STOLEN PENISES AND OTHER EXOTIC PSYCHOLOGICAL TALES

From penis thieves to voodoo death, strange mental disorders can tell us a lot about the deeper layers of any culture, finds an unusual new travelogue.

For a few strange months in 1984, thousands of men and boys in Hainan, China, became convinced that their penises were vanishing. The episodes often came at night as a chill entered a room, perhaps the result of a malevolent spirit. When a villager awoke screaming, terrified that his penis was shrinking into his body, friends would rush to his rescue. They would grab his penis, beat him with sandals, and squeeze the middle finger of his left hand, in the hope that the penis-thieving spirit would escape.

It is the mystery of conditions like koro, the overpowering belief that one’s genitals are disappearing, that inspired Frank Bures’s book, "The Geography of Madness". Why do some mental illnesses appear only in certain cultures and historical periods?

Seen from afar, these illnesses often seem inexplicable. Why, in late 19th-century France, did young men lapse into fugue states and wander across the country? Why do so many Japanese people suffer from 'taijin kyofusho', the fear that their appearance or behaviour will embarrass other people? If these illnesses baffle us, it is usually because we are unfamiliar with the background conditions that give the illnesses their meaning. And the deeper one immerses oneself in the culture, as Bures tries to do, the more understandable the illnesses become.

The premise for "The Geography of Madness" is so irresistible you are left wondering why you never thought of it yourself. It is a travel book with a quest. Rather than setting out in search of rare Tuscan wines, the roots of Texas swing, or the ancient songs of aboriginal Australians, Bures searches for clues to exotic mental disorders.

His efforts to understand koro take him not only to the Chinese island of Hainan but to dusty villages in Nigeria and modern clinics in Singapore, where a 1967 epidemic was fuelled by rumours that koro was caused by eating tainted pork. Bures does not pretend to be a cultural anthropologist. But he is a brisk, perceptive, congenial travelling companion, thinking seriously about the mysteries of culture and illness.

Culture shapes the way the world looks, Bures writes, but more than that: culture shapes how the world feels. After a long period abroad, Bures would often come home with the uncanny sensation of finding his own culture simultaneously familiar and foreign. Returning from Italy or Tanzania to his home in Minneapolis, he writes: “I’d arrive and feel like an anthropologist examining a race of people who ran in circles, who thought bulging muscles are beautiful, and who saw convenience as a kind of birthright.”

This is no idle relativism: at roughly the same time that villagers in Hainan were becoming convinced that their penises had been stolen, for instance, many Americans believed that they or their children had been sexually abused by Satanists. Some patients recalled episodes of necrophilia, forced abortions and cannibalism, often directed by their parents and a secret network of cultists. Many suspected of this abuse were convicted and sent to prison. What exactly does this strange episode tell us about America in the 1980s?

While conditions like koro are undeniably strange, even to most members of the society in which they occur, they are also avenues to understanding. Stories bind a people together, Bures explains, for they do more than reveal our fears and anxieties and common-sense beliefs: they also reveal the architecture of our selves. Stories “hold the world together”, Bures writes. “They’re the raft on which we steer our lives down the river. If it falls apart, if we abandon it, if it’s destroyed on the rocks, all we can do is swim.”

By Carl Elliot in "New Scientist", June 18, 2016, n.3078, excerpts p. 44. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.