27. Getting Weirder with the Jumping Frenchmen, Part I
Plus thoughts on doom listening
Dear Readers,
I dig the early morning. I mean I really, really dig the early morning. Especially when the weather is just right and I can sit on my front porch, sip coffee, and listen to the symphony of crickets and cicadas. I like to home in on just one of these sounds and listen to it ease in and out. It’s like the Universe is breathing.
SAY NO TO DRUGS, PROFESSOR!!!
I know, right!?!?!? Though I swear it’s not drugs. It’s nature. Nature will utterly blow your mind if you let it. Not to mention that “breathing” Universe.
Did you know the Sun is so big that about 1.3 million Earths could fit inside of it? Did you know there are 100 billion stars just in our own galaxy, and that there are something like 200 billion galaxies in the Universe? It’s all amazing.
But there’s also this middle-aged guy who walks by my house every morning. I see him when I’m up especially early. Around 5:30 AM. He’s got his phone out, listening to outrage media at full volume (no earbuds). He’s definitely not hearing the symphony all around him. He’s just getting REALLY ANGRY to start the day. I can see it in his gait: “Those motherfuckers!” I bet he’s an absolute delight by the time he’s having his cornflakes. His poor wife.
Is this a new culture-bound syndrome? Doom listening? Doom Scrolling? It can’t be healthy. I guarantee that listening to the cicadas is a lot better for you. But, as usual, we’re getting off topic.
Plus I know what you’re really wondering about this morning: The “jumping Frenchmen”!! WTF is that, you ask? I was asking myself the same question after Wednesday’s newsletter. And then I did a little digging. And boy am I glad I did!
It’s interesting. Really interesting. Especially in the context of our ongoing inquiry into Mexico’s mad marihuanos of the early twentieth century, which, I’ll remind you, began as an inquiry into why people started smoking marijuana in cigarettes in the United States around the same time. We’ll eventually come back to the cigarette question, but let’s keep following this fascinating diversion! Why not??
Most of what I’ve just learned about “Jumping Frenchmen” comes from a great article in the January 2007 issue of Maine History. One of the authors, Stephen Whalen, has a PhD in history from the University of Maine. I had an interview with the University of Maine exactly one year before that article came out. Needless to say, those bastards didn’t hire me.
Anyway, here’s how Whalen and his co-author, Robert Bartholomew, describe the phenomenon:
The incidence of Jumping Frenchmen was (and perhaps still is) a phenomenon located along the northern fringe of Maine and New Hampshire and across the border in the adjacent Province of Quebec. In these areas, small pockets of people, especially in isolated communities and lumbering camps, exhibited dramatic responses when startled. Their behavior included a combination of jumping, screaming, swearing, flailing out and striking bystanders, and throwing objects that happened to be in their hands. The most extraordinary feature of these displays was ‘automatic obedience’: subjects briefly did whatever they were told. Because jumping was associated with French-Canadians, the victims became known as the Jumping Frenchmen of Maine.
Cannabis has nothing directly to do with Jumping Frenchmen. But the amount of overlap with our story had me literally laughing out loud as I read the Whalen and Bartholomew piece.
Jumping Frenchmen first came to the attention of academics at the 1878 meeting of the American Neurological Association. There, the famous neurologist George M. Beard noted that groups of lumberjacks near Moosehead Lake in northern Maine suffered from this strange condition.
A few of the nerdiest among you may remember George M. Beard. He was the guy who in the late-nineteenth century popularized the condition “neurasthenia,” that is, “the rampant exhaustion and melancholic disorders of sedentary brain workers and their sensitive, anxiety-ridden women,” as my friend and distinguished historian Paul Gootenberg has described it. Paul wrote a great book on the drug that was originally advertised as a cure for neurasthenia. What drug was that? Well, of course—COCAINE! Yes! It’s true! Really helps you focus.
But that’s a story for yet another day.
Though one more point on neurasthenia—I just learned that the first person to publish on this ailment was Edwin H. Van Deusen, an alienist (i.e. psychiatrist) at the Kalamazoo Asylum, which is about five blocks from my childhood home. Known as “the State Hospital” to locals, it’s also the place where they sent Malcolm X’s mother in the mid-twentieth century. I’ll be in the neighborhood next week for Thanksgiving if anybody wants to party.
Anyway, Beard was the first to describe Jumping Frenchmen as it manifested among these quirky lumberjacks. But you’ll never guess what he compared it to? No, not “amok,” but good guess! And very close.
Here’s Beard:
I found . . . brief reference to precisely similar phenomena on the other side of the globe, among the Malays. The notice was . . . sufficient to show that there was no difference in the phenomena as exhibited in these different races.
My God! It’s the Malays again, and yet another Malay culture-bound syndrome, this one called “latah.” Whalen and Bartholomew elaborate:
Indonesian natives used the term latah to describe the reaction of startled individuals who would mimic behavior or words, swear, or occasionally follow commands. Severe cases typically responded with verbal insults, obscenities, disrobing, mimicking the words and actions of others, and “automatic obedience.” The word latah is derived from the Malay words for ticklish, nervous, creeping, and love madness.
Interestingly, latah was first identified for Europeans in 1867 by Dutch colonialist F.J. Van Leent. The Dutch were obviously very busy, from Van Leent in Indonesia to Van Deusen in Kalamazoo!
In any case, Western scientists, as was typical of the day, often used latah as evidence of Western racial superiority, with native peoples supposedly being “inherently nervous, mentally unstable, and irrational,” as any nineteenth century orientalist would have readily explaned. (You’ll remember that hashish was a a quintessential symbol of such “oriental” atmospheres.) While Beard framed the “jumpers” as generally robust in constitution, he speculated that “jumping was precipitated by temporary degeneration from exposure to their rustic environment.”
Degeneration!! This opens a whole separate can of worms. Did you know that, when Mexico banned marijuana in 1920, the justification was that cannabis could “degenerate the race”? Yes, it’s true! But one thing at a time, people!
I can’t believe it. We’ve hardly gotten anywhere and we’re already out of time for today. Just too many good things to comment on. And we’re just getting started. So let’s stop now and call this Part I. In Part II, I’ll offer a little more on Jumping Frenchmen and some of the ways this relates to amok, cannabis, and more. Until then, enjoy your weekend.