pre-dating white explorers. The Inuit lived closer to the edge of personal extinction than any other group of humans. Rules of behaviour, especially pertaining to group co-operation, were extremely important. A negligent mistake could not only kill you, but wipe out your extended family group. Living with that kind of pressure, with no privacy, and little opportunity for individuality would certainly account for sudden explosive disorders. I'd see piblokto as a culturally-sanctioned way of blowing off steam before returning to the daily grind.
Sorensen's account of the Andamans all makes sense if the explorer commented that at least one person on the island has blue eyes.
I've saw some mini-versions of this sort of thing when I was in clinical psychology grad school in Durham, NC. We had an outpatient clinic where students provided psychotherapy, and most of our patients were locals. So my patients often talked about someone "making themselves ill," (with "ill" pronounced "ee-yul"), which I took to mean "making themselves sick." Also, certain subgroups, such as pregnant women, were thought of as being prone to being "ill." Anyhow, eventually I figured out that "being ill" meant having something like a low-grade, temporary, agitated depression -- the person became negativistic, irritable, unreasonable, tense, & loud and dramatic in manifesting all this. And there was a certain tolerance for this behavior -- it was thought of as a temporary bad state that came over people.
Also, just for your amusement, there was a sort of opposite thing called "sopping on out." That meant really enjoying the out hell out of your meal. "You get you some biscuits and gravy and just sop on out."
Not the point of the post, but I found this bit interesting: "The fear of death by drowning is of constant concern to the Eskimo, AND WITH GOOD REASON. Between 1901 and 1930 there were 1023 deaths by accident in Greenland; eight percent were due to drowning and ninety-four percent of these were kayak accidents."
(bolding added by me).
The top three preventable causes of death in the US seem to be: poisoning, motor vehicle and falls. These three account for 86% of preventable deaths.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/deaths-by-demographics/top-10-preventable-injuries/
I don't think of the US population as having a constant concern about these things. Maybe falls for the elderly? And the Eskimos have a "constant concern" about a specific form of accidental death that accounts for 8% of accidental deaths?
>there were too many clear stories by too many different explorers, all similar to each other and to Foulks’ own report.
I mean, how many extremely similar accounts of wealthy people torturing children and harvesting their adrenochrome could you find online?
Or, how many similar stories of a child developing extreme autism symptoms right after getting a vaccine?
Once there's an established story within a community that has a lot of attention and grants a lot of social capital within that community, lots of similar stories of it will start to pop up -some outright fabrications, some people applying a narrative to coincidence or other events that look superficially similar.
Maybe 'Artic explorers during this time period' were just such a community.
> Rasmussen mentions a young man who was told by his foster father, “I wish you were dead! You are not worth the food you eat.” And they young man took the words so seriously that he declared he indeed would not eat again. To make the suffering as brief as possible, the same young man lay down stark naked in the bare snow and was frozen to death.
So... Eskimos invented Twitter long before we Westerners did ? :-/
"This sounds plausible to me, but I don’t know how to square it with the official Greenland data suggesting low suicide rates at the very beginning of contact."
I suspect the conservative Eskimo argument would be that more people are bad at hunting than they used to be.
Fascinating
This is fascinating. One wonders how many different ways there are to be human. Are we kinda stuck in one big mono-culture? Or do we have two cultures here in the US?
Tiniest of nits, and possibly [sic], but it's Eielson, not Elison, Air Force Base
It sounds very plausible to me that kayak phobia is panic disorder: Sitting, bored and chronically anxious, with a weird light and glassy water thing going on that makes the world look bleak and weird seems to me like an excellent setting for someone with the right wiring to have their first panic attack. Seems quite plausible to me that those who do not have the right wiring to have their anxiety go FOOM! might still develop a haunting fear that *something* awful is going to happen to their head if they go out that kayak. So some people have full-blown panic disorder and an associated dread of getting in that kayak again, others have more a phobia of going out in the kayak based on what it's done to other people, but the 2 groups' current symptoms are almost exactly the same. So here's a question about culturally transmitted interpretations of feelings, and culturally transmitted ideas of how somebody with those feelings acts: What about the other FOOM, the good Foom, orgasm? Like a panic attack, it's preceded by a lower-grade version of the ultimate feeling -- in this case, pleasure -- and then, Foom! the full-blown version happens. Do you get all the same culturally-related phenomena? Like some people have the real thing, others have via contagion a sort of placebo version which nonetheless they fully believe in and find important? Are there different conventions in different cultures about how people act during orgasm -- like in New Guinea people tear out handfuls of their own hair at the supreme moment, in Eskimo culture people bite their partner's nose, and in New York they say "mmmm . . . honey, is there any diet Pepsi left?" I'm being funny about this but actually it's a serious question. Seems like a good companion question to the culturally-determined psychiatric syndrome one.
Maybe Kayak Phobia has to do with sound (the lack thereof) rather than light? I've read that being in an anechoic chamber can "drive you crazy" https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/earths-quietest-place-will-drive-you-crazy-in-45-minutes-180948160/ and I believe it. I was moose hunting in northern BC, and found myself in the middle of an open grassy field on an especially windless day. There were no birds chirping and the tall grass absorbed and deadened any other sound. When I wasn't moving, it was utterly silent, and my heartbeat sounded deafening. It was /extremely/ disconcerting. I can imagine that the sensation (or rather lack thereof) would be similar sitting in a kayak in open water on a windless day.
I would think their society operated on a narrow ledge they didn’t know existed because they were so isolated. The kinds of dramatic cultural and small scale diplomatic changes as the subsequent cultural infusions of news ideas and practices were not skills they had a developed. If you look to a Silk Road hot spot like Istanbul which had to deal with and develop societal skills around dealing with unfamiliar people and practices, the contrast with isolated communities who lack these skills are stark.
While it might sound strange or colonialistic in mindset, the idea of a mental disorder associated with stress around first contact isn’t so outlandish, nor the idea that those same circumstances wouldn’t repeated or propagate through time. A rare temper tantrum of the pre contact past could be what they called it when the stresses of cultural exposure after such extreme isolation occurred. It seems like this could be a good explanation and doesn’t need to fit into the psychological disorder taxonomy one would find in and within western contexts. Certainly the idea has merit and while science and its methods might not like it, unique phenomena or ones which cannot be readily or ethically replicated do indeed occur.
I’d also think to look towards real environmental pressures. While it may be true the western settlements and resource exploitation in the region want focused on whales, caribou, or seals, it doesn’t mean there were no impacts. Certainly western finishing ramped up along with oil contamination and other major impacts to their food supplies.
If you combine that with the cultural pressures to succeed, the mindset distance and difficulty older hunters had with the younger hunters, plus even a small decline in the availability of wives, the addition of alcohol to worsen the effects of despair into a pattern, and simply having many many more options as a young man with pretty much none of them being good. You can see how this led to a downward spiral of despair in the young men and distaste and resentment in the older men. Aka the near total breakdown of their society with food being even more scarce which activates cultural norms to reduce the population. It all adds up to a unique pedicure of events for those people at that time, and isn’t confusing, only sad.
Perhaps/likely there was a true reduction in their traditional food sources which was simply another factor in their old lives not being sustainable. Maybe hunting being harder made a young hunter get fewer chances per hunt and 10 insults was 5 too many versus what they’d have had to endure in the past, along with being western schooled and missing out on years of hunter education. Alcohol was a new option and a detriment, fewer women were around to marry, it makes me feel despair just thinking about it, much less living that life of a hopeless young man with no future.
Very interesting and informative. One thing that I thought might ought to be mentioned that isn't, is the lack of suicide stigma in many traditional societies. I don't know, and I am not sure that anyone does, about pre-Western contact Eskimos but the stigma around suicide is a late development. A great many human societies view it something like the Martians in Stranger in a Strange Land, or as it seems these Eskimos do, a way to conserve resources and for the person committing suicide to sort of bury his mistakes in oblivion. I suspect the suicide stigma requires something like a belief in the afterlife or some sort of 'survival of death' soul type concept. So, we should probably realize that what appears to us as cruel may have seemed entirely practical to the people involved. While in many 'trad' communities it could be expected to go exactly as it does in the Eskimo community as Scott suggests, I would say that this has less to do with 'trad' than it does with a community where the collective is everything and the individual is expendable.
If one is interested in first person diaries, I enjoyed "Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family" by anthropologist Jean L. Briggs.
Something to which Americans (perhaps other societies in other times, but Americans is what I know) constantly give too little attention is how much "response to stress" is culturally learned. As an outsider I see so many (mostly destructive and self-destructive) patterns in the US where it's considered more or less the appropriate response, when life gets tough, to engage in one or more of
- alcoholic bender
- drug-fueled bender
- gambling bender
- sexual (with or without payment involved) bender
Give me 10 recent Hollywood movies and probably half of them will involve this pattern, frequently suggesting that this is precisely the right thing to do, ie (depending on the exact movie) the correct thing to do on failing an exam or losing your job/girlfriend is one of the above.
Then of course we get the more underground cultural response, not encouraged in movies but we're all aware of them in the air, of going on a shooting bender of some sort.
Point is, this is all learned. It's not inevitable that people respond this way. And as I read the accounts, to me this all looked like learned responses (cf the earlier reviews about learned Western hysterical responses like anorexia); the culture taught people that when you feel especially (angry| frustrated| powerless| whatever) you run about engaging in a half hour of piblokto. The culture may (or may not, who knows?) result in feelings of this sort more often than Western culture, but I don't see any qualitative difference between this and Westerners believing that when you feel especially (angry| frustrated| powerless| whatever) the appropriate thing to do is get blackout drunk along with (depending on your precise society) having random sex or picking random fights.
As for the first one, kayak phobia, I think we've all experienced "driving hypnosis" where you almost lose track of what you are doing while driving. I've certainly heard comedians talk about this and how you can start to wonder "what would happen if I just took my hands off the wheel and let what happens happen". I suspect again this is a culturally-specific response to a more universal phenomenon (in this case something about being alone in a specifically monotonous environment?)
Opinion:
"these people are cursed" in the penultimate paragraph should be replaced with "people are cursed".
I come away from this thinking that there is always a similar degree of mental illness that we cannot cure, only shape.
Some people have touched on this in the comments, but it seems like talking to a few Inuit elders about the questions above would yield a more nuanced understanding than speculation from people outside the culture.
So after reading this, I started reading up on culture-bound syndromes (as defined in the DSM-IV) and I've come to the conclusion that the DSM-IV has a lot of stuff that some guy heard about one time and threw in just to be safe.
The sheer number of culture-bound syndromes that did not survive the jump to DSM-V (cataloged there as "cultural concepts of distress") feels like it should be notable. Gone, of course, is piblokto, and running amok, and other such things, but also gone is sangue dormido ("sleeping blood"), a condition allegedly attested in Cape Verdeans -- there is literally ONE case study I've found in the scientific literature online, and every book-length source either cites that one specific case or they quote nearly verbatim the sentence-long list of symptoms found in the DSM-IV (usually because the book is a dictionary of psychiatry or whatever and they need to be sure to have something on every culture-bound syndrome that's out there).
I was only looking because I was gonna make a Wikipedia article for sangue dormido (it currently lacks one) but shit, it looks like there aren't enough sources for me to do that!
Disappointed this review overlooked the obvious cause of piblocto:
tiger spirits