History and science of mass hysteria
turmeric, usually used to keep people at bay, become popular. Warding off evil becomes a local cottage industry as a community waits to zero in on the next report. It is generally a vulnerable group that is targeted. Children, womenandthevictimsarebothcomplainants and rumour-mongers. Forensic experts collect the braid for analysis but forensics is little match for witchcraft as the anxiety spreads. It is eerie watching official rationality and irrationality battle but what makes it sinister is the element of violence as superstition inevitably searches for a scapegoat as a cause. A Dalit woman, a migrant worker, a minority group meets a gory death that changes the narrative. The victim as complainant has an innocuous story but rumours provide the agency of the narrative. The police then find their own scapegoats but few look at the social profile of anxiety, displacement, the appearance of a modernity that does not answer questions of meaning. Indeed, people prefer collective insanity to an individual recognition of problems.
Rumour constructs a monster, a demonology which is always amorphous. What it smashes is the usual routine of domestic life as suspicion cuts down on interaction and a fortress complex develops. There is a predictable quality of narratives. What one misses is the presence of groups, civil society activists, doctors who can tackle the event, civil society activists to initiate panchayat meetings. As hysteria mounts, violence increases. Yet a few weeks later after the ‘criminal’ is caught, few are able to explain what happened. Social scientists rarely follow up. The standard explanations hardly explain. Just as we have early warning groups to predict a stock market crash, we need groups that examine such explosions of irrationality as symptoms of what such societies are going through. Each event whether monkey man, braid women, or the much-saluted Ganesh becomes a fable unfolding the symptoms of trust and the contours of suspicion and anxiety. Here, the Ojha and the Shaman may be as necessary as the psychiatrist. Such crises can be a moment of collaboration between our different psychiatric systems. Constructing such epidemics as mere law and order problems adds little to understanding or healing.