| SYNDROME |
CULTURAL
/ GEOGRAPHIC LOCATION |
SYMPTOMS |
| latah |
Malaysian
and Indonesia |
afflicted person becomes flustered and may say
and do things that appear amusing, such as mimicking people's
words and movements |
Adapted from Cultural Anthropology,
2nd ed. Miller, Barbara D. Boston:Allyn and Bacon,
2002, p. 156, who, in turn adapted it from Ronald C. Simons
and Charles C. Hughes, eds., The Culture-Bound Syndromes:
Folk Illnesses of Psychiatric and Anthropological Interest,
Boston, D. Reidel, 1985: 91-110.
|
Film Guides
Terms / Concepts
- hyperstartling
- normal / abnormal
- Disease is universal
- Illness is culturally specific
- Ainu
Notes
- Only certain women in the village are latah (2)
- Only one man is latah
- Some think that latah runs in the family, but the role
of heredity in latah is uncertain
Bibliography
-
Bakker, M. J., van Dijk, J. G., Pramono, A., Sutarni, S. and Tijssen, M. A.J. (2013), Latah: An Indonesian startle syndrome. Mov. Disord., 28: 370–379. doi: 10.1002/mds.25280.
- Simons, Ronald C. Boo!: Culture, Experience, and the
Startle Reflex (series in Affective Science). Oxford University
Press, 1996.
"The startle reflex provides a revealing model for examining
the ways in which evolved neurophysiology shapes personal
experience and patterns of recurrent social interaction. In
the most diverse cultural contexts, in societies widely separated
by time and space, the inescapable physiology of the reflex
both shapes the experience of startle and biases the social
usages to which the reflex is put. This book describes ways
in which the startle reflex is experienced, culturally elaborated,
and socially used in a wide variety of times and places. It
offers explanations both for the patterned commonalities found
across cultural settings and for the differences engendered
by diverse social environments. Boo! will intrigue readers
in fields such as psychological anthropology, medical anthropology,
general cultural anthropology, social psychology, cross-cultural
psychiatry, evolutionary psychology, and human ethology.
- Simons, Ronald C. Introduction to Culture-Bound Syndromes, Psychiatric Times, No. 11, 01 November 2001.
- Winzeler, Robert L. Latah in Southeast Asia: The History and Ethnography of a Culture-bound Syndrome. (Publications of the Society for Psychological Anthropology) Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
- Winzeler, Robert L. (1984, April). The Study of Malayan Latah [Electronic version]. Indonesia, 77-104.
Related WebSites
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