Americans vs Japanese reactions to 'bad' feelings

I just read about a fascinating study called 'Feeling Bad Is Not Always Unhealthy', conducted by Shinobu Kitayama, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Kitayama surveyed American and Japanese participants, and in the Americans he found a correlation between feeling so-called negative emotions (for example, sadness) and increased inflammation. But--and here's the fascinating bit-- there was no such correlation with the Japanese. 

Kitayama's conclusion was that Americans believe 'negative' emotions are harmful, and so they are!

Americans are so sure that 'negative' emotions are bad for them, that they feel anxious about feeling them--in other words, Americans feel bad about feeling bad, and their body's reaction reflects that extra layer of stress. Americans feel threatened by such feelings, whereas Japanese do not.

Kitayama concludes that for Americans, feeling bad is more stressful than it is for Japanese, because it is felt as a “source of threat to self-image”, whereas in Japanese culture, it is understood to be “natural and integral to life”.

You can read more about it here.

How Multi-Lingual People Inhibit Their Other Languages (And Multi-Lingual Scrabble)

I switch between French and English without translating. I've largely forgotten my German, which was once fluent. Now I'm learning Spanish, and when I'm searching for a word, the French inevitably comes up and gets in the way.

It turns out that when you're multi-lingual, and speaking, all your languages are activated, and your brain inhibits the ones you're not using. Sometimes the inhibition is weaker, and then you get "intrusion errors" where the wrong language pushes its way in. 

Paradoxically, the brain of a bilingual person can inhibit their dominant language more than the non-dominant one, so that they can be slower to access words in their stronger language. I feel this when I'm playing Scrabble in English; my other languages jostle each other in the doorway of my mind, suggesting French, German, Spanish and even some Chinese words that I could make with the letters in my stash.Wrong, wrong, wrong--until I invented a game called "Multi-Lingual Scrabble", that I play with friends who speak other languages. (For the rules see below.)

Personally I find that even a French accent seems to prime my brain for French, so that as soon as someone starts speaking English with a French accent, my brain comes up with French words, despite my dominant language being English.

If this interests you, then for more details, read this fascinating article.

(Rules of Multi-Lingual Scrabble: You can put down a word in any language, but you're on your honour that it's a real word. If challenged, you have to prove it, and if you cheated, you miss your next turn. Try it; it's fun. Even though remember, Scrabble sets are adjusted for different languages, with different numbers of letters according to which letters are used the most in each language. So for example, if you're playing with an Italian Scrabble set, it will be harder to form words in French, etc.)

India Syndrome

Here's a fascinating article about a syndrome found in foreigners who visit India with high expectations of spiritual fulfilment, and go a little off the rails, with disorientation and even psychosis happening to them as a result. 

It describes the research of a French doctor named Régis Airault, and an Indian psychiatrist named Sunil Mittal.

Régis Airault worked at the French Consulat in Mumbai, and saw this over and over again. He differentiates it from simple culture shock, and says it is also found in other places of great psychological significance to people, such as Jerusalem, or Florence, where people can be overcome by the religious or artistic significance of the place.

Sunil Mittal is the senior psychiatrist at the Cosmos Institute of Mental Health and Behavioural Sciences in New Delhi. He also sees the syndrome regularly, and he breaks it down into two categories: simple tourists who arrive with a pre-existing problem or vulnerability and have a breakdown, and people who arrive hoping for a deeply significant spiritual journey. In either case, he says the best treatment is a ticket home.

Wooden Maps Made by Traditional Seafaring People in Greenland and the Marshall Islands

I recently discovered two different types of 3D maps, made by traditional seafarers in Greenland and the Marshall Islands. 

The ones from Greenland are carved from wood and depict sections of coastline, while the ones from the Marshall Islands (like the one on the left) are made of thin wooden slats tied together, and cowrie shells, and depict ocean currents.

 

Carved wooden maps from Greenland

An article at Atlas Obscura presents carved wooden maps made by the Tunumiit people of Greenland before contact with Europeans. It says, "the maps show how the Tunumiit cognitively organized their world, and have captured the imaginations of map enthusiasts around the world for over half a century. But as time passes the maps have acquired a new mythology that doesn’t quite suit them. Anecdotal descriptions of the maps online today compare them to some sort of archaic, ruggedized handheld GPS device: waterproof, small enough to fit inside a mitten, and naturally buoyant. It’s easy to picture a lonely seal hunter in his kayak using the map to navigate through an archipelago by the light of the moon. But this is how we use modern maps, as roadside companions, and suggesting that the Tunumiit used them the same way is ... Eurocentric...[since] there is, in fact, no ethnographic or historical evidence that carved wooden maps were ever used by any Inuit peoples for navigation in open water, and there are no other similar wooden maps like these found in any collection of Inuit material anywhere else in the world"

It goes on to explain that the Inuit people have traditionally used carvings "to accompany stories and illustrate important information about people, places, and things", and says, "a wooden relief map, would have functioned as a storytelling device, like a drawing in the sand or snow, that could be discarded after the story was told. As geographer Robert Rundstum has noted, in Inuit tradition, the act of making a map was frequently much more important than the finished map itself. The real map always exists in one’s head."

 

Stick charts from the Marshall Islands

The Marshall Islands stick charts, which date from at least the middle of the nineteenth century are called "rebbelibs, medos, and mattangs" in local languages. They focus not on land forms or coastlines but on the sea itself and particularly the ocean currents--which tells you something crucial about the way the people here see the world.  

National Geographic says there are two different types of charts: "The first and probably older type... contains abstract representations of how waves interact with bodies of land in general. The second type illustrates actual islands, often represented by cowrie shells, along with swell patterns identified and recorded by pilots. “There aren’t that many examples from across the Pacific of this kind of navigational knowledge being encoded or physically represented,” says anthropologist Joseph Genz of the University of Hawaii. He says the charts were used mainly as teaching devices rather than real-time way-finders. They help to impart perhaps the most crucial concept in the Marshallese navigational tradition, that of the dilep, or “backbone wave.” “People still describe the dilep as the most important wave to find,” Genz says. “It’s like a path you can follow to the next atoll. Instead of going landmark to landmark, you go seamark to seamark.”

For more on traditional indigenous world views and in particular the ocean navigation of the Pacific Island peoples, read Wade Davis's book The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World.

China's 'Empty Heart Syndrome'

Chinese psychologist Professor Xu Kaiwen, the deputy head of the mental health education and counseling center at Peking University, has named a new syndrome he sees among China's top students. He calls it 'empty heart syndrome': kōngxīn bìng 空心病 

I teach on the online Chinese MA in Applied Psychology being offered by the California Institute of Integral Studies and Zijing Education Group in China, and it was my students that alerted me to this newly named syndrome.

Here's another point of view though, suggesting sampling bias may be part of the perception of students' negative mood.

For an excellent discussion of the state of the burgeoning mental health industry in China, see Li Zhang's 'Anxious China'. 

Honjok: Living Alone in S Korea

 Living alone is a new thing in South Korea, which values family, community and work.

This article describes the new phenomenon. Sometimes characterised as lonely, it's increasingly a choice for singles who love their solitude and freedom.

 

Hikikomori: the Japanese Hermits Who Stay in their Room for Years

By Guest Blogger Mitsue Karaman

Hikikomori or “social withdrawal” now impacts an estimated 700,000 to 1.5 million youths across Japan, who stay isolated in their rooms, and disengage from social activities such as school or work for months, years or even decades.

Typically the hikikomori is a young male, often the oldest son in an upper-middle class, nuclear family. Men are four times more likely to become hikikomori, and the onset of symptoms often occur in childhood as a form of school refusal which gradually leads to full withdrawal in adolescence. Hikikomori frequently present a profound sense of apathy: disillusioned by society at-large, these young men lack the motivation to engage with life and have difficulty developing their own identity.

While clinical cause is still unclear, studies from the past decade have begun to identify a correlation between hikikomori and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Hikikomori individuals have a developmental history of early childhood language delay, a severe shyness and preference to play alone, and a focused interest on numbers versus imaginative play. They have difficulty fitting in and often experience bullying, which may lead to truancy and trigger social withdrawal. Like people with high-functioning ASD, many individuals do well academically and develop compensation strategies to cope with social challenges in childhood; therefore, the earlier symptoms may go unnoticed and onset of hikikomori may sometimes occur in the individual's late 20s.

The theories on the etiology of hikikomori--which began to be noticed in the 1970's--are many, ranging from the depressed economy, a strict education system, to a culture where parents place immense pressure on their eldest son. While these factors may contribute to the increase of hikikomori in recent decades, I believe they are merely triggers for the onset of the condition and the true etiology is buried deeper in history. By withdrawing and isolating themselves from the world, I believe individuals with hikikomori are restoring their inner spirit – tamashii (Japanese for spirit/soul) – to reemerge stronger and better adjusted to the world around them.

Japan has a long history of isolationism, seen in its mythology and early Shinto and Confucian religious beliefs. Solitude and introspection is inherent in the Japanese spirit. However, the rapid modernization of post-war Japan dramatically changed the nation from its core. Rituals and tradition were lost as nuclear families became the norm, artisans and craftsmen disappeared with industrialization, and spiritual practice declined with less than 40% of the population now saying they practice a religion. I believe this created a generation of youths with little access to spirituality, who–triggered by the imbalances in modern society–are now experiencing a spiritual crisis. They are searching for spiritual richness in their lives instead of the material success society presents as self-actualization. They withdraw and isolate themselves into solitude that, for the first time, offers them space to explore their consciousness and purpose in life.

The rising popularity of mindfulness in young adults illustrates a culture in need of stillness, introspection, and a foundation to rebuild the Japanese spirit. This perspective also allows us to understand why hikikomori is now emerging in other countries around the globe. The loss of culture, tradition and spirituality is an impact of globalization that many nations face, and in this way, spiritual crisis is an issue affecting all modernized countries.

For a longer, in depth investigation of hikikomori, click here.

Uppgivenhetssyndrom: Refugee Children Facing Deportation Fall into Comas

Refugee children in Sweden are falling into a state that looks like a coma, when their family's applications for asylum are denied. The so-called "resignation syndrome", or uppgivenhetssyndrom, has so far been diagnosed in over 400 children. It seems unique to Sweden, and is found mainly in children from former Soviet states, many of whom are Roma.

A New Yorker article on the phenomenon has a detailed account of the syndrome and its manifestations.

The children, who have stayed in these comas for months at a time, are not faking, though their brains are not damaged. They are described as "“totally passive, immobile, lack[ing] tonus, withdrawn, mute, unable to eat and drink, incontinent and not reacting to physical stimuli or pain.”

One of the children describes feeling as though "he were in a glass box with fragile walls, deep in the ocean. If he spoke or moved, he thought, it would create a vibration, which would cause the glass to shatter. “The water would pour in and kill me,” he said.” The boy has now recovered, after his parents were granted residence permits for the family. This appears to be the only cure for the syndrome. Other children, whose families have been deported, are still in comas in their home country.

The director of a child psychiatry center in Stockholm has proposed that the phenomenon is a kind of "willed dying", and likens it to a syndrome found in some prisoners in Nazi concentration camps who “stopped eating, sat mute and motionless in corners, and expired.”

The phenomenon could perhaps be explained as an extensive vagal shutdown, or freeze response, in which the nervous system shuts down as a response to overwhelming and inescapable stress. Why it's unique to Sweden, nobody knows, except that we do know that different cultures develop their own culturally-specific ways of expressing emotional distress.

It appears that the refugee children in Sweden have developed a new meme for expressing the fear and despair experienced by refugees facing deportation.

The Algonquin Concept of Wetiko

I've just found out about a concept I sorely needed, in order to account for the state of our planet, where 8 men own half the wealth, and the very ecosystem is in peril due to human greed. It's the Algonquin concept of wetiko (also called wendigo or windigo).

"Wetiko is an Algonquin word for a cannibalistic spirit or thought-form driven by greed, excess and selfish consumption. It deludes its host into believing that consuming the life force of others for self-aggrandizement or profit is a logical and morally upright way to live."

The wetiko, or windigo, is like the hungry ghost in Chinese tradition: always starving, never sated. It's continually looking for new victims. Whenever a windigo devours another person, it grows in proportion to the meal it has just consumed, so it can never be sated. What a metaphor for capitalism, with its insane imperative for continual growth in a context of finite and almost exhausted resources.

Some native traditions believe that humans who become overpowered by greed can turn into wendigos, and that environmental destruction and insatiable greed are caused by wendigos:

"Every time someone is seen justifying the destruction of life for profit—it is wetiko.
Every time compassion is vitally missing during a time of suffering—it is wetiko.
Every time a privileged person uses another as a “throw away” toy—it is wetiko.
Every time, in every way a community or country is impoverished so that others can be rich – it is wetiko."

Externalizing a mindset by personifying it in this way helps draw our attention to our own behaviour. That's if you think this is a metaphor. Maybe it's literally true, and wetikos are out there, taking over peoples' minds and causing them to indulge in mad destruction. Personally, I don't have a better explanation for what's happening.

You can read a searing account of the mindset of colonization as wetiko, in Columbus and Other Cannibals, by Native American author Jack Forbes.

Whistled Languages

I'm posting a link here to an article about whistled languages, just because they're fascinating.
Whistled languages generally use whistles to imitate the tones of the spoken language, in ways that carry much further across distances.
Here's a Wikipedia explanation.
Whistled languages are found around the world.

Sexual and Relationship Habits in Japan, the Netherlands and the US

I'm posting links to two recent articles on relationships and sex in Japan, the Netherlands and the US. The articles show how cultural attitudes to gender, work, family, and sex drive the behaviour of young people in surprisingly far-reaching ways that are experienced as internal motivation.

Japan: no sex for us thanks
The article about Japan, which appeared in the Guardian, claims that young people are choosing to remain single and not get into sexual or romantic relationships at all.

"A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way."

Wow, that's a lot of people choosing celibacy over coupling. The article suggests that major economic changes which have destroyed men's career security, as well as the recent earthquake and tsunami, have ruined peoples' sense of certainty. But it also blames ultra-conservative attitudes toward women, which make motherhood or career a strictly binary choice, and which project virginal chastity and lack of desire onto women.

"Both men and women say to me they don't see the point of love. They don't believe it can lead anywhere," says Aoyama. "Relationships have become too hard. Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. Japanese men have become less career-driven, and less solvent, as lifetime job security has waned. Japanese women have become more independent and ambitious. Yet conservative attitudes in the home and workplace persist."

This article has been critiqued in Slate magazine for bias. Americans too, says the author, are in a relationship crisis. Though his figures seem less drastic than the ones quoted in the Guardian article, I agree. So let's take a look at the Netherlands, which reveals a much healthier, and happier, picture.

The Dutch: sex and love and family togetherness
In the article on the Dutch vs the Americans, based on a new book by Amy Schalet, an almost opposite picture emerges--at least in the Netherlands. The article starts with some solid statistics: "Teen birth rates are eight times higher in the U.S. than in Holland. Abortion rates are twice as high. The American AIDS rate is three times greater than that of the Dutch."

Why this shocking disparity?

For a start, Dutch parents have a relaxed, open attitude about sex, so that boyfriends and girlfriends stay over, and hang out in the family, so that teen sexual experience is embedded in relationship, and safety. In the culture, sex has not been decoupled from love and relationship. Hookups are not the norm; love is!

Birth control is readily available (free of religious overtones) for teens in the Netherlands, and sex education teaches about sex in the context of love--rather than stressing, as we do here, the dangers of dating, and the importance of abstinance. Holland is free of American cultural myths (which all too quickly become adopted as being reality) that men "do love to get sex" and that women "do sex to get love". (Remember that one? People have even quoted it as truth in my human development class!) As the article says,

"For boys, our [US] culture devalues their impulse to love. But research shows that in the U.S., boys are quite romantic. Other research finds that for girls, recognition of sexual desire and wishes is taboo, so they have fewer tools to assess what’s right for them. That makes things very difficult.

In the US, Christian dominance has constructed a view that morality has to go with strict religious belief. If you slip from virginal chastity, you're in the realm of sin. So we have constructed a view of sex that gives only two options: "either a very sensationalized unrealistic scoring type of mentality or no sex until marriage." And it's also one that condemns victims of sexual assault, or LGB teens, to an agony of shame.

But the secular Dutch view is that people are naturally cooperative and decent. They have a concept called gezelligheid, which means something like ‘cozy togetherness’ or ‘conviviality.’ This important concept means that across generations people spend time together, enjoying each other's company. The Dutch social policies help maintain that, with part-time work and child care made easy. The result is less alienation, and more relating.

Where would you rather be discovering your sexuality?

The Hidden Trauma of the Wars in Europe

The generation of my parents were children during World War II. It's that recent. And it's horrific. The Blitz, in UK, included 58 days of continuous bombing. Fifty eight days. And the nights. Continuous. Likewise, Dresden, in Germany, was almost completely destroyed in the carpet-bombing campaign by the Allies.

And yet.....NOBODY TALKS ABOUT THE TRAUMA. And this happened to people who are still alive today.*

And it's not only the Second World War. My grandfather was gassed and shell-shocked somewhere on the front line in France in the First World War, and was never the same again. But we don't talk about that either. Even though almost every village in the UK has a monument to the men who died, usually with over a dozen names--they put the men of one village into a platoon together, so when the platoon was wiped out, so were all the men of an entire community. Eleven million men died across Europe, and an entire generation of women grew up and died spinsters because of it.

The French, as a nation, talk endlessly about the Holocaust, trying to make sense of what happened, and what they did to contribute. In UK, the War (meaning the second one) is referred to as 'Britain's finest hour'. In Germany, the discourse is one of national shame. But there is no discourse that I know of about the post-traumatic effect of the wars on the general population throughout Europe.
No discourse about the PTSD. Nothing about the effect on our cultural and familial psyche of two hideous wars in 40 years. (It's alluded to when people write about the drive behind the European Union, but that's it.)

Is this because the thing is too big and extensive? Is it shame, that the flower of our culture led to this? Was it swept under the rug in the urgency of reconstruction? Was the Holocaust so hideous that no-one else's trauma seemed valid beside it?

And yet I see it in our familial and personal psyches all the time. When the first Gulf War started, women my age fought physically over storable food in the aisles of French supermarkets, which were emptied every day of flour, sugar, pasta and oil--that was the memory of near famine. When the Falklands war errupted, my mother switched into another personality, and the country was swept away by jingoism--that was the memory of the patriotism that kept them going through the war. When I hear sirens, my entire body floods with terror--that's the family memory of the Blitz, in which my father and his family were buried in rubble when a church collapsed on them in Coventry.

John Cleese made great hay out of "don't mention the war". But it's about time we began to mention the war.

It's why Angela Merkel, who keeps bailing out Europe, is loathed in the very countries she has saved, and pictured with a swastika. It's why Israel is caught in a terrible re-enactment of unfathomable trauma with the Palestinians. It's why I save jars, string, paper bags and left-overs--because my grannies, who lived through both wars, never threw a thing away. It's why when my dear German friend Bettina, her mother, and I talked about the war at her mother's house in Berlin last year, the air seemed to thicken around us.

There's a positive side to it too. As Tony Judt points out in his book 'Postwar', Europeans do not share the unlimited US optimism and belief in progress, because we know what collective shadow looks like. We don't trust our governments. We are less keen to go to war. The Germans have a an unparalleled anti-nuclear movement, I believe, because they have recently experienced utter devastation. The French have a law against 'non-assistance of persons in danger', and don't allow 'my boss told me to do it' as a defense under the law, because of the camps. When their government does something they don't like, they strike and take to the streets. Those Greek riots we keep seeing--that's Europeans, remembering the war.

*Since I wrote this blog post, I've become aware of an excellent book called 'Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II', by Keith Lowe. If you're interested in the effects of the war on the general population of Europe, this book is a great place to start.

Cultural Casebook: How To Hear the Voice of God

T M Luhrman is a psychological anthropologist, which means she likes to investigate our lives from the inside, and see how we create our worlds through the workings of our minds. In this book, she reports on the process by which evangelical Christians learn to hear the voice of God.

Luhrman is agnostic about whether or not these people are 'really' tuning into the voice of the Almighty. She makes no pronouncements about whether or not she believes in God herself. And this neutrality makes the book possible. It's not a polemic; it's an impartial investigation. In order to research the book she joined a congregation, attended church, went to bible study meetings and other classes, learned to pray and interviewed the church members about their own experience. The result is fascinating. I couldn't put it down.

What Luhrman found is that evangelicals learn to tune in to the different qualities of thoughts within their own mind, in order to distinguish the impulses of ego from the 'other' messages that come to them, potentially from God. (They qualify the 'other' voices carefully, to ensure that they really are divine, using criteria such as whether the message is asking you to hurt yourself or someone else, in which case, it is classified as not the voice of God.) As a Jungian, I would identify these 'other' messages as coming from non-ego parts of the psyche. Instead of messages from God, I would call them messages from the Self--that part of the psyche which participates in the universal ground of being, and which one might call the soul. For Jungians, a dialogue between the ego and the Self is essential to health and individuation, or evolution.

Luhrman also distinguishes several types of prayer, and reports that evangelicals train their minds to enter into the stories of the bible, visualising the scenes in sensory detail, in ways that are similar to the visualisation prayers used by Tibetan Buddhists. This training results in sharper mental imagery, more intense emotional experience of God, and better ability to hear 'his' voice.

A key element of the evangelical experience is the gradually acquired certainty that God loves you exactly the way you are. God becomes a self-object, in psychological terminology, which has an enormous healing potential. And in a stunning paradox, not having prayers answered seems to increase the faith of an evangelical Christian, who learns to lean into God for comfort and love.

This book is fascinating in itself, a 'must' if you're interested in the psychology of religion, and a great source of insight if you work or live with Christians. As a non-Christian, I found myself drawn to trying some of this, as indeed did Luhrman. Anyone in Jungian analysis learns to heed the voice of the Self, so the idea made sense to me. In Jungian therapy we use art and active imagination to engage in dialogue with the Self, and we attend to the synchroncities that happen in life, and which seem to provide us with guidance. It's not so far removed from the phenomena Luhrman describes, and I found the book creating an unexpected bridge for me to the world of evangelical Christianity.

Amaeru: A Japanese Term For The Desire and Need To Be Cared For

The Japanese concept of amaeru became known in the West via the work of Japanese psychologist Takeo Doi.

According to Doi, amaeru refers to the behaviour of attempting to get someone to take care of you--usually a parent, teacher, spouse or boss. Doi defines amaeru, as meaning "to depend and presume upon another's benevolence." It indicates "helplessness and the desire to be loved", and denotes 'dependency needs'.

Amae (the noun form of amaeru) describes behaviour which constitutes an implicit request for indulgence of one's perceived needs--it may include coyness, capriciousness and childishness. It is based on the prototype of a child's behaviour with its parents.

A Japanese website retells a story from Doi, about amae and how the lack of amae in America shocked him: "His friend put some cookies ... on a table and said "If you are hungry, please help yourself." Coming from the culture of amae, Doi felt put out. He was hungry, but he was in an amae frame of mind. He did not want to say, "Well I don't mind if I do," and tuck into the cookies. He wanted his host to actively perceive ("sasshi") that he was hungry and give him a plate of cookies. He wanted to be mollycoddled. The word "mollycoddle," not so common in English, helps us to understand the term amae. Some one who wants to be mollycoddled does not articulate their desire but hopes by their person or their actions to elicit indulgence from an other without the use of language. As soon as they put their desire into language they are putting themselves on an equal footing, as another separate desiring individual - but the person who "amaes" (if I am allowed to conjugate the verb) wants to merge (Doi argues) with the other."

According to the Wikipedia article on Doi, the range of behaviours described by amae includes that of "a husband who comes home drunk and depends on his wife to get him ready for bed. Amae has a connotation of immaturity, but it is also recognized as a key ingredient in loving relationships, perhaps more so than the notions of romance so common in the West."

Some more examples of amae are listed here, in a blog by a Spanish person living in Japan. S/he also notes: "Amae plays a fundamental role in a collectivist society where individualism is not well seen and people likes the group to have the power. Amae helps in the process of creating harmonious interconnections inside the family, in the companies and between friends. Japanese do not usually confront each other. It is very difficult to see Japanese people arguing. Amae is one of the tools to keep the harmony, the peace, the wa 和 in the Japanese society. [sic]"

The concept of amae was taken up by US psychologists Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Faith Bethelard, who translate it as 'cherishment' in their book 'Cherishment: A Psychology of the Heart'. Young-Bruehl and Bethelard use the concept of amae to argue for a more loving form of psychotherapy, proposing that the desire of clients to be cherished is profound, and often goes unmet in therapy. They suggest that pathologies arise when this so human need is not satisfied.

It seems to me that latter concept is important to consider--especially in this culture, where dependency needs are pathologised, and there is little, if any, acceptance of our lifelong human need to be cherished, taken care of, and understood without having to explain.

Two Spirit People: Gender and Transgender in Native American Tradition

In Native American cultures, people that we would usually call gay or transgender are known as 'two-spirit people': people who embody both male and female spirits. Sometimes these two-spirit people are known in anthropological literature as 'berdache'.

This video beautifully presents the two-spirit tradition. It emphasizes that the two-spirit role is a spiritual one, which makes it different from gay or lesbian identity, which is based on the physical and social.

"Traditionally, the Two-spirited person was one who had received a gift from the Creator, that gift being the privilege to house both male and female spirits in their bodies. " Having both male and female within gives two-spirit people the ability to transcend boundaries, including the boundary between the earth and the spirit world. Thus they can provide a conduit to the spirit world. For this reason, two-spirit people were traditionally respected, and held powerful and important roles as teachers and healers.

Native American writers Sandra Laframboise and Michael Anhorn say, "Many tribes had rituals for children to go through if they were recognized as acting different from their birth gender. These rituals ensured the child was truly two-spirit. If parents noticed that a son was disinterested in boyish play or manly work, they would set up a ceremony to determine which way the boy would be brought up. They would make an enclosure of brush, and place in the center both a man's bow and a woman's basket. The boy was told to go inside the circle of brush and to bring something out, and as he entered the brush would be set on fire. The tribe watched what he took with him as he ran out, and if it was the basketry materials they reconciled themselves to his being a 'berdache'."

Sandra Laframboise and Michael Anhorn have posted a detailed article on two-spirit people written from a positive gay identity. They point out the controversy between traditionalists and two-spirit people, in the post-colonial context of today's America, and urge us all to learn from this heritage, which can enrich all of us.

Stages of Acculturation

Acculturation is the process of adapting to living in a new culture. It's something all immigrants go through, and though most writers on the subject seem to think the stages last for weeks or months, I know from experience that it can take place over years. It has taken me ten years to proceed through them, and in the disorienting wilderness of the middle stages, it would have been helpful to have had a description of the process, as a map to guide me toward home.

Stage 1: Euphoria
In this stage, a person is full of excitement at their new surroundings. I remember sitting happily under the grapefruit tree in my tiny backyard during my first long California summer, smelling the jasmine and orange blossom, and living off corn tortillas and avocados. I loved racoons, NPR, all the ethnic food I could get so easily in California, and the natural beauty of the area. This stage lasted several years for me.

Stage 2: Culture Shock and Alienation
In this stage, a person becomes keenly aware of the cultural differences between him/her and the host culture. They feel the loss of aspects of home. Feelings range from irritability to panic. A person can feel deeply lonely and sad, homesick and confused, or angry and hostile at people who do not understand them, and customs that seem wrong. Immigrants in this stage seek out compatriots, and often complain about the local people, culture and customs.
I was filled with a feeling of homesickness in this stage, longing for Europe, seeking out French food, movies and books, and feeling lost in the US. I felt confused about where I ought to be, and found myself often despising the way things were done in America, while trying to hide my prejudices and judgements from my close US friends. It would have been very helpful to me at this stage to have known that it was a phase in a gradual process of settling in, rather than a sign that I had made a big mistake in relocating to the US.

Stage 3: Anomie, or Culture Stress
In this stage, a person gradually restabilises. Some of the stresses of culture shock are solved, and some continue. A person in this stage may experience an identity crisis, feeling at home neither in their home culture, nor in their new culture. In this stage, I used to joke ruefully that I was stuck in the middle of the Atlantic. I knew that there were many things about California that I loved and appreciated, but I still felt confused about my feelings of homesickness for Europe.

Stage 4: Assimilation or Adaptation
In this final stage, a person either assimilates or acculturates.
Acculturation permits a person to find value and meaning in both cultures and identify with both. An acculturated person accepts the new culture, and feels able to negotiate it and live within it, without compromising who they are. They are able to feel similarity with the people of the host culture, as well as identity with their own culture and language.
Assimilation means that a person's old cultural values and beliefs are replaced by the new culture. They leave behind the culture of their parents, for example, and take on "American ways".
As I acculturated to California, I began to take walks around the little Northern California town I live in, smiling at its beauty. I relished soy chai and Thai food, and local farmer's markets. I loved the vast computer-linked library system, the local geeks, quaint wooden cottages, and bay trees. I felt fully myself, with all of my European-ness, living in California, and I began to deepen my relationships with American friends. I decided to apply for citizenship.

All immigrants negotiate these stages differently. Our reasons for coming here make a difference to our acculturation process. For example, did we choose to come, or were we forced to leave our home as refugees, or political exiles? How much trauma and loss were involved? What and whom did we leave behind? What were we able to bring, and what were we able to recreate once we got here? Can we exercise our profession, or did we lose our socio-economic status and earning power when we took up residence here? Is our kind accepted here? Is our being here a matter of struggling to survive, or does it represent an opportunity to thrive?

Trauma Work In Congo Using Local Metaphors

Here's a nice blog post from 'Beyond Trauma', the Somatic Experiencing blog. It describes a group intervention using local metaphors to educate people in Congo about the effects of trauma. Instead of the usual metaphor of "it's like having the brake and the accelerator on at the same time", the trainer uses a locally applicable metaphor of being chased by a wild animal. The audience responds from their experience.

Somatic Experiencing is a trauma therapy methodology developed by Peter Levine. Its basic premise is that PTSD happens as a result of the body's normal fight/flight reactions getting blocked. For example, after a scary event, the body naturally trembles. If we stifle the trembling, then the adrenalin 'locks in', and the fear stays in the body. It's better to allow the body's natural processes of trembling, tears, and so on to move through, bringing calm in their wake. Levine's practitioners focus on retraining the body, and safe release of previously stored trauma.

The Anthropology of Money

Students at the University of California at Irvine have created an online exhibition on the anthropology of money, drawing on information from relatives and friends in immigrant communities in Southern California. The home page says:

"This project took the student researchers to Little Saigon, Little India, the Cambodian Corridor of Long Beach, Los Angeles's Chinatown, Little Armenia, the clubs of Hollywood, the dorms of UC Irvine and the barrios of East LA. It also involved phone calls to far-away relatives and friends, and travels through memories contained in family photo-albums, scrapbooks, and sacred texts."

The exhibition discusses:

• various types and uses of lucky money in Hawaiian, Chinese and Muslim culture
• tandas and cundinas: Mexican-American and Latino-American rotating credit associations
• Lakshmi and ritual uses of money in Hindu culture
• the mid-Lent festival in Armenian culture
• ghost money in Chinese culture
• 'edible money' in the form of dumplings in Chinese culture.

Roots Trump Radiation? A Vital Lesson from the Ukraine

I came across a fascinating article about a community of elderly Ukrainian women who live in the Chernobyl dead-zone, in evident good health. After initially being relocated out of the radiation-contaminated area around the nuclear plant, these women decided within a few weeks to return home to the villages that had been their ancestral home. They have been there for the last twenty-five years.
The women farm beets, potatoes and other crops in the irradiated soil, forage for berries and mushrooms, and hunt game in the forest. Deer are said to be heavily contaminated, yet they are eaten. Although one of the women has thyroid cancer (which is treated), they have, on average, out-lived their peers who did not come back, by ten years.
The article suggests that the psychological effects of forced dislocation, separation from one's land and one's roots, and from one's community, are more dangerous than massive doses of radiation.
This is a deeply provocative idea, but in the context of massive doses of radiation in Japan, some of which have drifted to the US, it's a paradoxically comforting one.
Could it be that grounding into a deep relationship with the land, living in a close-knit community, eating humbly and locally, and living a very simple lifestyle, is in itself curative? These elderly Ukranian peasant women know something profound, and their indigenous wisdom holds an important lesson for the rest of us.

Susto: Loss of Soul Through Terrible Fright

Susto is a disorder you might get in Central or South America, resulting from your soul having left your body as a result of a severe fright. (A more severe form of susto is called espanto, and considered potentially fatal.)

Symptoms of susto include: nervousness, insomnia, despondency, lack of attention to your appearance, listlessness, fear of the event happening again, and stomach upsets. Susto clearly has much in common with PTSD, including the fact that sometimes it doesn't set in until months or years after the event that caused it. See the list of symptoms listed by one curandera, and you will note that many of them correspond to those of PTSD.

But the notion of soul loss captures something essential to the experience of great fear--something that is not captured by the notion of PTSD and the neurological explanations that go with that diagnosis. Great fear (and also great loss) do make you feel as though you had lost some essential part of oneself. The lively, life-filled part: your soul.

Susto is treated by local healers in the US using herbal teas, limpias (cleansing rituals) and barridas (sweeping rituals). During the barrida the client recounts the traumatic event, and then receives a healing usually involving having his or her body swept with a crucifix or some other ritual object such as an egg. Usually a series of barridas is necessary to heal a person from susto.

According to Dr. Dennis O'Neil, at Palomar College, California: "Among the Maya Indians of Southern Mexico and Guatemala, [the] ceremony typically involves a lengthy series of ritual actions in the presence of the patient's friends and relatives. It usually begins with prayers to the Catholic saint of the village. Next, a chicken egg and special herbs are passed over the patient's body to absorb some of the illness. Later, the egg may be left where the soul loss occurred, along with gifts to propitiate the supernatural being who has the patient's soul. The patient is then partly stripped and "shocked" by liquor being sprayed from the curandero's mouth. The patient may then be massaged and finally "sweated" on a bed placed over or near a hot stove. Alternatively, the patient may be covered with many blankets to induce profuse sweating."