Boo! Culture, Experience, and the Startle Reflex (Series in Affective Science)

287 Pages·1996·15.53 MB·English

by  Ronald Simons

BOO!
SERIES IN AFFECTIVE SCIENCE
SERIES EDITORS
Richard J. Davidson
Paul Ekman
Klaus Scherer
Boo!
Culture, Experience, and
the Startle Reflex
Ronald C. Simons
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1996
Oxford University Press
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"Startle Neurosis" by EC. Thorne, American Journal of Psychiatry, 101,105-109.
Copyright (c) 1944/45. the American Psychiatric Association. Reprinted by permission.
"Lanti, illness by fright among Bisayan Filipinos." In R.C. Simons and C.C. Hughes
(Eds.), The Culture-Bound Syndromes (pp. 371-398). Copyright (c) D. Reidel. Reprinted
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Simons, Ronald C.
Boo! : culture, experience, and the startle reflex / Ronald C. Simons.
p. cm.— (Series in affective science)
Includes index.
ISBN 0-19-509626-6
1. Startle reaction—Social aspects. 2. Startle reactions—Cross-cultural studies.
3. Latah (Disease)—Cross-cultural studies. I. Title. II. Series.
QP372.6.S57 1995 95-11809
304.5—dc20
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
on acid free paper
For Sherwood L. Washburn
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PREFACE
An analysis of the biology of the actors is essential to the understanding of
any human social system.
Sherwood Washburn & Elizabeth McCown, 1980,
Human Evolution: Biosocial Perspectives, p. 7
Accepting that humans are a product of evolution, we must endeavor to
understand how the behavioral propensities with which human individuals
have been endowed by natural selection can give rise to the complexities of
human relationships and of societies, and how societal forces shape the
nature of the individual.... Certainly it is here... that the really exciting
challenge now lies.
Robert Hinde, 19S9, Animal Behavior, 38, p. 732
The work that this book reports began in 1975, when I spent a sabbatical
year in the anthropology department of the University of California at
Berkeley as a graduate student in cultural anthropology and simultane-
ously as a postdoctoral student in physical anthropology with Professor
Sherwood Washburn. It was at Berkeley that I began the study of the latah
reaction, a "culture-bound syndrome" of Malaysia and Indonesia. As latah
is discussed in some detail in the body of this book it is not necessary to
describe it here, only to say that it is a set of rather peculiar behaviors per-
formed by some individuals after they are startled.
What made studying latah so intriguing is the fact that, although it is
generally regarded as merely a Malay and Indonesian custom, and therefore
a cultural artifact, a similar set of behaviors occurs in a most improbable
set of other places around the globe—Siberia, Maine, Yemen, and the Island
of Hokkaido, to name a few. No one had suggested any plausible explana-
tion why. I wondered if the answer might have anything to do with the biol-
ogy of the startle reflex, but if so, why did it occur only in scattered locations
viii Preface
and not ubiquitously? Much of the empirical work I was to do concerned
itself with attempting to solve this puzzle. As E M. Yap had suggested in his
seminal 1952 paper on latah, the solution seemed to be the result of some
interaction among the neurophysiology of startle, what people thought
about startle, and how these ideas were reflected in social action. In the
course of the work on latah, I became interested in what happens when peo-
ple are startled in other contexts and in the larger question of how this sim-
ple evolved reflex enters into the private and social lives of people more gen-
erally. How is it that the same bit of neurophysiology is played out and
experienced so similarly and yet so differently in different cultural contexts?
Thus startle, rather than latah per se, gradually became the focus of the
work. The startle reflex—ubiquitous, discrete, and brief—presented itself
as a Rosetta stone. I could look both at what people did with this simple
reflex and also at what they said about it in a wide set of contexts, in both
the popular and scholarly literatures. Just as Carlyle's Sartor Resartus had
humorously examined human life as reflected in clothing, I could look at
experience, interaction, and explanation as they were reflected in startle,
using startle as a model system. Different disciplines developed different
data, but data that could in this case be reconciled from one discipline to
another along the dimensions of the startle reflex.
As I began to publish on this work, it was my good fortune to have an
especially fluent and persuasive intellectual adversary, Michael Kenny, of
Simon Fraser University. Professor Kenny took on the task of opposing the
position I present here in a series of papers in which the relevant issues were
argued back and forth between us. The opportunity to participate in this
debate enormously clarified for me the line of thinking presented in this
text. Much of the material in the second part of this book is an expansion
of materials and ideas first developed in the course of that debate. The
debate appeared in the pages of the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease,
which under the editorship of Professor Eugene Brody has long been a pub-
lication that encourages the thoughtful presentation of more than one side
of any issue. To the Journal and to Professor Brody I am much indebted.
While this book was in press, Robert L. Winzeler published a work sum-
marizing his long study of latah. In many ways our observations about the
previous literature on latah and about the cultural and social setting in which
contemporary latah is embedded are similar and mutually reinforcing. How-
ever, starting from rather disparate premises about the relationship of cul-
ture to biology, we arrive at quite different conclusions about the nature of
latah, why latah has the form and cultural patterning we see. Our conclusions
about latah differ in two important respects: the significance we find in the
similarities among the family of culture-specific "latah" syndromes and,
most importantly, the significance of neurophysiological factors in the syn-
drome's contemporary Malaysian presentations. To anyone interested in fur-
ther pursuing the study of latah, Winzeler's book can be highly recommended.
Organizing and explaining the heterogenous assemblage of materials
that have been collected over the years presented some major expository
problems. Initially, I began with a discussion of latah which, after all, was
Preface ix
the original subject of research. However, after wrestling with the mater-
ial unprofitably for rather too long, I realized that most readers would find
it easier to move from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Hence the organiza-
tion of this book, with the section on latah and other non-Western mani-
festations of startle following material closer to the lives of most Western
readers. The major problem proved to be that of sequentially presenting
data and concepts linked by an intricate network of connections.
Of all the relevant disciplines, it is anthropology with its cultural,
physical, linguistic, and archaeologic branches that makes the strongest
claim to being a unified science of humankind. Yet in actuality, this is more
of an idealized goal than a usual practice. Paul J. Bohannan once expressed
the tension between this ethos and practice in an open letter to the mem-
bership of the American Anthropological Society published almost two
decades ago on the front page of the Anthropology Newsletter:
Anthropology covers a wider range than any other social science:
from human biology to human language, from prehistory to civi-
lization. That broad scope is not an accident or a mirror of vanity.
To carry out our main job—determining the many ways that the
many dimensions of human life can be fitted together—it has to
be broad. Anthropology is an integrated and synthesizing disci-
pline: it is within itself necessarily interdisciplinary. Its primary
mode is one of comparison....
The need for precise monographic study of particular behav-
ioral situations is obvious: without them we could not be compar-
ative [However], the comparative task—which is, in my opin-
ion, the primary one—seems far more difficult. Perhaps because
it is farther removed from artifacts and from people. And as time
goes on and a subject develops, it becomes increasingly difficult to
make the leap to the comparative and the general.
Yet, the fact of the broadness and the difficulty of making that
leap gives anthropology the appearance of being constantly on the
verge of shattering into its components. The unifying cement is
something that must be constantly worked on if we are to preserve
it. (Bohannan, 1978, pp. 1-2)
It is my hope that this book will function as a bit of the necessary
cement. It is a book of connections. It is also my hope that it will be of use
to those who hyperstartle and who find their hyperstartling problematic,
and to those who will follow in the cross-cultural study of startle, hyper-
startle, latah, and other culture-bound syndromes.
I am much indebted to the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation,
which supplied the major portion of the costs of my fieldwork in Southeast
Asia; to the University of California International Center for Medical
Research (Grant AI 10051 from the National Institutes of Health, United
States Public Health Service); and to the Institut Penyelidikan Perubatan,
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which provided office space and much logistic
support during the time I was in the field.