Hysteria

The term hysteria, in its broadest clinical and anthropological usage, has long served as a catch-all category for psychogenic conditions characterised by sudden outbursts of uncontrolled behaviour, vocalisation, and motor disturbance. In the Malay Peninsula and Borneo, two such conditions—latah and amok—have attracted sustained scholarly attention, particularly for their distinctive cultural expressions and their apparent parallels with abnormal mental phenomena observed among geographically distant peoples. The comparative study of these conditions, as documented in the early literature of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, reveals a field of inquiry that straddled clinical medicine, ethnography, and the emerging discipline of cross-cultural psychology, with scholars debating whether such phenomena were culturally specific or represented universal expressions of a common underlying psychological mechanism.

Scope and Historical Definition

The Malay condition of latah is a psychogenic disorder, predominantly affecting women, in which the sufferer exhibits sudden, involuntary outbursts of profanity, screaming, and sometimes aggressive or self-endangering behaviour, typically triggered by suggestion, startle, or social provocation. Amok, by contrast, is characterised by a sudden episode of violent, purposeless aggression, often culminating in the sufferer’s death or capture, and is not specifically linked to a triggering stimulus in the same way as latah. C. Boden Kloss, in a brief comparative note, drew attention to the Eskimo condition piblokto, as described by Robert Peary in The North Pole, which he noted presented a superficial resemblance to latah in its female manifestations: adult Eskimo women would scream, tear off their clothing, and run naked on the ice in extreme cold, sometimes to the point of freezing to death if not restrained [1, p. 254]. Peary also recorded an instance in which a piblokto sufferer killed a companion [1, p. 254]. Kloss argued, however, that despite the surface similarity, piblokto was not triggered by suggestion or shock and was therefore more akin to amok than to latah [1, p. 254]. He closed with the observation that both Eskimos and Malays were Mongoloid peoples, despite the vast geographic separation between the Arctic and the equatorial belt [1, p. 254].

J. O’May, writing in the same year, extended the comparative frame further, arguing that the abnormal mental phenomena among North Siberian peoples such as the Yakuts were “notably similar” to those among Malays and “still more similar” to those among the Dayak peoples of Borneo [2, p. 382]. He identified the Malay pawang (a traditional healer or spirit-medium) and the Dayak manang (a ritual specialist and healer) as essentially equivalent to the Central Asian shaman, a point he attributed to Archdeacon Perham, who had made the same observation in 1887 [2, p. 382]. O’May’s contribution was to situate latah within a broader typology of psychogenic and possession states that transcended any single cultural context.

The Question of Profanity and Linguistic Outbursts

A distinctive feature of latah that has drawn particular scholarly attention is the sudden eruption of profane, obscene, or otherwise socially inappropriate language from the sufferer’s mouth. O’May addressed this feature directly, contending that such outbursts were not peculiar to the condition but were observable in a range of analogous states: among Yakut shamans, in Batak spirit possession, among the insane generally, and even among normal individuals under the influence of nitrous oxide or in hypnagogic states [2, p. 382]. To reinforce his point, O’May cited an anecdote from Dr. T. B. Hyslop illustrating the extraordinary vocabulary that could emerge from a sub-conscious state, thereby supporting his conclusion that the linguistic outbursts of latah admitted of a general psychological explanation rather than being specific to the Malay context [2, p. 383]. This argument positioned latah not as a culturally bounded anomaly but as one expression among many of a universal psychological mechanism in which the suppression of socially taboo material is temporarily lifted under conditions of heightened suggestibility or altered consciousness.

Comparative Frameworks and Racial Taxonomy

The comparative literature on latah, amok, and their Arctic and Siberian analogues was shaped by the racial and classificatory assumptions prevalent in early twentieth-century anthropology. Kloss’s closing remark—that both Eskimos and Malays were Mongoloid peoples—illustrates how such comparisons were often framed within a racial taxonomy that sought to explain cross-cultural similarities through shared biological ancestry rather than through independent cultural development or universal psychological processes [1, p. 254]. O’May’s approach, while also comparative, leaned more heavily toward a psychological rather than a racial explanation, emphasising the functional equivalence of the pawang and manang to the shaman and the general psychological account of the linguistic phenomena [2, pp. 382–383]. The tension between these two explanatory frameworks—racial affinity versus universal psychology—was a recurring feature of the comparative literature on psychogenic conditions in the region, and it reflected broader debates within anthropology about the relative weight of biology and culture in shaping human behaviour.

Research and Documentation

The documentation of latah, amok, and their comparative analogues in the early volumes of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society’s journal reflects a period of active scholarly engagement with psychogenic conditions in the Malay world. The two notes by Kloss and O’May, both published in 1923, represent a moment in which the Society’s contributors were actively seeking to place local phenomena within a global comparative framework. Kloss’s note, though brief, introduced the Arctic parallel and raised the question of whether latah and amok were distinct conditions or points on a single spectrum of psychogenic disturbance. O’May’s note, slightly longer and more analytically developed, pushed the comparison further into Siberia and Borneo and offered a psychological explanation for the most culturally salient feature of latah—its profanity. Together, these contributions illustrate a shift in the Society’s literature from purely descriptive ethnography toward a more interpretive and comparative approach, one that sought to identify the underlying mechanisms common to diverse cultural expressions of abnormal mental states. The reliance on secondary sources—Peary’s travel narrative, Perham’s earlier observation, Hyslop’s clinical anecdote—also indicates that the field was still in an early stage, with direct clinical or ethnographic study of latah and amok in the Malay context yet to be fully developed within the Society’s own publications.

MBRAS Sources

C.B. Kloss (1923). Arctic amok. JMBRAS 1: 254
J. O’May (1923). Arctic latah. JMBRAS 1(2): 381–383

References

C.B. Kloss (1923). Arctic amok JMBRAS 1(1): 254. Read on JSTOR
J. O’May (1923). Arctic latah JMBRAS 1(2): 381–383. Read on JSTOR