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.I really had a knife on my belt; anda Russian Cossack who sat next me proposed laughingly that I give it toAkI´mlAkê.Hearing this, the women of the house raised a frightened cry.AkI´mlAkê, however, who doubtless was stung by the taunt implied in the wordsof the Cossack, suddenly picked up from the ground a long, sharp-pointed chip ofwood, and, baring his abdomen, put one end of the stick on his body, and theother against my breast.Then he made a thrust forward with the whole weight ofhis heavy body.The chip, of course, was snapped in two.One end flew up andhit me on the brow very near to the left eye, leaving an ugly gash.The other endcut a deep scratch entirely across the abdomen of AkI´mlAkê.I wonder that it hadnot been driven in.All this was done so quick that nobody had time to interfere.AkI´mlAkê with much coolness picked up a handful of snow, and, wiping off theblood from his abdomen, quietly went to another tent.In half an hour, when hewas no longer thirsting for blood, I asked him about his actions; but he disclaimedall knowledge, and expressed the utmost wonder when showed the bloody scratchon his own abdomen.(442-3)The psychopathology theory was taken up by other scholars as well.Åke Ohlmarks(1939:100) saw the Arctic s brutal environment and distinctive light regimen as the verycradle of shamanism, and suggested that shamans further south were obliged to find otherways of inducing trance once the tradition migrated out of the Arctic region.Hallucinogens, as well as feigning trance, became in Ohlmarks s view signs of adevolution from the pristine hysterical conditions of the tradition s place of origin (see 156Chapter 9).Although such theories lost ground in the post-war era, they found partialecho in the writings of later figures, such as Ernst Arbman (1970).The psychopathology theory rested in part on the notion of  culture-boundsyndromes  the idea that particular cultures or societies are plagued with distinctive,sometimes unique, forms of mental illness.In the Arctic regions, various culturally-identified ailments including the Sakha (Yakut) menerik, the Nenets and Khantyomeriachenie (a Russian term), and the Inuit pibloktoq became viewed as evidence of apan-Arctic tendency toward severe hysterical episodes, which in turn could serve as theexperiential basis of shamanic trance.Art Leete (1999) details the manner in whichRussian scholars made frequent use of such somatic models in characterizing thebehaviors of indigenous Siberians whom they observed.Recent research on the topic ofculture-bound syndromes, or folk illnesses, has pointed out, however, that adoption offolk categories as empirical facts holds many pitfalls, particularly since the terms usedwithin ordinary culture for perceived illnesses are extremely variable and imprecise(Simons and Hughes 1985, Prince and Tcheng-Laroche 1987).Both Thomas Miller(1999) and Lyle Dick (1995) have pointed out, further, that folk constructs of illnessbecame inextricable parts of a colonial enterprise when they entered Western medical andanthropological discourse, serving to further exoticize, infantilize, and disempowerNative populations.Lyle Dick (1995) presents a cogent argument to this effect in a careful review ofscholarship regarding Inuit pibloktoq.Dick shows, for instance, that the term pibloktoqoriginates in 1894 in the travel journal of Josephine Diebitsch-Peary, who transcribed itas she heard it pronounced by an Inuit guide.Diebitsch-Peary was accompanying her 157husband, the polar explorer Robert Peary, to Northumberland Island at the time.There,she witnessed an Inuit woman s powerful emotional outburst at seeing Peary and hiscompany in her village.Robert Peary would later refer to such outbursts as a culture-specific hysteria in his popular polar accounts of 1907 and 1910, writing:  the adults aresubject to a peculiar nervous affection which they call piblokto a form of hysteria(quoted in Dick 1995: 3).Peary s assessment in turn led the New York psychiatrist A.A.Brill, a prominent Freudian of the time, to write a scholarly paper on the condition,establishing pibloktoq as a scholarly verity (Dick 1995: 3).Yet, as Dick (1995: 10)shows, no such native term actually exists in Eastern Canadian or Western Greenlandicdialects of Inuktitut.Dick suggests that the actual term Diebitsch-Peary may have heardcould be pilugpoq ( he/she is in a bad way ), perdlerorpoq ( he/she is mad ),perdlerpoq ( he/she is starving ), or pirdlerortoq ( a drum dance fit ), terms that indicatea wide array of different phenomena.Further, such bouts of putative hysteria seemed toarise particularly in response to the stresses of Inuit contact with Euro-Americans, andwith Peary in particular, whose mania for reaching the North Pole led him to makesizeable, and often unreasonable, demands of his Native crews.Bouts of putative hysteriaoften freed men from dangerous tasks they were being ordered to do, and may have freedInuit women from the sexual advances of white men whom they were expected to servein various ways.Writes Dick: Pibloktoq did not constitute a specific disorder but rather encompassed amultiplicity of behaviors associated with Inuhuit psychological distress.Theseapparently included reactions of acute anxiety, symptoms of physical (and 158perhaps feigned) illness, expressions of resistance to patriarchy and possiblesexual coercion, and shamanistic practice.What these diverse phenomena sharedin common was that they were largely confined to the early twentieth century, andoften precipitated by the stresses of early contact with Euro-Americans.(23)By the 1930s, reports of  pibloktoq had virtually disappeared, although the medical andanthropological literature remained convinced of its existence.Medical researchers, fortheir part, have suggested that the symptoms reported could stem possibly from calciumdeficiencies (cf.Dick 1995: 3) or overconsumption of vitamin A (Landy 1985), or frommental disturbances arising from the distinctive 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