Why do people live in Tornado Alley? The could just leave! /s
The land is an important part of who they are. I've visited/worked with Ojibwe, Cree and Inuit in their respective lands. The connection to the land is more powerful than mere hometown nostalgia. I recommend reading Paying the Land for more on this.
NB: Canada forcefully relocated Inuit communities into the far north to be human flagpoles for our sovereingty claims. The state has an interest in keeping mukluks on the ground.
Presumably the state wants to strengthen its claims against encroachment by other Arctic powers (*cough* Russia *cough*) independently of how (il)legitimate it asserts its foundation to be for domestic audiences.
That's fine, but what if those people live in a modern state (e.g. Canada) and have terrible quality of life? Does the government have to pay the exorbitant cost of providing transport, schooling, police, electricity, sewage, power lines, medicine, and social services to every inhospitable square inch of the Arctic? Or is it fine for Canada to spend as much per capita in the Arctic as it does elsewhere, and get blamed for all the ills of Eskimo society because they're the Big Bad White Man?
I agree, but how much is a reasonable amount to spend? I'm OK with spending, say, 30% more on Arctic inhabitants than on non-Arctic inhabitants. I'm not OK with spending 5x more.
That's a really loaded question and doesn't account for the fact that there are First Nations reserves south of 60 that are also deficient in those things, it's not just a northern thing. The Crown entered into treaties with First Nations, and it's not exactly clear that they negotiated in good faith. Regardless, if you sign a treaty that promises provision of certain services in exchange for concessions, then it's on you to hold up your end of the bargain.
From the Wikipedia entry on Resolute Bay (Qausuittuq, "place with no dawn"): "They [relocated Inuit] were told that they would be returned home after a year if they wished, but this offer was later withdrawn as it would have damaged Canada's claims to sovereignty in the area and the Inuit were forced to stay." So yeah... I think we owe them some goods and services.
"That's a really loaded question and doesn't account for the fact that there are First Nations reserves south of 60 that are also deficient in those things, it's not just a northern thing. The Crown entered into treaties with First Nations, and it's not exactly clear that they negotiated in good faith. "
I'm sure the Crown didn't promise broadband Internet and electric lines back in the 19th century. But in my comment, I wasn't arguing that the government isn't at fault at all. I was questioning whether other Canadians should be obligated to pay for the Ojibwe, Cree and Inuit "connection to the land", and if so, what amount is fair. Obviously it's unreasonable to expect exactly the same per-capita spending in every region of a vast country, but is it fair to Ontario taxpayers to spend 100x more per capita in Nunavut than in Ontario?
From the same article: "The government paid $10 million CAD to the survivors and their families and gave a formal apology in 2008.[22]"
Also, the Inuit who live in Resolute Bay aren't prevented from leaving anymore, are they?
Individuals can win $10 million awards in court for arguably lesser grievances. What's the price for using the state's monopoly on violence to relocate whole villages into environments where death and privation are daily hazards, where the sun doesn't rise Nov - Feb? What's the price of a life sentence for you, your children, and their children? $10 million and an apology won't bring back the dead. The Inuit in settlements like Resolute and Grise Fiord are manning our northern walls and they're not getting paid soldiers' salaries for it.
Regarding treaty obligations, this is a complicated issue that I'm not prepared to speak on with any authority, but I will say that it's more complicated legally and ethically than most Canadians care to admit. These are treaties between various nations and the Crown. These nations don't fit neatly into our Westernized box of concepts around citizenship, sovereignty, and the social contract. "If they don't like it then why don't they leave?" glosses over so many things, it's a single sentence Gish gallop. Asking a question like that betrays a fundamental lack of engagement with the subject at hand. Excusable for an American perhaps, but Canadians ought to know better by now.
But you haven't answered my question: what amount of money is it fair to ask other Canadians to pay to subsidize Arctic living? We both agree that it's not zero, and I think you'd also agree that it isn't infinity, so l what is it? I'd set the limit at 50% the average per capita government spending in the rest of the country. I think this is well below what is needed to give Arctic dwellers an equal quality of life.
The Arctic in winter requires extraordinary effort to simply survive. Military operations on land up there are more about presence, getting there first and not dying, rather than offensive operations. Naval surface ops basically a non-starter, not sure about sub-surface. The air is the dominant domain
Both would be miserable, but I'm not sure which would be worse. From a land perspective, sustainment (replenishment, transport, med support, etc.) would be the greatest challenge, followed by environmental hazards. One of my winter warfare instructors had attended a high altitude warfare school in Nepal. One of his team mates went down from altitude sickness and the evacuation became a mission in itself because they were higher than the working altitude for helicopters.
It means you're among the last people to be invaded, but I note that no Eskimo community is an independent nation, they've all been annexed by great powers - being in remote and hostile territory just mean it happened circa 1900 rather than circa 1700
Of course , technological advances are game changing about who you would want to invade an why....nobody was very interested in mineral oil until a hundred y ears ago.
Good for the two of you! I've tried to memorize it, but my brain keeps filling in every line or half-line I can't quite get right with the phrase "And the huskies howled", which doesn't appear in the poem nearly enough times for this strategy to work.
I won't copy and paste it here because substack seems to have zero ability to format quotes or code segments in comments. (I have tried several forms of annotation all to no avail, such as HTML or square brackets, etc. If this can be done, I would love to know how!) I guess a simplistic comment facility is deliberate, to prevent complications in narrow mobile display windows.
You guys are making me remember one of my all-time most fun nights: I'd just graduated recently, and had some friends who were in an American Studies grad program. We got really very stoned and someone put on an album of TS Eliot reading The Wasteland and some other poems, in the voice of a pretentious undertaker. Every line seemed to have a ridiculous second meaning to someone in the group, and they'd shout it out, and we roared with laughter all the way through the poem.
Oh yeah, we also laughed our asses off at
Webster was much possessed by DEATH [deep sepulchral voice for this word]
And saw the skull beneath the skin
And breastless creatures underground
Lean backward with a lipless grin [trilling the r in "grin"]
". 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.
I just watched a very hard to watch movie, "The Homesman" on HBOMax. Three Nebraska women go around the bend and need to be returned to the safety of civilization in Iowa in the late 19th century.
Tommy Lee Jones and Hillary Swank are the main players. Like I said, it is pretty hard to watch but it does depict frontier women made mad by the privations of a very rough life.
Shades of Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, maybe? I still recall the story-within-a-story of how Gentleman Jim discretely canceled a horse thief's retirement.
But then settlers have to sort out what to do if the ad hoc enforcer or committee goes rogue, and you have to form a second committee to reign in the vigilantes. It's an old story on the frontier.
Maybe, but I'm not sure I'm convinced. The military during wartime is probably relatively analagous and while there is certainly the pressure not to fail it doesn't seem to require an absence of positive interactions or a disapproval of positive feelings. Indeed, it seems like often the positive reinforcement of group bonding is as important as the negative.
I dunno, far as I can tell, the military seems to push forced conformism pretty hard.
Axtually, the analogy I originally was thinking of was the Taliban. Fuckup Taliban not only got killed, a bunch of other Taliban tended to get killed along with them.
Yes on conformism. But my point is that conformism doesn't always require a prohibition on positive interpersonal interactions. Indeed, sometimes it comes along with a positively sappy amount of brothers in arms kind of talk.
I agree that it usually brings along the mocking of failure etc but the prohibition on positive reinforcement is what seems odd.
I'm not really sure that it's fair to assume that all "tribes" of Eskimo were similar WRT that custom. Perhaps there's a selection bias. If piblokto only showed up among groups without positive reinforcement, those are the ones you would notice. Certainly among the folks I know, different families have different ways of interacting, and that's within the same culture.
It's pretty easy to come up armchair anthropological explanations for why some seemingly strange or cruel social custom is important for survival. But I think such explanations need to be taken with a grain of salt, or maybe an entire salt lick.
For one thing, you can easily make one up about the exact opposite custom. If the book had instead said that Eskimos were incredibly warm and kind people who showered each other with praise all the time, you could say that because they live in such a hard and unforgiving environment they need to make everyone feel like a loved and needed part of the group, so that they will strive to protect it.
Also, such explanations ignore non-survival-related reasons such dynamics might develop. For example, they might have resulted from an out-of-control loop of virtue signaling where people competed to one-up each other for intolerance of noncomformity, sterness, toughness, or some other value that is good in moderation, but toxic in excess. Other commenters have pointed out that there are other societies that manage to survive in dangerous scenarios without being quite so cruel to each other.
The lesson of "The Secret of Our Success" is that stone-age societies are long shaped by cultural group selection. Life is quite marginal that far north, so there's not a lot of slack for practices that would screw things up. On the other hand, the lower population density also makes war less important than in places like the Amazon or New Guinea (which is not to say it wasn't a factor).
I'm not sure I buy that in harsh environments destructive signaling loops can't necessarily get started because there isn't enough slack. There might be no slack in some parts of the environment, but plenty in others. Or people might get stuck in a permanent loop of mediocrity, where they never screw up bad enough to get everyone killed, but never really excel either (in fact, in a low war environment such a loop seems more likely, since they're competing more against nature and less against rival humans).
This. We could even argue the other way round -- when you have no slack, people can get stuck in completely stupid local maxima, if doing the obviously better thing requires a small upfront cost they cannot pay.
For example, the situation with abusive teachers seems like a stable equilibrium. If you have few experts, they can afford to be as abusive as they like, because the students do not have a choice. But then only the most determined students become experts, which means you have few experts in the next generation, too.
The other equilibrium, where you have enough experts, so if your teacher is abusive, you simply choose another one, and that gives you enough experts in the next generation, is also stable. And probably better for the tribe: more experts means higher productivity, and also a smaller risk that the only local expert randomly dies.
Problem is, that "better for the tribe" does not give you a recipe how to get from here to there. You have one local expert, which makes him high-status, he likes to abuse the students, and he is not going to cooperate at destroying his source of power.
There's not a lot of slack for *experimenting.* The fact that they're surviving and that changing it would end badly means that they've found a local maximum, but not a global one.
(Actually, an especially conformist society might *create* local maxima - if the rest of the tribe bullies you to death for not conforming, then obviously attempts to change are going to end badly for you, but that doesn't say anything about whether the change itself is a good idea.)
Deliberate experimentation is uncommon among all the societies Henrich was focused on. Instead cultural evolution is said to proceed randomly, with people not understanding why what they do works. And any random change that would give one group an advantage can lead to them replacing others. Although I suppose one could borrow the logic of "The 10000 Year Explosion" that selection is stronger vs drift in larger populations and thus that there won't be as much random cultural change in an environment that doesn't support as many people & groups (in contrast to a place like New Guinea).
Nigel Barley (*1947) wrote best-selling (and rather funny) anthropological books about his studies of a tribe in West-Africa (Dowayo) and later in Indonesia (Toraja). After those kinda rude Dowayos he was amazed how friendly the Torajan were (with each other). And was at a complete loss to explain: Why? - OTOH, late Marvin Harris was always great at theories why (holy cows, witch hunts, pig wars ...). Controlling the number of surviving baby-girls is often crucial in Malthusian societies. One tribe in India used to(?) kill so many, that they found a stable and peaceful equilibrium, where all brothers marry ONE girl. The guys do all serious work, the girl combs her hair. When one brother is making out with the wife, he leaves a mark at the door, so the others know not to disturb. - Others (see: Yanomami) kill baby-girls more often than boys, too. But just enough to have constant fights about the remaining, who get mistreated a lot. - What are the gender ratios at different ages among Eskimos (1850 vs. 2020)?
If that environment would be the primary cause of these unusual social habits, then we'd expect the same patterns to appear in groups in similar circumstances, for example, the indigenous peoples on the other side of the arctic - the Chukchi (who are so close to Siberian Yupik), Samoyeds, Sami peoples. I don't know enough about them to dare to assert if they have similar or contrasting habits (AFAIK they're different, but I may be wrong), but either way that would be relevant information about that hypothesis.
Which, based in the article, is a fair enough joke/observation, sure. Your reply:
> Hey watch that colonialist POV, man! :)
might just be a harmlesss joke. Or it might be the type of joke that's meant to be a cheeky political observation, something along the lines of *Liberals are way too obsessed with the idea that westerners are colonizers, and that's ridiculous, so watch out before a liberal calls you a colonizer!* The "strawman-leftist" is that hypothetical upset liberal you might be making fun of.
NYT read Scott's posts and comment sections and spun a story that we're a bunch of casually-bigoted libertarian edgelords. I don't agree with that, but can you see how trying to be funny about the impacts of American colonialism could support that kind of spin? We committed a genocide, let's not forget that.
IDK, maybe I'm reading into things too much. But these comment sections tend to be about hyperanalysis, so here it is.
You cannot live your life worrying about what the NYT types thinks. And the NYT hit piece doesn't seem to have harmed Scott anyway. And for what its worth, the only reason I am here is precisely because of the NYT hit piece. If they had showered him with praises, I wouldn't be here :)
"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.""
I recall reading that the Auca natives of South America had a similar "religious" situation. I think it may be common among "uncivilized" people groups: those without writing, or city building, or the other things that bring about organized religion. The natural world is a frightening place.
It's at least intuitive that if you live in a super harsh, barely-livable environment, your gods/spirits/etc. would also be super harsh. OTOH, who the hell had more terrifying gods than the Azteks? And they lived in a pretty nice part of the world, at least if you could avoid having your heart cut out to appease the gods so they wouldn't end the world.
Umnn... partially. They also did it for fun. Some did it for enlightenment. Simple pictures are usually wrong. (And the rites of Orpheus appear to have started as a work of fiction, though it may have been presented as truth.)
> 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.
I read that too, and while usually I am quick to be envious of anyone's skill in virtually any hobby - one of those resentments only available to moderns, but abundantly so - including the skill of practicing at some one thing in a dedicated fashion - I began to perceive what they did to the poor trees as brutal and abusive.
Pretty much like it used to be in japanese martial arts. Sensei is silent is the highest praise, usually there is criticism. Not much left of that in European dojos, it seems to me.
Nothing enhances authority better than silence, the splendor of the strong and the refuge of the weak.
Unfortunately only the first sentence made it to the internet, there is a 20-lines paragraph of it in "Le Fil de l'épée", but the core concept is that speaking dilute a leader's ability to get respect, while silence keeps the subordinate attentive.
"Not much left of that in European dojos, it seems to me."
Probably because is mostly doesn't work, but other things can.
In college many years ago I was taught Shotokan Karate from an old-school Japanese instructor. Five foot zero, slender, smoked. His day job was selling real estate, but he taught Karate in the evening because he wanted to. Which meant that he didn't NEED the students to continue to show up as he would if instruction was his job.
He was an excellent instructor, but had also figured out that what worked in Japan in the 1960s was not going to work in American in the 1980s. Because he wanted his American students to learn he adjusted his approach while still managing to instruct well ... his black belt candidates went to Japan to get their black belts so he clearly wasn't cutting corners with his instruction. And he did not want them to go to Japan and fail their black belt test.
Times and places change. He adapted. I didn't realize at the time how unusual his adaptation might have been.
Yes this is a critical, difficult transition it seems... Effective instruction, or finding a new pedagogy, of the same art in a new cultural environment.
Wow, looks like the "Wax on, Wax Off" trope you'd see in films like "The Karate Kid" (the one where the master makes the apprentice do menial chores as part of their training; see https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WaxOnWaxOff) wasn't an exaggeration. In fact, the trope was rather romanticizing/underselling the sort of thing apprentices are subjected to:
"In the morning, Neil would bring a sample of his wiring to the workshop and ask Kimura to critique it. Neil recalls Kimura once saying, “I’ve never even seen anyone do something this terrible. I would have to *try* to do something this terrible. Why are you so stupid?”"
&
"Neil was even more disheartened by the abuse that the senior apprentices inflicted on those below them: slapping them, striking them with sticks, even punching them in the face. On one occasion, he saw Urushibata repeatedly kick another apprentice, who was balled up in the fetal position. (Urushibata says that he “is sorry for using unreasonable corporal punishment.”) During these beatings, Neil recalls, Kimura often watched and laughed, exclaiming, “I bet you won’t forget that lesson!”"
&
"Neil has never been able to watch “Whiplash,” the 2014 film about a sadistic jazz conductor who pushes a young drummer to practice until his hands bleed, because the story line is “hauntingly” reminiscent of his experience as a bonsai apprentice. “That kind of mental warfare—that was my apprenticeship,” Neil said. He was often criticized for mistakes that he hadn’t actually made, and he was never complimented on his achievements. He learned that the only way to survive was to switch off his emotions, store away his ego, and give himself over to predicting and fulfilling Kimura’s needs."
(This sort of thing used to be common of course, in apprenticeships & master-apprentice relationships in Europe and elsewhere, as the article points out. But it's easy to see why this died out, as the article also points out.)
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.
>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?
I was wondering that as well. People from more expressive cultures often perceive people from more reserved cultures and emotionally repressed, although the reserved people don't perceive it that way, and (for those in the know) can often pack a lot of emotion into a seemingly minor act or phrase ("You know, I really am rather fond of you, old girl"). Maybe the Inuits have ways of marking acceptance and approval that are obvious to them but tend not to get noticed by westerners.
Judging by "... their family and community start hounding them to commit suicide, ratcheting up the social pressure until they comply." & "Frequently relatives admonished the individual to the point of encouraging him to do away with himself. 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.” ", I don't think that can be the full story. Or perhaps any part of the story at all. Saying “I wish you were dead! You are not worth the food you eat.” sounds like it has the opposite problem of being a bit *too* direct, something better off emotionally repressed.
That certainly is but how common is that and how common was that before outside pressure.
I mean maybe when the society was healthy it was just a difference in expressiveness but then when it starts to collapse this is how things go bad. I mean, I expect you can find similar family issues in troubled western communities now (at least based on the dubious evidence of 90s shows like Jerry Springer).
Why do you feel such a desperate need for the West to be either at fault or "just as bad" that you must throw out baseless speculation, contra the evidence WindUponWaves provided you?
WELL I KNOW IT SAYS THEY ARE DIRECT AND EXPRESSIVE RIGHT THERE BUT LIKE THE WEST IS JUST AS BAD SOMETIMES SO THERE!!
I don't. It's just a possibility. Could be their culture just sucks too. But the reason I feel motivated to make it is that we evolved various positive reinforcement mechanisms for a reason so it seems unlikely that a culture which is split up into such small units (so seemingly plenty of opportunity for a group with a more effective social system to outcompete the others) to end up not making use of these mechanisms. Besides, my intuition is that being constantly miserable is itself a significant competitive disadvantage (other things being equal).
Generally, I think that being rich and educated tends to make a culture better and nicer. But I'd expect there either to be a specific reason why an absence of positive affect is selected for in this environment or for it to be used. The conformity aspect seems perfectly understandable but not the aspect of any positive emotional connections/feedback.
....okay, fair enough, heh. I apologize for assuming the worst of you, my friend!
_edit:_ WAIT HOLD ON WHY WOULD YOU NEED TO OBSERVE "PARTS OF THE WEST ARE JUST AS BAD" THEN, HUH?! That *undermines* the point you outline above, if anything! My beady eye is now upon you, P.G., ol' chum; upon you like veritable glue!
Maybe their model is that the units that one loves and are loyal to are not individuals, but groups -- the family, the whole village. If you can't work, and are eating the food other members of the family produce, you are showing lack of love for the family.
Coming from India, this seemed like just like the interactions I'm used to - people will rarely positively reaffirm you directly, at least as effusively as seems to be common in North America. When I first experienced Western-style compliments I thought I was being made fun of. However, this style of communication doesn't feel bleak or cold, at least when you're used to it - it feels warm and accepting (they didn't even expect that I would fail!) whereas aggressive complimenting feels weird and condescending (were you expecting that I would do badly?...)
I’m American and find the “culture of compliments” weird. I wouldn’t even say I come from a family that particularly withholds compliments and approval, so it’s not that. But in recent decades I think it’s gotten *much* more standard to shower people with praise, especially at work. It’s practically required (maybe literally required) for managers to praise people routinely. My parents definitely did not experience that, so they did not teach me to expect warm praise at work and thus I tend to find it confusing.
I would say that North America is at the upper edge of the compliment distribution. Certainly those Americans whom I have had the pleasure to meet have been very free with positive praise. It is the sort of thing that can look insincere if one is unfamiliar with their calibration.
In (my bit of) China, there are a lot of compliments. In fact, it's one of the things I've struggled most to master. Where I was brought up on snarky British insults, everything said at dinner parties here comes coated in a layer of personal praise - though of course, expert practioners may be using that praise to mock, bond, celebrate, denigrate, or anything in between.
Coming from the UK- people will rarely positively reaffirm you directly, at least as effusively as seems to be common in North America. Also, very few things are deemed "awesome" or "hysterical".
I’d second this; if you complement someone in Britain un-sarcastically, it comes across as creepy and fake. We very rarely seriously suggest people should kill themselves, although it can be used as a joke if someone seriously embarrassed themselves.
Similarly, in UK legal education there’s typically an explicit no positive feedback rule. I’ve no idea if other professional education is the same.
"I was on a conference call with an American group yesterday, and the organizer began, I am absolutely thrilled to be with you this morning. Only an American would begin a meeting like this. Let's face it, everyone in the room knows that she is not truly, honestly, thrilled. Thrilled to win the lottery--yes. Thrilled to find out that you have won a free trip to the Caribbean--yes. Thrilled to be the leader of a conference call--highly doubtful."
I don’t want to make generalizations about cultures I don’t know about. But just as a general comment, praise or displays of favor to one person can lead to jealousy, which is toxic to social harmony. In a situation where people have very little privacy, even favor or affection between friends or partners is seen by everyone and might therefore be riskier.
Similarly, an individual’s going around telling people about his successes or specialness is varyingly unacceptable in different cultures, maybe atypically relatively acceptable in America.
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.
I get occasional migraines, once every year or two. I have found these are triggered when I have "overdosed" on something sugary and I then encounter a sudden visual change, such as a dark PC display suddenly going white!
But as soon as the characteristic Jacob's Ladder shimmering pattern (sometimes called an aura) makes an appearance at the centre of my vision, I neck a couple of Anadin Extras and everything is back to normal in a few minutes. Haven't actually had a painful migraine for thirty years or more, but woe betide me if one ever starts with no headache pills handy!
Yes, this is called the mammalian diving reflex. Cold water on face and nostrils --> body goes into oxygen preserving mode --> lowered heart rate, selective vasoconstriction, etc. Also helps against tachycardia and other arrythmias.
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.
I'm highly skeptical of this idea that frustration and other strong negative emotions can be ameliorated through "venting".
Nonetheless–it seems like most cultures have some kind of festivals, rituals, and other customs where the normal social rules are suspended or even upended, or at least different rules are temporarily in effect; and one benefit of these things might be to serve as a kind of mental reset or "trip" that relieves some of the accumulated weight of the everyday stresses. Maybe these arctic cultures have relatively few of these built-in communal breaks from normality, so individuals are more prone to do them individually, in the form of ad hoc personal freakouts.
Maybe we're starting to see more ad hoc freakouts in mainstream society today, because a lot of our old normality-breaking festivals, rituals, customs, etc. are fading away; "culture" is increasingly a matter of passive content consumption; our lives are becoming more isolated, and an increasing percentage of the parts of our lives that do take place in community are mediated by bureaucratic institutions–we're at school, we're at work, we're in some form of professional "care"; there's nothing to break up the monotony, nothing to shake us free from our everyday perspective, and anything that does remain to serve this function is getting relentlessly watered down...
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?
Well, dentist visits are probably the most painful and uncomfortable experiences for an average child, so it isn't surprising to me that this often results in irrational hangups.
They're not strange, though. Fear of heights is natural, & even babies have it. So is fear of injury, and the mouth is a particularly sensitive and important region. I've treated a lot of phobias, and have seen almost none that weren't just exaggerated versions of fears many people feel: heights, entrapment, insects, snakes, blood, illness, thunderstorms, public speaking, medical procedures. The only really odd one I can think of is a ketchup phobia -- at first I thought it was just a variant of blood phobia, but the person was not bothered by blood, just by ketchup. He was, though, on the autistic spectrum, and that may have something to do with his developing such an unusual phobia.
What psychological assistance is offered to people who fear tubes being stuck in their stomach or urethra? Many procedures you find in ordinary hospitals seem much more uncomfortable than a dental check-up so that I find it surprising that fear of dentists looms large.
My experience as a patient has been that dentists are more respectful of my choices than many other medical professionals, who can be downright abusive (admittedly, I do have some disabilities). Quite a few advertise that they treat fearful patients.
Similarly, I suspect far more people have bad experiences in road transportation than on flights, but they are expected to put up with them. Why make an exception for air travel?
Maybe having a tube stuck into your stomach is different enough to the sort of things we faced in our ancestral environment that we don't really have a visceral fear of it, whereas having a tooth pulled out isn't?
Yeah I think dentists are more sensitized to the importance of patient's fears. Also, people develop genuine phobias -- i.e., irrational fears of dentists -- like they can't bring themselves to go in even for an exam, which they know will not hurt. Dread of having tubes stuck in their stomach or the urethra is certainly understandable, but probably would not count as a phobia because these procedures are physically very unpleasant. It makes *sense* to be scared of them. At least it does of the urethral one. I had that done when I was 18, and it is by far the most painful thing that I have ever experienced in a doctor's office. It wasn't a catheter, it was a metal tube for examining the urethra and bladder, and I remember it as being pretty thick. Also, having something stuck in there is just more disturbing than having a dentist's tools in your mouth, because a tube in the urethra is really going into the interior of your body. Anyhow, some docs doing things like that are really good with helping patients through it and others seem not to get that there is a scared and suffering person attached to that urethra. What I do these days for weird procedures that creep me out is just tell them in advance I'm creeped out, and that I want to know ahead of time what they will do and what it will fell like, and that when they do it I want them telling me, "I'm going to do X now and you will probably feel Y." Also I try to negotiate an agreement that if I say I want them to stop they will, even if they have not completed the procedure. I think that's what you have to do with docs who just aren't attuned to patient's feelings -- just go in there and clear a space for your feelings.
As for driving, I don't really get what you mean about people who have fears about driving on roads being expected to put up with it, but people scared of air travel getting sympathy or accommodations. I don't think plane phobes get much TLC at all. The airlines certainly don't give a shit, and the phobe's relatives usually give them the speech about how planes are safer than cars blah blah.
I think having an actual viscerally unpleasant experience, particularly as a child, can easily lead to phobias, even if it was related to teeth and not the viscera.
I'm likely autistic and have a phobia of cheese. My mother is definitely autistic (diagnosed) and has a phobia of apples.
I suspect it's an OCD type, overblown disgust reflex/cleanliness/anxiety kind of thing. Both me and my mom have a very specific early childhood memory seeing apples, in her case, and cheese, in mine, in a context we found disgusting. For me, I think that must have been around age 3, and then my cheese phobia got progressively worse up to age 6-7 or so before maxing out. It's stayed there ever since.
Your theory about your phobia and your mother's sounds very plausible. My ketchup guy, though, did not even have as a basis some disgusting ketchup-related memory. And it was quite a powerful phobia. He would not eat in a room where someone was using ketchup. And once he found out after the fact that he'd eaten something with ketchup in the recipe and he promptly vomited. He got over it though. I mean, he did not become a ketchup user, but could sit at a table with others using it, and even smear his hands with it.
Fear of flying is not a strange phobia by any stretch. Though safe on a rational level you're experiencing bizarre and terrifying stimuli every time you fly.
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.
Thanks for the kind words. I checked two places on Substack, as well as my payment processor, and all three claim that you haven't been charged any money and that I haven't received any money from you. I don't know how you would have been charged if you weren't a paid subscriber. Did you even give Substack your credit card number?
If you want to email me more details about what makes you think you've been charged, I can see if they make any sense to me. You can reach me at scott@slatestarcodex.com
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"!
I think his point is that hyperthermia-with-an-er actually means being too hot; it's hypothermia-with-an-o which means being too cold. There's nothing at all either paradoxical or implausible about a person who's too hot thinking that he is in fact too hot.
Indeed, so TGGP is right that John R Ramsden should have said (and probably meant to say) hypothermia instead of hyperthermia, which means Edmund was wrong to criticize, so the Original Mr. X is right to re-explain TGGP's point in more detail, which means your comment is wrong to begin with "No" but otherwise is correct.
(I'm assuming you meant hypothermia in this response.)
I also kept thinking "isn't this hypothermia?" while reading, but the part where there are (possibly half-hearted, but still) attempts at murder made me reconsider. The described hysterics don't really fit the vaguely dream-like mental state that I associate with hypothermia (although maybe that's not how that's actually like and I'm misinformed). Still, the parallels do keep striking me.
Running with the idea that people having mental breakdowns display exactly the symptoms that they believe are characteristic of mental breakdowns...
I can tell a fairly plausible story that (1) Eskimo cultures would all be familiar with the effects of hypothermia, which actually causes non-culture-bound mental breakdowns that include some predictable symptoms; (2) they attributed some or all of the predictable symptoms of hypothermia to mental breakdown more generally; and then (3) they included some or all of them in the things you're supposed to do when you express piblokto.
Isn't it the same sort of reaction as with fever, where your body is hotter than normal but you feel cold? Or in this case, there's some part of the system that tries to get you cold, so it makes you "feel" hot so you do things that cool yourself down.
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.)"
Someone sent me that article when I had my first child. I wasn’t sure Inuit parenting was replicable in the modern West.
I had heard that all kissing in these cultures involved sniffing cheeks? Supposedly up North people’s cheeks might be protected with some unctuous substance, and a quick sniff could transmit “how am I doing/what have I been up to” kinds of information.
I heard that Eskimos rub noses instead of kissing, although that always sounded like one of these "Woah, look how weird this exotic people is!" stories rather than something that's actually true.
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.
But then the disappearance of piblokto has to be explained. It does seem plausible that the Westernization (having clinics, general stores, and welfare) relieved some of the stresses, but is it likely to make so much of a difference?
(I guess that could happen if the people who would otherwise likely have weird breakdowns started self-medicating with alcohol. But "alcohol and piblokto don't go together" sounds like a thing someone would notice.)
I don't have a particular explanation for that. I would simply note that these sorts of effects are highly nonlinear in relation to their causal inputs.
Agreed - and I would add that, contrary to what I understood Scott to be saying, first/early contact with the West might indeed be a very particular stressor on a group. Worldview radically altered.
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.
The Dylatov Pass Incident always seemed to me like a very clear example of severe hypothermia and paradoxical undressing.
That said, the parallels between piblokto and hypothermia are striking. The confusion, disorientation, combativeness and removal of clothing all seem to fit.
> 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.
Thesiger found that his Bedouin guides from his journeys across the Empty Quarter in the late 1940s were, when he visited then decades later, wealthy middle aged men. Don't know how typical this was.
The Bedouin way of life had already largely disappeared by the forties, as the coming of the motor car made camels obsolete - but ibn Sa'ud had conquered Saudi Arabia with Bedouin forces, and per Hourani "an essential part of his policy was to persuade the beduin to settle". If the Bedouin were seen as being both linked to the ruling class, and dangerous, then the incentive for the state to get settlement and integration right would plausibly have been far greater than it was in Canada and Alaska. And those responsible had a deeper understanding of the culture they were trying to change, and were trying to change it less. Not that surprising if the transition went better, I suppose.
The culture was also just far less alien. There was no moment of discovery and having your whole understanding of the world vastly changed; a way of life was given up, but for one which they were familiar enough with from a distance.
I think first contact for the Inuit would have been mind blowing in a way that's hard to properly fathom; imagine people from Atlantis showed up tomorrow with technology we can't even dream of. Beyond Superintelligent AGI and Stargates and FTL, stuff we never even considered; AND their society is structured radically differently, AND they have a really convincing and coherent system of ethics and morality.
I think the culture shock would be on that sort of level.
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 not sure that Kalimac's point conflicts with the linked post, which included passages like this:
"The only excuse for it is that it’s actually preventing someone from feeling sad or getting offended. I think in the 1950s there really were a lot of Japanese people who felt triggered by the word “Japs”, and society going through an inconvenient transition in order to protect and show respect for those people was a reasonable move."
And, when giving an example of a slur-in-the-making that should not be allowed to become a slur:
"I question whether any real black person has ever thought about this and been offended. If they have, I would guess this is < 0.001% of the black population."
So if most of the people referred to by the term "Eskimo" do find it offensive or insulting, I don't think Scott has made a case for using it anyway. (I'm guessing he would dispute the premise, and I don't know whether it's true or not.)
I got into the weeds on this one a few months ago when a friend of mine expressed her horror that “The Christmas Song” contained the word “Eskimo” and that she could no longer listen to it. So I delved into the question of “how offensive is this actually?”
It seems to me like “Eskimo” is just an inaccurate exonym landed on the Inuit and Yupik by their more southerly neighbors. But the people themselves have their own name and would like us to call them that. Some technical uses in fields like archaeology still linger, but it’s mostly been phased out. This isn’t recent- the switch started decades ago.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are plenty of people calling themselves “Eskimos” in familiar settings, kind of the way some Native Americans will call each other “Indians”. Reports of its offensiveness seem to range from mild to serious, especially if you’re doing official business. It seems pretty clear that if you are not Inuit, don’t start out with “Eskimo”.
My friend’s insistence that the e-word is tantamount to the n-word seems a bit off-base. It’s mostly just inaccurate and the preferred term is widely known, and a majority of those specific people have asked us to use it, which is good enough for me. Still going to listen to “The Christmas Song”, though.
OK, this was a minor point for me, but I am hoping that Eskimo will be 'back on the table ' and that "McGelligot's Pool" by Dr. Seuss will be back in publication.
The idea that exonyms are inherently worse than endonyms just strikes me as weird. I don't get upset over the fact that the French would call my country Angleterre rather than England, and I'm not about to start calling them Francaises instead of French. Different languages have different names for countries and peoples, and if the English name for a foreign tribe differs from that own tribe's name for themselves, that's just normal.
The fact that a German might call me a 'Cliff pisser', or a Chinese observer describe me as a 'foreign devil' troubles me not in the slightest. I find it quite humorous.
I agree, but your examples are bad. Angleterre and England both mean "land of the Angles". Same with the French and Français (Françaises is feminine plural).
In Canada, 9/10 Indians I meet prefer to be referred to either by their particular ethnicity: Cree, Dene, Oneida, ect. Or, failing that, as Indians. They get annoyed by the constant hyperstitious slur cascade with regards to terminology for them; in my lifetime the PC term has gone from Indian, to Native, to First Nations, to Aboriginal and now Indigenous. If you think it's tiring from the outside, it's probably more tiresome from the inside when you see it happening again and again.
The 10th usually finds Indian horribly offensive, holds woke positions on everything and considers themself gifted with supernatural powers from the divine.
IIRC, there are groups that think of it as a nasty slur, and other groups that explicitly prefer that to be what they're called, which leaves outsiders in a bit of a puzzling situation wrt politeness.
I'm not sure about Greenland, but in Canada there are Eskimo groups that live inland, often hunting caribou. There's fewer of them then coastal tribes, but humans will expand to fill any vacuum.
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?
I know that a significant portion of the homeless community in Anchorage, AK (the largest city in the state) are Alaska Natives. The typical explanation is they left the village behind but couldn't hack it in the city.
Check out Paying the Land, by Joe Sacco. It's an account of Sacco's interviews with Dene people in northern Canada, their history and struggle with colonial forces. The Dene territory is sub-Arctic and covers areas of The Yukon and Alaska. Well researched, thorough, and beautiful book, but painful to read about the near-extermination of a way of life and being in the world.
Edit: not an expert or a local, but to add to what FLWAB posted, peole look for work in resource extraction and the service sector jobs that come with it. When there are neither jobs available nor a viable means of living "traditionally", you run into problems.
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
Theory: the (for some) stifling privacyless Eskimo communities created a strong trigger for bipolar or even for non-clinical episodes similar to it. This may have selected against the base rate of similar mental illnesses by triggering them at a higher rate so that the genetic base rate was adversely selected against. When social experiences changed this resulted in a relative disappearance of similar breakdowns
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.
I mean, I didn't wind up in hospital, but I was very, very hungry and it probably wasn't amazingly good nutrition (I was horrifically underweight already).
Mum had never taught me to cook normal meals. IIRC she was also cooking as-needed for herself so I couldn't steal the cooked food without actually fighting her, although I might be confusing it with a later time when she did that.
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 read the actual book, "An African in Greenland". It happened around 1960, so closer to Foulk's time than the early explorers. One thing that stood out to me was that the Greenlanders drank huge amounts of alcohol and coffee. Another was that, in the first settlement the African visited, everyone was on welfare. So not exactly an uncontacted tribe here.
Later, in another settlement, the African befriended a man living in poverty because he was too drunk to work. All his neighbors shunned him, and they told the African to shun him too.
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".
I'm not sure pO2 is even in there. People breathing pure nitrogen or hydrogen do not feel short of breath, even though they are taking in no 02 at all, because there is not CO2 buildup in the body.
It is, though it is pretty weak. For instance, people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have elevated arterial carbon dioxide levels, to which they have habituated. Hypoxic drive is an important stimulus to refluration for such people.
I was going to say wow, weird that people can habituate to something so contrary to what we need -- then remembered that it's been found that in some primary school classrooms there are very few air changes per hour. I guess the kids habituate to high CO2 too.
pCO2 is the input, because it was easier for evolution to hack a sensor for that. PO2 is probably the driver, because inadequate O2 will kill you faster than excessive CO2. The pCO2 sensor is calibrated to prevent either from reaching critical levels with reasonable margin, assuming otherwise normal(ish) atmospheric composition. And the diving reflex shifts the set point so that you don't feel the urge to breathe as quickly or as strongly
Not all panic attacks involve hyperventilation and a feeling of not being able to get enough air. Much more commonly the huge FOOM of anxiety is set off. by ideas like, I'm having a stroke, I'm about to drop dead, I'm about to go psychotic, I'm going to start screaming and rolling on the ground right here in public, I'm going to faint, or just a diffuse sense that something terrible is wrong and out of control and a disaster of some sort is happening. I have seen lots of panic attacks and also had a dozen or so myself, and in none of those was anyone panting like people do in the movies. I'm sure pulse is elevated, though. Ice Diver technique seems worth a try. It's a bit hard to imagine many people in the midst of a panic attack being willing to do something so unpleasant and weird. People in the midst of panic attacks are sort of like people being dangled by a rope over a hundred foot drop. They really are in a state of panic, and most could barely even attend to an explanation of the Ice Diver technique. Still, there probably are a few very tough ones who will.
Strange, doesn't cold water cause a rapid increase in breathing? If I step into a cold shower on a winter's morning, I involuntarily take a huge breath almost instantly.
That's cold water on the body. Cold water on the face, and in particular cold water in the nostrils, is what trigger the diving reflex. Your hindbrain knows better than to try and breathe if you'd be inhaling water rather than air, and since there isn't a "sense wetness" nerve type, it uses temperature gradient as a proxy. Then sets up to go without breathing for as long as possible.
Any water temperature below body temperature should trigger the diving reflex, but cold water does it faster and stronger.
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?
This is a good point. The description of learning to hunt and getting bullied into sucked doesn’t seem that different from how certain dysfunctional pockets of the military operate. I head a story about a guy who was bullied to the brink of suicide while training bomb sniffing dogs. Actually getting deployed was a huge relief for him.
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.
Maybe little natural immunity to the S.pneumonia, N.meningitidis and H.influenza that are the main causes—in which case immunization should make a huge difference (it has further south in Canada). Or maybe the anatomy of the nasal passages and eustachian tube is adapted to extreme cold by being narrower and more easily blocked?
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.
"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?"
Razib Khan's posts on Finland are paywalled and Wikipedia isn't that great at "exactly who is living in this place at different points in history", but it says about ancient Finland:
"The arrival of the Corded Ware culture in Southern coastal Finland between 3000 and 2500 BC may have coincided with the start of agriculture."
"Although distantly related, the Sami people retained the hunter-gatherer lifestyle longer than the Finns."
And it looks like the Sami have typical HG problems, even in Finland. So it seems modern Finns might be about as farmer-ish as other north Europeans. Not sure why they don't speak an Indo-European language then though.
I agree Finns have had some farming for a while (although no longer than some American Indians), but there doesn't seem to have been much of a state until Sweden in the Middle Ages.
.......as settled farmers in large structured societies for several thousand years?
I wouldn't have thought everyday life, in terms of obeying laws, working relations etc., under a local Swedish Jarl (or iron/bronze age lord) was that different to life under a Saxon king, even if the Saxon kingdom technically counts as a state.
As to why the Native Americans that have farmed for as long as people in places like Britain have also seem more hunter-gatherer like in their behaviour (hopefully that's framed respectfully enough). Not sure. Maybe farming is necessary but not sufficient. Maybe there actually is a HG / farmer divide in social outcomes for different Native American groups that's not obvious. Cochran talks about how you don't see large monolithic language groups in the Americas, suggesting there weren't major expansions of single populations, like in Eurasia. So perhaps the current farming groups weren't the original farmers and only adopted it relatively recently.
Feel like this theory is starting to whither under the light a bit now that you've made me add all these epicycles though.
The ancestors of Finns and other Northern Europeans were largely pastoralists before agriculture I believe, do they do badly in modern society? Are Mongols known for being shiftless alcoholics?
Thanks for reading my post on the Greenland Norse by the way.
One thing that timelapse misses out is that it's common in history for pastoralist to conquer and replace older farming groups.
The Yamnaya/Indo Europeans/Aryans (the main ancestry groups of modern Europeans, particularly northern Europeans) replaced the previous Neolithic farmers ~5k years ago, as pastoralist, but seem to have adopted farming not long after. The Bell Beaker people (the Yamnaya that colonised Britain around 2800BC) were already farmers for example. So I'd say that counts as "settled farmers in large structured societies for several thousand years".
Even so, I've been meaning to write a post about how Europeans are sort of intermediate between recent HGs and the very ancient Asian farming cultures in how adapted to the farming life style they are.
Not sure about the Mongolians, although their gdp per capita is only ~5k usd, so maybe that's some reason to think they haven't fully managed to capitalise on modernity like their long-term farming Chinese neighbours have.
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.
Well and also kids die. That kids are buried outside some place kids lived in the early 1900s is kind of the norm. I remember a “polish” controversy over something similar where an orphanage had “so many child graves”. Except when you did the math the kids there were dying at exactly the same as poor kids in other parts of Poland living with their parents.
Well at least many churches were burned in the summer of 2021 after the residential school hysteria. So thats at least one positive outcome according to the average Canadian.
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."
Tar heels! -- i.e., white southerners who had been in North Carolina for several generations. And not professionals or upper middle class N.C. families, because they tended to go up north for college, and even if they came back to NC to live they weren't tar heels any more.
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?
Yeah. It was the "and with good reason" that stuck out for me.
If I read "The fear of child kidnappings is of constant concern to Americans, and with good reason...." I would find that interesting, too. More for the belief by the author (not Scott, the guy he's quoting) that such a low *relative* risk is something one would obviously be concerned about.
Or maybe I misjudge how much concern (some?) Americans have over auto fatalities? I read this today:
"Volkswagen of America has issued a recall of more than 140,000 vehicles over an issue that could deactivate the front passenger airbag when the seat is occupied.
The recall affecting 143,053 Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport vehicles was announced Tuesday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is advising owners of affected vehicles 'not to use the front passenger seat until the remedy has been completed.'"
So don't use the front-side passenger seat of a car because the air bags MIGHT NOT deploy in a crash. 30 years ago I don't think most cars HAD passenger side air bags. Most people driving the effected VWs won't be involved in crashes (before the car gets fixed as part of the recall) where the airbags will matter. And even if the VM is involved in such a crash the air bags still might deploy.
But don't ride in the passenger seat until the fix has been applied.
I wonder if not riding the passenger seat until the air bags were fixed would be considered concern WITH GOOD REASON here????
>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.
"I mean, how many extremely similar accounts of wealthy people torturing children and harvesting their adrenochrome could you find online?"
Do these accounts specify the times/places/circumstances of the supposed events? Or is it somebody told me or "this happened many years ago and I didn't tell anyone at the time and I don't remember where it was or the date it was or how I got there or why I was there."
The age at which autistic symptoms often become so prominent you cannot ignore them is coincidentally around the same age of certain vaccinations. I don't think these accounts are fabricated or inaccurate... They're just a manifestation of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
> 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'm very curious and would love a chance to experience this. I'm overly sound sensitive, to the point where I almost left a sensory deprivation tank in disgust because I could still hear things outside, and I seem to feel much more relaxed in situations other people find creepily understimulating. But I've never gotten to be in an anechoic chamber.
For me, one of the reasons it was so disconcerting is that it violently dispelled the notion that I'm an island unto myself. Younger me always thought that I'd be perfectly fine as a hermit, that the good life would be to subsist on pure thought in solitude. But five minutes of hearing only my own heartbeat pounding in my ears sent me scrambling noisily back to the safety of my waiting motorcycle. It was was a bit like the Total Perspective Vortex. Everyone thinks they could withstand the Total Perspective Vortex. I'd /really/ love for you to try an anechoic chamber and to hear your account
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?)
May I ask where you're originally from, whether they have "benders" like these, and if not, whether there's something else that serves the same purpose?
(I don't think I or anyone I know closely has gone on benders like these, though I sometimes overindulge in food or computer games when I'm stressed)
I'm from (white) South Africa and, while I'm sure there are subpopulations of South Africa who would behave this way, my subpopulation would not. For example (again at least amongst my peer group at college) there was no culture of binge drinking, whether one had recently suffered disappointment or otherwise.
Likewise I agree that there are subpopulations of the US that would not. But would you agree that the picture is, as far as popular media (ie movies) are concerned, as I have presented it?
It's worth, in this context, remembering the amount of US drug use and alcoholism which, while not the absolute highest in the world, are certainly up there (highest, or second, by "big country" depending on whether or not you consider Russia a big country).
Different (though somewhat tamer) versions of the phenomenon appear with regards to eg weddings and funerals. Certainly in my set neither an ostentatious wedding nor ostentatious grieving would be considered at all "appropriate", whereas this sort of thing is very common in US movies.
Now, does that movie over-acting translate to real life? That's unclear to me and I'd love to have a definitive answer.
There is a whole language within Woke of "normalization" and the claim that things we see in the media (for example treatment of women) tell people what is appropriate, or acceptable, or at least behavior you can get away with. So the question is, is this just nonsense, or is it real? Or is real for some behaviors (how to interact with women) but not others (when to use violence)? I've seen claims to the effect that in the case of violence it has no impact because everyone can tell that this is not reality, that we don't *really* settle our differences this way; whereas in the case of social realtionships it has a substantial impact. True? False because people can tel what count as jokes and exaggeration?
I could even believe that within "still functional" cultures in the US normalization theory is basically nonsense, that people pick up their cues from the positive behavior around them; whereas in the dysfunctional cultures in the US it is a huge deal. (So most in the media can engage in this normalization secure in the knowledge that *their* kids will not be adversely affected by drug culture or whatever...)
This would essentially be a large part of the _Coming Apart_ argument, and would suggest that anecdote is an especially unhelpful lens through which to judge the importance of the issue, precisely because our peer groups are very different from some other peer groups?
These are all good questions, but I'm not sure about the answers. I don't really have good enough memory indexing of media I've watched to remember how they portray this.
Alcohol consumption is also very commonly portrayed in films, including in (US) G-rated (General Audience) [27] and animated [28] films. A content analysis of 100 of the top grossing US films between 1986 and 1994 reported that 96% had references that supported alcohol use, and 79% included at least one character who used alcohol. Whilst incidents of alcohol use were common, portrayals of the hazards of drinking were not reflected [29]. Similarly, a study of the most popular US film rentals from 1996-7 found 93% included alcohol use and 22% illicit drug use; in 12% of films one or more of the major characters used drugs and 65% of adult characters used alcohol; and in 43% of films alcohol use was portrayed as a positive experience [30]. A content analysis of the top grossing US films from 1999-2001 found 15% of teen characters used illicit drugs and again were unlikely to be shown as suffering any consequences (positive or negative, short or long-term) of their drug use [31].
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!
So I ended up writing that WIkipedia article anyhow. Turns out sangue dormido (defined in the DSM-IV, eliminated from the DSM-V) was described from that one 1981 case study, and then in 2012 the original authors of the study were like "yeah, we've been looking into this and literally nobody in the English-language literature has described this...maybe someone needs to go interview some Cape Verdeans or peruse the Portuguese-language literature or something like that? Also, we're skeptical of how psychiatry treats culture-bound syndromes in general, it's all kind of a mess."
Why do people live in Tornado Alley? The could just leave! /s
The land is an important part of who they are. I've visited/worked with Ojibwe, Cree and Inuit in their respective lands. The connection to the land is more powerful than mere hometown nostalgia. I recommend reading Paying the Land for more on this.
NB: Canada forcefully relocated Inuit communities into the far north to be human flagpoles for our sovereingty claims. The state has an interest in keeping mukluks on the ground.
Presumably the state wants to strengthen its claims against encroachment by other Arctic powers (*cough* Russia *cough*) independently of how (il)legitimate it asserts its foundation to be for domestic audiences.
That's fine, but what if those people live in a modern state (e.g. Canada) and have terrible quality of life? Does the government have to pay the exorbitant cost of providing transport, schooling, police, electricity, sewage, power lines, medicine, and social services to every inhospitable square inch of the Arctic? Or is it fine for Canada to spend as much per capita in the Arctic as it does elsewhere, and get blamed for all the ills of Eskimo society because they're the Big Bad White Man?
I agree, but how much is a reasonable amount to spend? I'm OK with spending, say, 30% more on Arctic inhabitants than on non-Arctic inhabitants. I'm not OK with spending 5x more.
That's a really loaded question and doesn't account for the fact that there are First Nations reserves south of 60 that are also deficient in those things, it's not just a northern thing. The Crown entered into treaties with First Nations, and it's not exactly clear that they negotiated in good faith. Regardless, if you sign a treaty that promises provision of certain services in exchange for concessions, then it's on you to hold up your end of the bargain.
From the Wikipedia entry on Resolute Bay (Qausuittuq, "place with no dawn"): "They [relocated Inuit] were told that they would be returned home after a year if they wished, but this offer was later withdrawn as it would have damaged Canada's claims to sovereignty in the area and the Inuit were forced to stay." So yeah... I think we owe them some goods and services.
"That's a really loaded question and doesn't account for the fact that there are First Nations reserves south of 60 that are also deficient in those things, it's not just a northern thing. The Crown entered into treaties with First Nations, and it's not exactly clear that they negotiated in good faith. "
I'm sure the Crown didn't promise broadband Internet and electric lines back in the 19th century. But in my comment, I wasn't arguing that the government isn't at fault at all. I was questioning whether other Canadians should be obligated to pay for the Ojibwe, Cree and Inuit "connection to the land", and if so, what amount is fair. Obviously it's unreasonable to expect exactly the same per-capita spending in every region of a vast country, but is it fair to Ontario taxpayers to spend 100x more per capita in Nunavut than in Ontario?
From the same article: "The government paid $10 million CAD to the survivors and their families and gave a formal apology in 2008.[22]"
Also, the Inuit who live in Resolute Bay aren't prevented from leaving anymore, are they?
Individuals can win $10 million awards in court for arguably lesser grievances. What's the price for using the state's monopoly on violence to relocate whole villages into environments where death and privation are daily hazards, where the sun doesn't rise Nov - Feb? What's the price of a life sentence for you, your children, and their children? $10 million and an apology won't bring back the dead. The Inuit in settlements like Resolute and Grise Fiord are manning our northern walls and they're not getting paid soldiers' salaries for it.
Regarding treaty obligations, this is a complicated issue that I'm not prepared to speak on with any authority, but I will say that it's more complicated legally and ethically than most Canadians care to admit. These are treaties between various nations and the Crown. These nations don't fit neatly into our Westernized box of concepts around citizenship, sovereignty, and the social contract. "If they don't like it then why don't they leave?" glosses over so many things, it's a single sentence Gish gallop. Asking a question like that betrays a fundamental lack of engagement with the subject at hand. Excusable for an American perhaps, but Canadians ought to know better by now.
But you haven't answered my question: what amount of money is it fair to ask other Canadians to pay to subsidize Arctic living? We both agree that it's not zero, and I think you'd also agree that it isn't infinity, so l what is it? I'd set the limit at 50% the average per capita government spending in the rest of the country. I think this is well below what is needed to give Arctic dwellers an equal quality of life.
Living in unfavourable places at least stops you being invaded.
The Arctic in winter requires extraordinary effort to simply survive. Military operations on land up there are more about presence, getting there first and not dying, rather than offensive operations. Naval surface ops basically a non-starter, not sure about sub-surface. The air is the dominant domain
I wonder how it compares with India vs China combat in the Himalayas. Which would be worse?
Both would be miserable, but I'm not sure which would be worse. From a land perspective, sustainment (replenishment, transport, med support, etc.) would be the greatest challenge, followed by environmental hazards. One of my winter warfare instructors had attended a high altitude warfare school in Nepal. One of his team mates went down from altitude sickness and the evacuation became a mission in itself because they were higher than the working altitude for helicopters.
It means you're among the last people to be invaded, but I note that no Eskimo community is an independent nation, they've all been annexed by great powers - being in remote and hostile territory just mean it happened circa 1900 rather than circa 1700
Of course , technological advances are game changing about who you would want to invade an why....nobody was very interested in mineral oil until a hundred y ears ago.
I'm so pleased at the Robert Service reference. The Cremation of Sam McGee is the first long poem I memorized.
Nice, I've got that one memorized as well!
Good for the two of you! I've tried to memorize it, but my brain keeps filling in every line or half-line I can't quite get right with the phrase "And the huskies howled", which doesn't appear in the poem nearly enough times for this strategy to work.
I have the same experience trying to memorize The Raven, it’s weird.
Howled the husky "Awooooorawr."
For those of you who are too young to have learned poems in school.
"The Cremation of Sam McGee"
By Robert W. Service (1874–1958)
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold;
The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee.
* * *
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee
Published in 1907 in "Songs of a Sourdough".
Thank you. Something about it sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it.
My father loved to recite the poem when I was a lad.
Another striking Robert Service poem is "The men that don't fit in"
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58012/the-men-that-dont-fit-in
I won't copy and paste it here because substack seems to have zero ability to format quotes or code segments in comments. (I have tried several forms of annotation all to no avail, such as HTML or square brackets, etc. If this can be done, I would love to know how!) I guess a simplistic comment facility is deliberate, to prevent complications in narrow mobile display windows.
My brain always wants to switch to Kipling's Ballad of East and West at the ninth line.
I've been working on "The Absinthe Drinkers" for a while now. I'll get it in time.
April is National Poetry Month.
April is also the cruelest.
It will show you fear in a handful of dust.
This is the way the world ends
With a bang!
You guys are making me remember one of my all-time most fun nights: I'd just graduated recently, and had some friends who were in an American Studies grad program. We got really very stoned and someone put on an album of TS Eliot reading The Wasteland and some other poems, in the voice of a pretentious undertaker. Every line seemed to have a ridiculous second meaning to someone in the group, and they'd shout it out, and we roared with laughter all the way through the poem.
Oh yeah, we also laughed our asses off at
Webster was much possessed by DEATH [deep sepulchral voice for this word]
And saw the skull beneath the skin
And breastless creatures underground
Lean backward with a lipless grin [trilling the r in "grin"]
". 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.
I just watched a very hard to watch movie, "The Homesman" on HBOMax. Three Nebraska women go around the bend and need to be returned to the safety of civilization in Iowa in the late 19th century.
Tommy Lee Jones and Hillary Swank are the main players. Like I said, it is pretty hard to watch but it does depict frontier women made mad by the privations of a very rough life.
Viewer discretion is advised.
I'm glad you mentioned that. I just read the book a few weeks ago and didn't realize the movie had been made.
Great book, although not particularly cheerful. The description of life in early Nebraska was pretty bleak.
Shades of Mari Sandoz's Old Jules, maybe? I still recall the story-within-a-story of how Gentleman Jim discretely canceled a horse thief's retirement.
But then settlers have to sort out what to do if the ad hoc enforcer or committee goes rogue, and you have to form a second committee to reign in the vigilantes. It's an old story on the frontier.
Maybe, but I'm not sure I'm convinced. The military during wartime is probably relatively analagous and while there is certainly the pressure not to fail it doesn't seem to require an absence of positive interactions or a disapproval of positive feelings. Indeed, it seems like often the positive reinforcement of group bonding is as important as the negative.
I dunno, far as I can tell, the military seems to push forced conformism pretty hard.
Axtually, the analogy I originally was thinking of was the Taliban. Fuckup Taliban not only got killed, a bunch of other Taliban tended to get killed along with them.
Yes on conformism. But my point is that conformism doesn't always require a prohibition on positive interpersonal interactions. Indeed, sometimes it comes along with a positively sappy amount of brothers in arms kind of talk.
I agree that it usually brings along the mocking of failure etc but the prohibition on positive reinforcement is what seems odd.
I'm not really sure that it's fair to assume that all "tribes" of Eskimo were similar WRT that custom. Perhaps there's a selection bias. If piblokto only showed up among groups without positive reinforcement, those are the ones you would notice. Certainly among the folks I know, different families have different ways of interacting, and that's within the same culture.
It's pretty easy to come up armchair anthropological explanations for why some seemingly strange or cruel social custom is important for survival. But I think such explanations need to be taken with a grain of salt, or maybe an entire salt lick.
For one thing, you can easily make one up about the exact opposite custom. If the book had instead said that Eskimos were incredibly warm and kind people who showered each other with praise all the time, you could say that because they live in such a hard and unforgiving environment they need to make everyone feel like a loved and needed part of the group, so that they will strive to protect it.
Also, such explanations ignore non-survival-related reasons such dynamics might develop. For example, they might have resulted from an out-of-control loop of virtue signaling where people competed to one-up each other for intolerance of noncomformity, sterness, toughness, or some other value that is good in moderation, but toxic in excess. Other commenters have pointed out that there are other societies that manage to survive in dangerous scenarios without being quite so cruel to each other.
The lesson of "The Secret of Our Success" is that stone-age societies are long shaped by cultural group selection. Life is quite marginal that far north, so there's not a lot of slack for practices that would screw things up. On the other hand, the lower population density also makes war less important than in places like the Amazon or New Guinea (which is not to say it wasn't a factor).
I'm not sure I buy that in harsh environments destructive signaling loops can't necessarily get started because there isn't enough slack. There might be no slack in some parts of the environment, but plenty in others. Or people might get stuck in a permanent loop of mediocrity, where they never screw up bad enough to get everyone killed, but never really excel either (in fact, in a low war environment such a loop seems more likely, since they're competing more against nature and less against rival humans).
Where do you live?
This. We could even argue the other way round -- when you have no slack, people can get stuck in completely stupid local maxima, if doing the obviously better thing requires a small upfront cost they cannot pay.
For example, the situation with abusive teachers seems like a stable equilibrium. If you have few experts, they can afford to be as abusive as they like, because the students do not have a choice. But then only the most determined students become experts, which means you have few experts in the next generation, too.
The other equilibrium, where you have enough experts, so if your teacher is abusive, you simply choose another one, and that gives you enough experts in the next generation, is also stable. And probably better for the tribe: more experts means higher productivity, and also a smaller risk that the only local expert randomly dies.
Problem is, that "better for the tribe" does not give you a recipe how to get from here to there. You have one local expert, which makes him high-status, he likes to abuse the students, and he is not going to cooperate at destroying his source of power.
Intuit fought the Cree and did pretty well before the Europeans gave the latter guns.
Thule vs Dorset
There's a TurboTax joke in here somewhere...
Assets frozen? Cree-dit problems?
Inuit can help!
There's not a lot of slack for *experimenting.* The fact that they're surviving and that changing it would end badly means that they've found a local maximum, but not a global one.
(Actually, an especially conformist society might *create* local maxima - if the rest of the tribe bullies you to death for not conforming, then obviously attempts to change are going to end badly for you, but that doesn't say anything about whether the change itself is a good idea.)
Deliberate experimentation is uncommon among all the societies Henrich was focused on. Instead cultural evolution is said to proceed randomly, with people not understanding why what they do works. And any random change that would give one group an advantage can lead to them replacing others. Although I suppose one could borrow the logic of "The 10000 Year Explosion" that selection is stronger vs drift in larger populations and thus that there won't be as much random cultural change in an environment that doesn't support as many people & groups (in contrast to a place like New Guinea).
They can definitely end up in an equilibrium that's stable but awful for most people in it. Human civilizations do that *all the damn time*.
Nigel Barley (*1947) wrote best-selling (and rather funny) anthropological books about his studies of a tribe in West-Africa (Dowayo) and later in Indonesia (Toraja). After those kinda rude Dowayos he was amazed how friendly the Torajan were (with each other). And was at a complete loss to explain: Why? - OTOH, late Marvin Harris was always great at theories why (holy cows, witch hunts, pig wars ...). Controlling the number of surviving baby-girls is often crucial in Malthusian societies. One tribe in India used to(?) kill so many, that they found a stable and peaceful equilibrium, where all brothers marry ONE girl. The guys do all serious work, the girl combs her hair. When one brother is making out with the wife, he leaves a mark at the door, so the others know not to disturb. - Others (see: Yanomami) kill baby-girls more often than boys, too. But just enough to have constant fights about the remaining, who get mistreated a lot. - What are the gender ratios at different ages among Eskimos (1850 vs. 2020)?
If that environment would be the primary cause of these unusual social habits, then we'd expect the same patterns to appear in groups in similar circumstances, for example, the indigenous peoples on the other side of the arctic - the Chukchi (who are so close to Siberian Yupik), Samoyeds, Sami peoples. I don't know enough about them to dare to assert if they have similar or contrasting habits (AFAIK they're different, but I may be wrong), but either way that would be relevant information about that hypothesis.
Nowhere did I say that this was the only solution, or even an optimal solution.
Doesn't the classic military version involve some kind going nutso during carpet bombing or a long artillery bombardment?
Eskimos are assholes.
Hey watch that colonialist POV, man! :)
Come on, knock it off with this low-effort strawman-leftist humor. Comment threads like this are why NYT was able to paint Scott as a bigot.
> Comment threads like this are why NYT was able to paint Scott as a bigot.
Hmmm… I’d be interested in your reasoning here.
>Strawman-leftist
First time I’ve seen that particular hyphenation
WTF does it even mean?
More cowbell or something?
GGP says:
> Eskimos are assholes.
Which, based in the article, is a fair enough joke/observation, sure. Your reply:
> Hey watch that colonialist POV, man! :)
might just be a harmlesss joke. Or it might be the type of joke that's meant to be a cheeky political observation, something along the lines of *Liberals are way too obsessed with the idea that westerners are colonizers, and that's ridiculous, so watch out before a liberal calls you a colonizer!* The "strawman-leftist" is that hypothetical upset liberal you might be making fun of.
NYT read Scott's posts and comment sections and spun a story that we're a bunch of casually-bigoted libertarian edgelords. I don't agree with that, but can you see how trying to be funny about the impacts of American colonialism could support that kind of spin? We committed a genocide, let's not forget that.
IDK, maybe I'm reading into things too much. But these comment sections tend to be about hyperanalysis, so here it is.
No sarcasm intended. Have a good day.
You cannot live your life worrying about what the NYT types thinks. And the NYT hit piece doesn't seem to have harmed Scott anyway. And for what its worth, the only reason I am here is precisely because of the NYT hit piece. If they had showered him with praises, I wouldn't be here :)
That doesn't follow. A lot of Eskimos decided they didn't like that culture and noped out of there once given the opportunity.
I can't imagine people who evolved and were raised in such an environment not being to some degree assholes.
Not my experience.
"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.
I recall reading that the Auca natives of South America had a similar "religious" situation. I think it may be common among "uncivilized" people groups: those without writing, or city building, or the other things that bring about organized religion. The natural world is a frightening place.
It's at least intuitive that if you live in a super harsh, barely-livable environment, your gods/spirits/etc. would also be super harsh. OTOH, who the hell had more terrifying gods than the Azteks? And they lived in a pretty nice part of the world, at least if you could avoid having your heart cut out to appease the gods so they wouldn't end the world.
That's pretty much how Graeco-Roman paganism worked too. People performed rites to avoid angering the gods, to calm them or to gain their protection.
Umnn... partially. They also did it for fun. Some did it for enlightenment. Simple pictures are usually wrong. (And the rites of Orpheus appear to have started as a work of fiction, though it may have been presented as truth.)
> 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
That sort of total Respect for Authority just isn’t built into American civilian culture.
I read that too, and while usually I am quick to be envious of anyone's skill in virtually any hobby - one of those resentments only available to moderns, but abundantly so - including the skill of practicing at some one thing in a dedicated fashion - I began to perceive what they did to the poor trees as brutal and abusive.
Do tell.
Interesting. My sister is a Buddhist, non-violent, etc. And she is an amateur bonsai practitioner.
I think the guys in that article practiced what might be called "extreme bonsai" but I dunno.
I was also never going to like the idea of wresting very old trees from the very marginal places where they had managed to survive.
Thanks for sharing, it was an enjoyable article to read.
Pretty much like it used to be in japanese martial arts. Sensei is silent is the highest praise, usually there is criticism. Not much left of that in European dojos, it seems to me.
Reminds me slightly of this banger from De Gaulle
Nothing enhances authority better than silence, the splendor of the strong and the refuge of the weak.
Unfortunately only the first sentence made it to the internet, there is a 20-lines paragraph of it in "Le Fil de l'épée", but the core concept is that speaking dilute a leader's ability to get respect, while silence keeps the subordinate attentive.
"Not much left of that in European dojos, it seems to me."
Probably because is mostly doesn't work, but other things can.
In college many years ago I was taught Shotokan Karate from an old-school Japanese instructor. Five foot zero, slender, smoked. His day job was selling real estate, but he taught Karate in the evening because he wanted to. Which meant that he didn't NEED the students to continue to show up as he would if instruction was his job.
He was an excellent instructor, but had also figured out that what worked in Japan in the 1960s was not going to work in American in the 1980s. Because he wanted his American students to learn he adjusted his approach while still managing to instruct well ... his black belt candidates went to Japan to get their black belts so he clearly wasn't cutting corners with his instruction. And he did not want them to go to Japan and fail their black belt test.
Times and places change. He adapted. I didn't realize at the time how unusual his adaptation might have been.
Yes this is a critical, difficult transition it seems... Effective instruction, or finding a new pedagogy, of the same art in a new cultural environment.
Wow, looks like the "Wax on, Wax Off" trope you'd see in films like "The Karate Kid" (the one where the master makes the apprentice do menial chores as part of their training; see https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WaxOnWaxOff) wasn't an exaggeration. In fact, the trope was rather romanticizing/underselling the sort of thing apprentices are subjected to:
"In the morning, Neil would bring a sample of his wiring to the workshop and ask Kimura to critique it. Neil recalls Kimura once saying, “I’ve never even seen anyone do something this terrible. I would have to *try* to do something this terrible. Why are you so stupid?”"
&
"Neil was even more disheartened by the abuse that the senior apprentices inflicted on those below them: slapping them, striking them with sticks, even punching them in the face. On one occasion, he saw Urushibata repeatedly kick another apprentice, who was balled up in the fetal position. (Urushibata says that he “is sorry for using unreasonable corporal punishment.”) During these beatings, Neil recalls, Kimura often watched and laughed, exclaiming, “I bet you won’t forget that lesson!”"
&
"Neil has never been able to watch “Whiplash,” the 2014 film about a sadistic jazz conductor who pushes a young drummer to practice until his hands bleed, because the story line is “hauntingly” reminiscent of his experience as a bonsai apprentice. “That kind of mental warfare—that was my apprenticeship,” Neil said. He was often criticized for mistakes that he hadn’t actually made, and he was never complimented on his achievements. He learned that the only way to survive was to switch off his emotions, store away his ego, and give himself over to predicting and fulfilling Kimura’s needs."
(This sort of thing used to be common of course, in apprenticeships & master-apprentice relationships in Europe and elsewhere, as the article points out. But it's easy to see why this died out, as the article also points out.)
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.
>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?
I was wondering that as well. People from more expressive cultures often perceive people from more reserved cultures and emotionally repressed, although the reserved people don't perceive it that way, and (for those in the know) can often pack a lot of emotion into a seemingly minor act or phrase ("You know, I really am rather fond of you, old girl"). Maybe the Inuits have ways of marking acceptance and approval that are obvious to them but tend not to get noticed by westerners.
Judging by "... their family and community start hounding them to commit suicide, ratcheting up the social pressure until they comply." & "Frequently relatives admonished the individual to the point of encouraging him to do away with himself. 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.” ", I don't think that can be the full story. Or perhaps any part of the story at all. Saying “I wish you were dead! You are not worth the food you eat.” sounds like it has the opposite problem of being a bit *too* direct, something better off emotionally repressed.
That certainly is but how common is that and how common was that before outside pressure.
I mean maybe when the society was healthy it was just a difference in expressiveness but then when it starts to collapse this is how things go bad. I mean, I expect you can find similar family issues in troubled western communities now (at least based on the dubious evidence of 90s shows like Jerry Springer).
Why do you feel such a desperate need for the West to be either at fault or "just as bad" that you must throw out baseless speculation, contra the evidence WindUponWaves provided you?
WELL I KNOW IT SAYS THEY ARE DIRECT AND EXPRESSIVE RIGHT THERE BUT LIKE THE WEST IS JUST AS BAD SOMETIMES SO THERE!!
C'mon, man.
I don't. It's just a possibility. Could be their culture just sucks too. But the reason I feel motivated to make it is that we evolved various positive reinforcement mechanisms for a reason so it seems unlikely that a culture which is split up into such small units (so seemingly plenty of opportunity for a group with a more effective social system to outcompete the others) to end up not making use of these mechanisms. Besides, my intuition is that being constantly miserable is itself a significant competitive disadvantage (other things being equal).
Generally, I think that being rich and educated tends to make a culture better and nicer. But I'd expect there either to be a specific reason why an absence of positive affect is selected for in this environment or for it to be used. The conformity aspect seems perfectly understandable but not the aspect of any positive emotional connections/feedback.
Well...
....okay, fair enough, heh. I apologize for assuming the worst of you, my friend!
_edit:_ WAIT HOLD ON WHY WOULD YOU NEED TO OBSERVE "PARTS OF THE WEST ARE JUST AS BAD" THEN, HUH?! That *undermines* the point you outline above, if anything! My beady eye is now upon you, P.G., ol' chum; upon you like veritable glue!
Agree
Maybe their model is that the units that one loves and are loyal to are not individuals, but groups -- the family, the whole village. If you can't work, and are eating the food other members of the family produce, you are showing lack of love for the family.
Coming from India, this seemed like just like the interactions I'm used to - people will rarely positively reaffirm you directly, at least as effusively as seems to be common in North America. When I first experienced Western-style compliments I thought I was being made fun of. However, this style of communication doesn't feel bleak or cold, at least when you're used to it - it feels warm and accepting (they didn't even expect that I would fail!) whereas aggressive complimenting feels weird and condescending (were you expecting that I would do badly?...)
I’m American and find the “culture of compliments” weird. I wouldn’t even say I come from a family that particularly withholds compliments and approval, so it’s not that. But in recent decades I think it’s gotten *much* more standard to shower people with praise, especially at work. It’s practically required (maybe literally required) for managers to praise people routinely. My parents definitely did not experience that, so they did not teach me to expect warm praise at work and thus I tend to find it confusing.
I would say that North America is at the upper edge of the compliment distribution. Certainly those Americans whom I have had the pleasure to meet have been very free with positive praise. It is the sort of thing that can look insincere if one is unfamiliar with their calibration.
In (my bit of) China, there are a lot of compliments. In fact, it's one of the things I've struggled most to master. Where I was brought up on snarky British insults, everything said at dinner parties here comes coated in a layer of personal praise - though of course, expert practioners may be using that praise to mock, bond, celebrate, denigrate, or anything in between.
That's very interesting! Do you think the culture is similar to the American one (if you're familiar with it), or is it done in a different way?
Coming from the UK- people will rarely positively reaffirm you directly, at least as effusively as seems to be common in North America. Also, very few things are deemed "awesome" or "hysterical".
I’d second this; if you complement someone in Britain un-sarcastically, it comes across as creepy and fake. We very rarely seriously suggest people should kill themselves, although it can be used as a joke if someone seriously embarrassed themselves.
Similarly, in UK legal education there’s typically an explicit no positive feedback rule. I’ve no idea if other professional education is the same.
"I was on a conference call with an American group yesterday, and the organizer began, I am absolutely thrilled to be with you this morning. Only an American would begin a meeting like this. Let's face it, everyone in the room knows that she is not truly, honestly, thrilled. Thrilled to win the lottery--yes. Thrilled to find out that you have won a free trip to the Caribbean--yes. Thrilled to be the leader of a conference call--highly doubtful."
--The Culture Map, Erin Meyer
That captures it perfectly!
I don’t want to make generalizations about cultures I don’t know about. But just as a general comment, praise or displays of favor to one person can lead to jealousy, which is toxic to social harmony. In a situation where people have very little privacy, even favor or affection between friends or partners is seen by everyone and might therefore be riskier.
Similarly, an individual’s going around telling people about his successes or specialness is varyingly unacceptable in different cultures, maybe atypically relatively acceptable in America.
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.
I get occasional migraines, once every year or two. I have found these are triggered when I have "overdosed" on something sugary and I then encounter a sudden visual change, such as a dark PC display suddenly going white!
But as soon as the characteristic Jacob's Ladder shimmering pattern (sometimes called an aura) makes an appearance at the centre of my vision, I neck a couple of Anadin Extras and everything is back to normal in a few minutes. Haven't actually had a painful migraine for thirty years or more, but woe betide me if one ever starts with no headache pills handy!
Yes, this is called the mammalian diving reflex. Cold water on face and nostrils --> body goes into oxygen preserving mode --> lowered heart rate, selective vasoconstriction, etc. Also helps against tachycardia and other arrythmias.
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.
I'm highly skeptical of this idea that frustration and other strong negative emotions can be ameliorated through "venting".
Nonetheless–it seems like most cultures have some kind of festivals, rituals, and other customs where the normal social rules are suspended or even upended, or at least different rules are temporarily in effect; and one benefit of these things might be to serve as a kind of mental reset or "trip" that relieves some of the accumulated weight of the everyday stresses. Maybe these arctic cultures have relatively few of these built-in communal breaks from normality, so individuals are more prone to do them individually, in the form of ad hoc personal freakouts.
Maybe we're starting to see more ad hoc freakouts in mainstream society today, because a lot of our old normality-breaking festivals, rituals, customs, etc. are fading away; "culture" is increasingly a matter of passive content consumption; our lives are becoming more isolated, and an increasing percentage of the parts of our lives that do take place in community are mediated by bureaucratic institutions–we're at school, we're at work, we're in some form of professional "care"; there's nothing to break up the monotony, nothing to shake us free from our everyday perspective, and anything that does remain to serve this function is getting relentlessly watered down...
Best justification for the Burning Man!
go outside
That's a good point, and not a perspective I've come across before
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?
Well, dentist visits are probably the most painful and uncomfortable experiences for an average child, so it isn't surprising to me that this often results in irrational hangups.
Nowadays, dentist consultations are mostly a walk in the park compared to pre-local anesthesia times.
They're not strange, though. Fear of heights is natural, & even babies have it. So is fear of injury, and the mouth is a particularly sensitive and important region. I've treated a lot of phobias, and have seen almost none that weren't just exaggerated versions of fears many people feel: heights, entrapment, insects, snakes, blood, illness, thunderstorms, public speaking, medical procedures. The only really odd one I can think of is a ketchup phobia -- at first I thought it was just a variant of blood phobia, but the person was not bothered by blood, just by ketchup. He was, though, on the autistic spectrum, and that may have something to do with his developing such an unusual phobia.
What psychological assistance is offered to people who fear tubes being stuck in their stomach or urethra? Many procedures you find in ordinary hospitals seem much more uncomfortable than a dental check-up so that I find it surprising that fear of dentists looms large.
My experience as a patient has been that dentists are more respectful of my choices than many other medical professionals, who can be downright abusive (admittedly, I do have some disabilities). Quite a few advertise that they treat fearful patients.
Similarly, I suspect far more people have bad experiences in road transportation than on flights, but they are expected to put up with them. Why make an exception for air travel?
Maybe having a tube stuck into your stomach is different enough to the sort of things we faced in our ancestral environment that we don't really have a visceral fear of it, whereas having a tooth pulled out isn't?
Yeah I think dentists are more sensitized to the importance of patient's fears. Also, people develop genuine phobias -- i.e., irrational fears of dentists -- like they can't bring themselves to go in even for an exam, which they know will not hurt. Dread of having tubes stuck in their stomach or the urethra is certainly understandable, but probably would not count as a phobia because these procedures are physically very unpleasant. It makes *sense* to be scared of them. At least it does of the urethral one. I had that done when I was 18, and it is by far the most painful thing that I have ever experienced in a doctor's office. It wasn't a catheter, it was a metal tube for examining the urethra and bladder, and I remember it as being pretty thick. Also, having something stuck in there is just more disturbing than having a dentist's tools in your mouth, because a tube in the urethra is really going into the interior of your body. Anyhow, some docs doing things like that are really good with helping patients through it and others seem not to get that there is a scared and suffering person attached to that urethra. What I do these days for weird procedures that creep me out is just tell them in advance I'm creeped out, and that I want to know ahead of time what they will do and what it will fell like, and that when they do it I want them telling me, "I'm going to do X now and you will probably feel Y." Also I try to negotiate an agreement that if I say I want them to stop they will, even if they have not completed the procedure. I think that's what you have to do with docs who just aren't attuned to patient's feelings -- just go in there and clear a space for your feelings.
As for driving, I don't really get what you mean about people who have fears about driving on roads being expected to put up with it, but people scared of air travel getting sympathy or accommodations. I don't think plane phobes get much TLC at all. The airlines certainly don't give a shit, and the phobe's relatives usually give them the speech about how planes are safer than cars blah blah.
I think having an actual viscerally unpleasant experience, particularly as a child, can easily lead to phobias, even if it was related to teeth and not the viscera.
I'm likely autistic and have a phobia of cheese. My mother is definitely autistic (diagnosed) and has a phobia of apples.
I suspect it's an OCD type, overblown disgust reflex/cleanliness/anxiety kind of thing. Both me and my mom have a very specific early childhood memory seeing apples, in her case, and cheese, in mine, in a context we found disgusting. For me, I think that must have been around age 3, and then my cheese phobia got progressively worse up to age 6-7 or so before maxing out. It's stayed there ever since.
Your theory about your phobia and your mother's sounds very plausible. My ketchup guy, though, did not even have as a basis some disgusting ketchup-related memory. And it was quite a powerful phobia. He would not eat in a room where someone was using ketchup. And once he found out after the fact that he'd eaten something with ketchup in the recipe and he promptly vomited. He got over it though. I mean, he did not become a ketchup user, but could sit at a table with others using it, and even smear his hands with it.
Fear of flying is not a strange phobia by any stretch. Though safe on a rational level you're experiencing bizarre and terrifying stimuli every time you fly.
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.
Thanks for the kind words. I checked two places on Substack, as well as my payment processor, and all three claim that you haven't been charged any money and that I haven't received any money from you. I don't know how you would have been charged if you weren't a paid subscriber. Did you even give Substack your credit card number?
If you want to email me more details about what makes you think you've been charged, I can see if they make any sense to me. You can reach me at scott@slatestarcodex.com
Thanks. Will follow up on the charge. Appreciate your checking.
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"!
Isn't that hypothermia rather than hyperthermia? It wouldn't be paradoxical for someone with hyperthermia to think they were too hot.
Paradoxical, but not implausible. Ice can (feel like it) burn(s).
I think his point is that hyperthermia-with-an-er actually means being too hot; it's hypothermia-with-an-o which means being too cold. There's nothing at all either paradoxical or implausible about a person who's too hot thinking that he is in fact too hot.
No, OP is right. Paradoxical undressing is (googleably) a known symptom of hypOthermia.
Indeed, so TGGP is right that John R Ramsden should have said (and probably meant to say) hypothermia instead of hyperthermia, which means Edmund was wrong to criticize, so the Original Mr. X is right to re-explain TGGP's point in more detail, which means your comment is wrong to begin with "No" but otherwise is correct.
But you're going to want to be stripping off during hyperthermia before you even get near any ice
Yes, I meant hypothermia (fixed my post now) DOH! Apologies for any confusion
(I'm assuming you meant hypothermia in this response.)
I also kept thinking "isn't this hypothermia?" while reading, but the part where there are (possibly half-hearted, but still) attempts at murder made me reconsider. The described hysterics don't really fit the vaguely dream-like mental state that I associate with hypothermia (although maybe that's not how that's actually like and I'm misinformed). Still, the parallels do keep striking me.
Running with the idea that people having mental breakdowns display exactly the symptoms that they believe are characteristic of mental breakdowns...
I can tell a fairly plausible story that (1) Eskimo cultures would all be familiar with the effects of hypothermia, which actually causes non-culture-bound mental breakdowns that include some predictable symptoms; (2) they attributed some or all of the predictable symptoms of hypothermia to mental breakdown more generally; and then (3) they included some or all of them in the things you're supposed to do when you express piblokto.
Isn't it the same sort of reaction as with fever, where your body is hotter than normal but you feel cold? Or in this case, there's some part of the system that tries to get you cold, so it makes you "feel" hot so you do things that cool yourself down.
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.
I sense you have a story or two to share about the Cree.
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.)"
Everyone has a special kiss for babies
Someone sent me that article when I had my first child. I wasn’t sure Inuit parenting was replicable in the modern West.
I had heard that all kissing in these cultures involved sniffing cheeks? Supposedly up North people’s cheeks might be protected with some unctuous substance, and a quick sniff could transmit “how am I doing/what have I been up to” kinds of information.
I heard that Eskimos rub noses instead of kissing, although that always sounded like one of these "Woah, look how weird this exotic people is!" stories rather than something that's actually true.
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.
Fine comment, thanks.
But then the disappearance of piblokto has to be explained. It does seem plausible that the Westernization (having clinics, general stores, and welfare) relieved some of the stresses, but is it likely to make so much of a difference?
(I guess that could happen if the people who would otherwise likely have weird breakdowns started self-medicating with alcohol. But "alcohol and piblokto don't go together" sounds like a thing someone would notice.)
I don't have a particular explanation for that. I would simply note that these sorts of effects are highly nonlinear in relation to their causal inputs.
Agreed - and I would add that, contrary to what I understood Scott to be saying, first/early contact with the West might indeed be a very particular stressor on a group. Worldview radically altered.
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
The Dylatov Pass Incident always seemed to me like a very clear example of severe hypothermia and paradoxical undressing.
That said, the parallels between piblokto and hypothermia are striking. The confusion, disorientation, combativeness and removal of clothing all seem to fit.
I heard a theory that they had pitched their tent on or near an unstable surface, and that realizing this made someone panic and run.
Exactly what I was thinking. Cut their way out of the tent. Violent injuries. Undressed and away from the campsite. Coincidence?
> 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.
There's a story like that in the Arabian Nights. https://tomthumb.org/422/the-tale-of-abu-hasan-and-the-fart-1001-nights/
Are the Bedouin actually doing well? I thought they were a particular nomadic subgroup, and the rich oil sheiks were from the settled people.
Thesiger found that his Bedouin guides from his journeys across the Empty Quarter in the late 1940s were, when he visited then decades later, wealthy middle aged men. Don't know how typical this was.
The Bedouin way of life had already largely disappeared by the forties, as the coming of the motor car made camels obsolete - but ibn Sa'ud had conquered Saudi Arabia with Bedouin forces, and per Hourani "an essential part of his policy was to persuade the beduin to settle". If the Bedouin were seen as being both linked to the ruling class, and dangerous, then the incentive for the state to get settlement and integration right would plausibly have been far greater than it was in Canada and Alaska. And those responsible had a deeper understanding of the culture they were trying to change, and were trying to change it less. Not that surprising if the transition went better, I suppose.
The culture was also just far less alien. There was no moment of discovery and having your whole understanding of the world vastly changed; a way of life was given up, but for one which they were familiar enough with from a distance.
I think first contact for the Inuit would have been mind blowing in a way that's hard to properly fathom; imagine people from Atlantis showed up tomorrow with technology we can't even dream of. Beyond Superintelligent AGI and Stargates and FTL, stuff we never even considered; AND their society is structured radically differently, AND they have a really convincing and coherent system of ethics and morality.
I think the culture shock would be on that sort of level.
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.
Did you read the linked piece about hyperstitious slur cascades?
Yes. It still seems to me ...
I'm not sure that Kalimac's point conflicts with the linked post, which included passages like this:
"The only excuse for it is that it’s actually preventing someone from feeling sad or getting offended. I think in the 1950s there really were a lot of Japanese people who felt triggered by the word “Japs”, and society going through an inconvenient transition in order to protect and show respect for those people was a reasonable move."
And, when giving an example of a slur-in-the-making that should not be allowed to become a slur:
"I question whether any real black person has ever thought about this and been offended. If they have, I would guess this is < 0.001% of the black population."
So if most of the people referred to by the term "Eskimo" do find it offensive or insulting, I don't think Scott has made a case for using it anyway. (I'm guessing he would dispute the premise, and I don't know whether it's true or not.)
I got into the weeds on this one a few months ago when a friend of mine expressed her horror that “The Christmas Song” contained the word “Eskimo” and that she could no longer listen to it. So I delved into the question of “how offensive is this actually?”
It seems to me like “Eskimo” is just an inaccurate exonym landed on the Inuit and Yupik by their more southerly neighbors. But the people themselves have their own name and would like us to call them that. Some technical uses in fields like archaeology still linger, but it’s mostly been phased out. This isn’t recent- the switch started decades ago.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that there are plenty of people calling themselves “Eskimos” in familiar settings, kind of the way some Native Americans will call each other “Indians”. Reports of its offensiveness seem to range from mild to serious, especially if you’re doing official business. It seems pretty clear that if you are not Inuit, don’t start out with “Eskimo”.
My friend’s insistence that the e-word is tantamount to the n-word seems a bit off-base. It’s mostly just inaccurate and the preferred term is widely known, and a majority of those specific people have asked us to use it, which is good enough for me. Still going to listen to “The Christmas Song”, though.
OK, this was a minor point for me, but I am hoping that Eskimo will be 'back on the table ' and that "McGelligot's Pool" by Dr. Seuss will be back in publication.
The idea that exonyms are inherently worse than endonyms just strikes me as weird. I don't get upset over the fact that the French would call my country Angleterre rather than England, and I'm not about to start calling them Francaises instead of French. Different languages have different names for countries and peoples, and if the English name for a foreign tribe differs from that own tribe's name for themselves, that's just normal.
The fact that a German might call me a 'Cliff pisser', or a Chinese observer describe me as a 'foreign devil' troubles me not in the slightest. I find it quite humorous.
I agree, but your examples are bad. Angleterre and England both mean "land of the Angles". Same with the French and Français (Françaises is feminine plural).
In Canada, 9/10 Indians I meet prefer to be referred to either by their particular ethnicity: Cree, Dene, Oneida, ect. Or, failing that, as Indians. They get annoyed by the constant hyperstitious slur cascade with regards to terminology for them; in my lifetime the PC term has gone from Indian, to Native, to First Nations, to Aboriginal and now Indigenous. If you think it's tiring from the outside, it's probably more tiresome from the inside when you see it happening again and again.
The 10th usually finds Indian horribly offensive, holds woke positions on everything and considers themself gifted with supernatural powers from the divine.
The PC term is actually "American Indian" not Native American.
IIRC, there are groups that think of it as a nasty slur, and other groups that explicitly prefer that to be what they're called, which leaves outsiders in a bit of a puzzling situation wrt politeness.
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'm not sure about Greenland, but in Canada there are Eskimo groups that live inland, often hunting caribou. There's fewer of them then coastal tribes, but humans will expand to fill any vacuum.
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?
I know that a significant portion of the homeless community in Anchorage, AK (the largest city in the state) are Alaska Natives. The typical explanation is they left the village behind but couldn't hack it in the city.
That seems like it checks out. Maybe they initially go back to the village, then just end up drifting back to the city? God, that sounds awful.
Check out Paying the Land, by Joe Sacco. It's an account of Sacco's interviews with Dene people in northern Canada, their history and struggle with colonial forces. The Dene territory is sub-Arctic and covers areas of The Yukon and Alaska. Well researched, thorough, and beautiful book, but painful to read about the near-extermination of a way of life and being in the world.
Edit: not an expert or a local, but to add to what FLWAB posted, peole look for work in resource extraction and the service sector jobs that come with it. When there are neither jobs available nor a viable means of living "traditionally", you run into problems.
>>”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.
As long as you don’t do anything too shameful under the influence.
Isn't that the perfect time to do something shameful, though? You've got your ready made excuse coursing through your veins.
Hey honey, I really shouldn’t have hooked up with the babysitter, but I was drunk after all. So we’re cool, right?
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
Theory: the (for some) stifling privacyless Eskimo communities created a strong trigger for bipolar or even for non-clinical episodes similar to it. This may have selected against the base rate of similar mental illnesses by triggering them at a higher rate so that the genetic base rate was adversely selected against. When social experiences changed this resulted in a relative disappearance of similar breakdowns
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 feel like there is a recurrent error of looking for "special causes" when none exists.
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.
You barely survived for one week without someone feeding you as a 15-year-old?
I mean, I didn't wind up in hospital, but I was very, very hungry and it probably wasn't amazingly good nutrition (I was horrifically underweight already).
Mum had never taught me to cook normal meals. IIRC she was also cooking as-needed for herself so I couldn't steal the cooked food without actually fighting her, although I might be confusing it with a later time when she did that.
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 remember that!
I think making conclusions about Inuit culture from a book about mental illnesses is a bad idea.
I read the actual book, "An African in Greenland". It happened around 1960, so closer to Foulk's time than the early explorers. One thing that stood out to me was that the Greenlanders drank huge amounts of alcohol and coffee. Another was that, in the first settlement the African visited, everyone was on welfare. So not exactly an uncontacted tribe here.
Later, in another settlement, the African befriended a man living in poverty because he was too drunk to work. All his neighbors shunned him, and they told the African to shun him too.
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".
Last time I checked, there was no sensor for blood oxygen or air oxygen in human physiology mentioned. Wasn ´t pCO2 the input for wanting to breathe?
Arterial pCO2 is the primary stimulus to breathe, with pO2 secondary.
I'm not sure pO2 is even in there. People breathing pure nitrogen or hydrogen do not feel short of breath, even though they are taking in no 02 at all, because there is not CO2 buildup in the body.
It is, though it is pretty weak. For instance, people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease have elevated arterial carbon dioxide levels, to which they have habituated. Hypoxic drive is an important stimulus to refluration for such people.
I was going to say wow, weird that people can habituate to something so contrary to what we need -- then remembered that it's been found that in some primary school classrooms there are very few air changes per hour. I guess the kids habituate to high CO2 too.
pCO2 is the input, because it was easier for evolution to hack a sensor for that. PO2 is probably the driver, because inadequate O2 will kill you faster than excessive CO2. The pCO2 sensor is calibrated to prevent either from reaching critical levels with reasonable margin, assuming otherwise normal(ish) atmospheric composition. And the diving reflex shifts the set point so that you don't feel the urge to breathe as quickly or as strongly
Not all panic attacks involve hyperventilation and a feeling of not being able to get enough air. Much more commonly the huge FOOM of anxiety is set off. by ideas like, I'm having a stroke, I'm about to drop dead, I'm about to go psychotic, I'm going to start screaming and rolling on the ground right here in public, I'm going to faint, or just a diffuse sense that something terrible is wrong and out of control and a disaster of some sort is happening. I have seen lots of panic attacks and also had a dozen or so myself, and in none of those was anyone panting like people do in the movies. I'm sure pulse is elevated, though. Ice Diver technique seems worth a try. It's a bit hard to imagine many people in the midst of a panic attack being willing to do something so unpleasant and weird. People in the midst of panic attacks are sort of like people being dangled by a rope over a hundred foot drop. They really are in a state of panic, and most could barely even attend to an explanation of the Ice Diver technique. Still, there probably are a few very tough ones who will.
Strange, doesn't cold water cause a rapid increase in breathing? If I step into a cold shower on a winter's morning, I involuntarily take a huge breath almost instantly.
That's cold water on the body. Cold water on the face, and in particular cold water in the nostrils, is what trigger the diving reflex. Your hindbrain knows better than to try and breathe if you'd be inhaling water rather than air, and since there isn't a "sense wetness" nerve type, it uses temperature gradient as a proxy. Then sets up to go without breathing for as long as possible.
Any water temperature below body temperature should trigger the diving reflex, but cold water does it faster and stronger.
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?
This is a good point. The description of learning to hunt and getting bullied into sucked doesn’t seem that different from how certain dysfunctional pockets of the military operate. I head a story about a guy who was bullied to the brink of suicide while training bomb sniffing dogs. Actually getting deployed was a huge relief for him.
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.
Maybe little natural immunity to the S.pneumonia, N.meningitidis and H.influenza that are the main causes—in which case immunization should make a huge difference (it has further south in Canada). Or maybe the anatomy of the nasal passages and eustachian tube is adapted to extreme cold by being narrower and more easily blocked?
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.
"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?"
What about Scandinavia, and especially Finland?
Hadn't thought of that, interesting possibility.
Razib Khan's posts on Finland are paywalled and Wikipedia isn't that great at "exactly who is living in this place at different points in history", but it says about ancient Finland:
"The arrival of the Corded Ware culture in Southern coastal Finland between 3000 and 2500 BC may have coincided with the start of agriculture."
"Although distantly related, the Sami people retained the hunter-gatherer lifestyle longer than the Finns."
And it looks like the Sami have typical HG problems, even in Finland. So it seems modern Finns might be about as farmer-ish as other north Europeans. Not sure why they don't speak an Indo-European language then though.
I agree Finns have had some farming for a while (although no longer than some American Indians), but there doesn't seem to have been much of a state until Sweden in the Middle Ages.
Maybe the question should be:
.......as settled farmers in large structured societies for several thousand years?
I wouldn't have thought everyday life, in terms of obeying laws, working relations etc., under a local Swedish Jarl (or iron/bronze age lord) was that different to life under a Saxon king, even if the Saxon kingdom technically counts as a state.
As to why the Native Americans that have farmed for as long as people in places like Britain have also seem more hunter-gatherer like in their behaviour (hopefully that's framed respectfully enough). Not sure. Maybe farming is necessary but not sufficient. Maybe there actually is a HG / farmer divide in social outcomes for different Native American groups that's not obvious. Cochran talks about how you don't see large monolithic language groups in the Americas, suggesting there weren't major expansions of single populations, like in Eurasia. So perhaps the current farming groups weren't the original farmers and only adopted it relatively recently.
Feel like this theory is starting to whither under the light a bit now that you've made me add all these epicycles though.
Spread of farming timelapse: https://youtu.be/-UvxexA5tz4
The ancestors of Finns and other Northern Europeans were largely pastoralists before agriculture I believe, do they do badly in modern society? Are Mongols known for being shiftless alcoholics?
Thanks for reading my post on the Greenland Norse by the way.
One thing that timelapse misses out is that it's common in history for pastoralist to conquer and replace older farming groups.
The Yamnaya/Indo Europeans/Aryans (the main ancestry groups of modern Europeans, particularly northern Europeans) replaced the previous Neolithic farmers ~5k years ago, as pastoralist, but seem to have adopted farming not long after. The Bell Beaker people (the Yamnaya that colonised Britain around 2800BC) were already farmers for example. So I'd say that counts as "settled farmers in large structured societies for several thousand years".
Even so, I've been meaning to write a post about how Europeans are sort of intermediate between recent HGs and the very ancient Asian farming cultures in how adapted to the farming life style they are.
Not sure about the Mongolians, although their gdp per capita is only ~5k usd, so maybe that's some reason to think they haven't fully managed to capitalise on modernity like their long-term farming Chinese neighbours have.
"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.
Well and also kids die. That kids are buried outside some place kids lived in the early 1900s is kind of the norm. I remember a “polish” controversy over something similar where an orphanage had “so many child graves”. Except when you did the math the kids there were dying at exactly the same as poor kids in other parts of Poland living with their parents.
There have been similar controversies in Ireland, too.
Well at least many churches were burned in the summer of 2021 after the residential school hysteria. So thats at least one positive outcome according to the average Canadian.
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."
I've never heard of the "making themselves ill" usage. Was this limited to culturally distinct groups there?
Tar heels! -- i.e., white southerners who had been in North Carolina for several generations. And not professionals or upper middle class N.C. families, because they tended to go up north for college, and even if they came back to NC to live they weren't tar heels any more.
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?
Maybe it's like how some people in America obsess over child kidnappings, even when they're very unlikely?
Yeah. It was the "and with good reason" that stuck out for me.
If I read "The fear of child kidnappings is of constant concern to Americans, and with good reason...." I would find that interesting, too. More for the belief by the author (not Scott, the guy he's quoting) that such a low *relative* risk is something one would obviously be concerned about.
Perhaps the counterfactual is most relevant: if they lacked constant vigilance due to this fear, what would the rate of death by drowning be?
And it's all of 2.72 people/year average, which, however low the population of Greenland might be, doesn't strike me as a crisis.
Or maybe I misjudge how much concern (some?) Americans have over auto fatalities? I read this today:
"Volkswagen of America has issued a recall of more than 140,000 vehicles over an issue that could deactivate the front passenger airbag when the seat is occupied.
The recall affecting 143,053 Atlas and Atlas Cross Sport vehicles was announced Tuesday by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is advising owners of affected vehicles 'not to use the front passenger seat until the remedy has been completed.'"
So don't use the front-side passenger seat of a car because the air bags MIGHT NOT deploy in a crash. 30 years ago I don't think most cars HAD passenger side air bags. Most people driving the effected VWs won't be involved in crashes (before the car gets fixed as part of the recall) where the airbags will matter. And even if the VM is involved in such a crash the air bags still might deploy.
But don't ride in the passenger seat until the fix has been applied.
I wonder if not riding the passenger seat until the air bags were fixed would be considered concern WITH GOOD REASON here????
>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.
"I mean, how many extremely similar accounts of wealthy people torturing children and harvesting their adrenochrome could you find online?"
Do these accounts specify the times/places/circumstances of the supposed events? Or is it somebody told me or "this happened many years ago and I didn't tell anyone at the time and I don't remember where it was or the date it was or how I got there or why I was there."
The age at which autistic symptoms often become so prominent you cannot ignore them is coincidentally around the same age of certain vaccinations. I don't think these accounts are fabricated or inaccurate... They're just a manifestation of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
> 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?
Depends on the dimensions you use to deliniate cultures.
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'm very curious and would love a chance to experience this. I'm overly sound sensitive, to the point where I almost left a sensory deprivation tank in disgust because I could still hear things outside, and I seem to feel much more relaxed in situations other people find creepily understimulating. But I've never gotten to be in an anechoic chamber.
For me, one of the reasons it was so disconcerting is that it violently dispelled the notion that I'm an island unto myself. Younger me always thought that I'd be perfectly fine as a hermit, that the good life would be to subsist on pure thought in solitude. But five minutes of hearing only my own heartbeat pounding in my ears sent me scrambling noisily back to the safety of my waiting motorcycle. It was was a bit like the Total Perspective Vortex. Everyone thinks they could withstand the Total Perspective Vortex. I'd /really/ love for you to try an anechoic chamber and to hear your account
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?)
May I ask where you're originally from, whether they have "benders" like these, and if not, whether there's something else that serves the same purpose?
(I don't think I or anyone I know closely has gone on benders like these, though I sometimes overindulge in food or computer games when I'm stressed)
I'm from (white) South Africa and, while I'm sure there are subpopulations of South Africa who would behave this way, my subpopulation would not. For example (again at least amongst my peer group at college) there was no culture of binge drinking, whether one had recently suffered disappointment or otherwise.
Likewise I agree that there are subpopulations of the US that would not. But would you agree that the picture is, as far as popular media (ie movies) are concerned, as I have presented it?
It's worth, in this context, remembering the amount of US drug use and alcoholism which, while not the absolute highest in the world, are certainly up there (highest, or second, by "big country" depending on whether or not you consider Russia a big country).
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/alcoholism-by-country
Different (though somewhat tamer) versions of the phenomenon appear with regards to eg weddings and funerals. Certainly in my set neither an ostentatious wedding nor ostentatious grieving would be considered at all "appropriate", whereas this sort of thing is very common in US movies.
Now, does that movie over-acting translate to real life? That's unclear to me and I'd love to have a definitive answer.
There is a whole language within Woke of "normalization" and the claim that things we see in the media (for example treatment of women) tell people what is appropriate, or acceptable, or at least behavior you can get away with. So the question is, is this just nonsense, or is it real? Or is real for some behaviors (how to interact with women) but not others (when to use violence)? I've seen claims to the effect that in the case of violence it has no impact because everyone can tell that this is not reality, that we don't *really* settle our differences this way; whereas in the case of social realtionships it has a substantial impact. True? False because people can tel what count as jokes and exaggeration?
I could even believe that within "still functional" cultures in the US normalization theory is basically nonsense, that people pick up their cues from the positive behavior around them; whereas in the dysfunctional cultures in the US it is a huge deal. (So most in the media can engage in this normalization secure in the knowledge that *their* kids will not be adversely affected by drug culture or whatever...)
This would essentially be a large part of the _Coming Apart_ argument, and would suggest that anecdote is an especially unhelpful lens through which to judge the importance of the issue, precisely because our peer groups are very different from some other peer groups?
These are all good questions, but I'm not sure about the answers. I don't really have good enough memory indexing of media I've watched to remember how they portray this.
It doesn't exactly answer the question, especially as posed in my first comment but https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3123204/ has some data, for example:
"
Alcohol consumption is also very commonly portrayed in films, including in (US) G-rated (General Audience) [27] and animated [28] films. A content analysis of 100 of the top grossing US films between 1986 and 1994 reported that 96% had references that supported alcohol use, and 79% included at least one character who used alcohol. Whilst incidents of alcohol use were common, portrayals of the hazards of drinking were not reflected [29]. Similarly, a study of the most popular US film rentals from 1996-7 found 93% included alcohol use and 22% illicit drug use; in 12% of films one or more of the major characters used drugs and 65% of adult characters used alcohol; and in 43% of films alcohol use was portrayed as a positive experience [30]. A content analysis of the top grossing US films from 1999-2001 found 15% of teen characters used illicit drugs and again were unlikely to be shown as suffering any consequences (positive or negative, short or long-term) of their drug use [31].
"
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.
community memory can be very long in indigenous cultures.
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!
So I ended up writing that WIkipedia article anyhow. Turns out sangue dormido (defined in the DSM-IV, eliminated from the DSM-V) was described from that one 1981 case study, and then in 2012 the original authors of the study were like "yeah, we've been looking into this and literally nobody in the English-language literature has described this...maybe someone needs to go interview some Cape Verdeans or peruse the Portuguese-language literature or something like that? Also, we're skeptical of how psychiatry treats culture-bound syndromes in general, it's all kind of a mess."
Disappointed this review overlooked the obvious cause of piblocto:
tiger spirits