18 BUREAU OF AMERICAN ETHNOLOGY [BuU. 175 



SO much more detailed than my leading question and fitted the clas- 

 sical picture of hysterical laughing and crying so perfectly, that their 

 correctness is beyond question. This, in turn, serves to justify the 

 method of leading questions, especially when investigating a little- 

 known problem. 



A further, and possibly even more important, advantage of the 

 technique of asking leading questions is that it enables one to ascer- 

 tain which types of mental disorders are characteristically absent in 

 a given societ}^ Thus, without a long and elaborate description of 

 obsessive-compulsive symptomatology, it is quite certain that the 

 striking absence of this neurosis could not have been discovered. 



Naturally, tliis dual approach makes the presentation of one's noso- 

 logical data in a rational sequence quite difficult in the end. For ex- 

 ample, a given clinical entity, as defined by modem psychiatry, may 

 be split up by native informants into two or more separate diseases 

 of the mind. Conversely, they may assign to a single native diag- 

 nostic category several kinds of disorders that, in terms of modem 

 psychiatric knowledge, are not interrelated in any way. 



There are several reasons for the extremely limited overlap between 

 Mohave and modern clinical entities. 



( 1 ) The systematic classification of Mohave neuroses and psychoses 

 in modern psychiatric terms is an extremely hazardous undertaking. 

 In fact, comparisons between Mohave and Western nosological cate- 

 gories are often practically useless, particularly because the latter are 

 so precise. In other words, the clinical and theoretical data provided 

 by native informants are seldom accurate enough to permit an exact 

 differentiation between, let us say, anxiety hysteria and anxiety neu- 

 rosis. In addition, shamanistic specialists, nonspecialist shamans, 

 and laymen sometimes describe the symptoms of a given illness in a 

 variety of ways and sometimes also mention altogether different, or 

 seemingly different, etiologies (pt. 4, pp. 117-128) . 



Generally speaking, it is quite possible that native categories may 

 occasionally fit the psychiatric realities of the tribe better than do 

 the categories of modem psychiatry, which were formulated so as to 

 fit patients belonging to our culture. This is not at all surprising, 

 provided one realizes that the mental disorders found in a given 

 society are the products of the characteristic strains of the tribal 

 culture pattern, which in turn underlies all native psychiatric theories, 

 views, and therapeutic techniques. For example, one and the same 

 culture — that of the Malays — is responsible both for the occurrence 

 of cases of amok and for the cultural formulation of the concept of 

 amok. This means that the term "amok" is, even from the view- 

 point of scientific psychiatry, probably a better label for that type of 

 behavior than is "paranoid schizophrenia," because running amok 



