Author: Gavin Duffy

The phrase ‘running amok’ is one that will be familiar to any speaker of the English language. The phrase contains one of the few Malay words to enter the English lexicon and describes a sense of aimless frenzy and wild incoordination. The history comes from a long line of beliefs and assumptions which surround running amok’s more violent origins, far across the ocean from Britain and reveals an interesting genealogy and exchange of beliefs that have been passed down and around through generations and worlds.

The concept of amok, or amuk is originally a Malay concept meaning to attack in an uncontrollable frenzy, more specifically in a state of mind that exceeds the normal feelings of rage that may be present in a human being. Initially, this was placed down to possession by a tiger spirit known as hantu belian a construct from Malay animist beliefs that pre-dates any of the Hindu, Buddhist, or Islamic influences that would come to flourish in the Malay Archipelago. 

The concept of amok was widely known and has been commonly referred to with metaphors of fire in the studied corpus of Malay texts invoking an uncontrollable and rapidly accumulating state of being that overwhelmed someone and caused them to lose all reason or control.

The concept entered Western spheres from accounts of Iberian explorers in South East Asia such as that of the Portuguese explorer Duarte Barbosa who noted the phenomenon in the early 1500s:

They have very good arms and fight valiantly There are some of them who if they fall ill of any severe illness vow to God that if they remain in health they will of their own accord seek another more honourable death for his service as soon as they get well they take a dagger in and go out into the streets and kill as many they meet both men women and children in such wise that they go like mad dogs killing until they are killed. These are called amuco. And as soon as they see this work they cry out saying amuco amuco in order that people may take care of themselves and they kill them with dagger and spear thrusts [1]

This account shows the disorganised nature of the phenomenon, where people would kill indiscriminately, which was believed by Malays to be possessed by the tiger spirit. Sometimes this violence could be somewhat organised, with bands of amuco warriors used in combat and were observed to be in a state of trance that made them hardier fighters, but equally likely to slaughter non-combatants.

This belief in animistic tiger spirits had survived hundreds of years of religious and philosophical influences settling in Malay lands from the outside world and later European colonists would also not stop its influence. The English anthropologist Walter William Skeat travelled into the less European-influenced areas populated by Malays and recorded their superstitions and folklore in a book published in 1900 titled Malay Magic.

Skeat describes a ceremony in which the tiger spirit is deliberately invoked to possess a Pawang, a Malay medicine man, in order to fight another spirit that was believed to possess his patient. Skeat describes in detail the Pawang growling like an animal before entering a trance-like state and fighting an invisible spirit that has been summoned from his patient body. He fought with a dagger and at times drew blood from his own person before finishing his exorcism and succumbing to a state of nausea.

Medicalisation

The phenomenon had become something of a concern in the 19^th century with the British and Dutch colonial authorities, as well as medical authorities in the West, becoming increasingly concerned about the amok phenomenon.

The colonial authorities had a great concern about the amok as a threat to public order. The mid-19th century had seen a large-scale rebellion, directed somewhat at British rule in India in 1857. While the 1857 rebellion had catalysed notions of certain races being more pre-disposed to violence, they were so in a way that was organised and could be utilised by the British military, leading to high numbers of certain groups like Gurkhas and Sikhs being recruited into the British Indian Army.

The amok syndrome was noted by Dutch sailors, whose Balinese slave labour force rebelled against them in 1782 on the Mercuur ship operated by the Dutch VOC. The slaves had shouted the word ‘amok’ to invoke a violent uprising against their captors which was part of a wider series of rebellions on Dutch VOC ships in Asia in the 1780s. This showed that the amok phenomenon could be an organised threat to colonial interests rather than the pathological irrational violence that it would come to be known as and may have increased the sense of necessity to put a stop to it amongst the colonial authorities. Although as mentioned previously this notion of organised amok appears absent in 19^th and 20th-century British literature on the subject.

Many Western theories were put forward to describe the amok phenomenon. Some blamed the phenomenon on substances like opium or cannabis or potentially some kind of infectious disease that was endemic to the Malay peninsula. Amok however became something that would be thought of in medical terms as a disorder endemic to the Malays. Beginning in 1849 amok began to be thought of as a psychiatric condition, or ‘Amok syndrome’ where the people who had begun to ‘run amok’ were mentally ill. This is an example of what is known in psychiatry as a ‘culture-bound’ syndrome, a mental illness or phenomenon that only appears in one culture, in this case, Malays.

This was noted in psychological or psychiatric terms by colonial administrators and Western medics alike. Two administrators in British Malaya, Sir Hugh Clifford and Frank Swettenham both took a keen interest in the subject of amok in their respective books In Court and Kampong and Malay Sketches.  Clifford writes about amok in a way that distinguishes it from sheer madness, which anyone is capable of and sees it as a particularly Malay response to stressors that would drive Europeans to suicide, an act which he thought Malays were immune from.

Amok became the defining feature of the Malay in the Western imagination, with Hugh Clifford noting the ‘at home’ British most likely having an unrefined view of Malays and Malaya based on its ubiquitousness in the popular imagination. Amok also could form bridges between psychological and popular ideas with the Austrian novelist’s 1922 work ‘Amok’ combining the Amok phenomenon with the theories of Sigmund Freud which Zweig had adopted.

  The idea of a specific culture-bound Amok Syndrome held sway amongst the psychiatric and psychological communities throughout the 20^th century until very recently, with a mention of amok featured in the fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, which serves as a bible of mental conditions used in the United States.[2]

Eventually, this led to scepticism towards amok syndrome as well as many other culture-bound syndromes. Reports of ‘running amok’ subsided in Malaysia and Indonesia and became an increasing rarity over the course of the 20^th century despite the syndrome’s continued existence in psychiatric literature until the publication of the DSM 5. Seemingly random acts of violence have been noted in all times and places throughout history, with some even having a more limited geographic range, such as school shootings being a phenomenon largely relegated to the United States albeit with some notable exceptions. This led to obvious scepticism of the concept of an endemically Malay condition of running amok.

The more organised martial trance observed by some, if such a thing exists, has been noted in other cultures as well, most famously that of the Viking berserker warriors who were observed to enter similar violent trances but nonetheless existed and were observed in a completely alien world to that of the Malay amucos. The concept has also fallen into obscurity in its native lands, with most Malays oblivious to the Amok phenomenon, with a few exceptions such as the fantasy author Anna Tan’s novel ‘Amok’. While the probability of possession by tiger spirits or a mental disorder confined to one ethnicity seems improbable, the idea of amok lives on in the phrase running amok, showing the ardent survivability of a false idea.

Gavin Duffy graduated from Strathclyde University with an MSc in Historical Studies and has had a general thirst for knowledge from a very young age. His main passion turned towards history which led him to his degree and also his work in museums such as the David Livingstone Birthplace. He has a wide range of interests both academic and non-academic and has a strong belief in exploring the fullness of life and the world.

Bibliography

American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. American Psychiatric Publishing.

Barbosa, D. (1866). A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar: In the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century. United Kingdom: Hakluyt Society

Clifford, H. (2018). In Court and Kampong. BoD – Books on Demand.

Ee Heok Kua (1991). Amok in nineteenth-century British Malaya history. History of Psychiatry, 2(8), pp.429–436. doi:https://doi.org/10.1177/0957154×9100200806.

Rashidin, R. and Jalaluddin, N.H. (2014). Metaphor of AMOK in Traditional Malay Text Corpora: An Analysis Using the Hybrid Theory. Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, 118, pp.412–419. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2014.02.056.

Saint Martin, M.L. (1999). Running Amok: A Modern Perspetive on a Culture-Bound Syndrome. The Primary Care Companion to The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, [online] 01(03), pp.66–70. doi:https://doi.org/10.4088/pcc.v01n0302.

Seng, F.S. and Chandran, G. (2020). Madness of the East: Demystifying the Colonialist Perspective on Frank Swettenham and Hugh Clifford’s ‘Amok’. New Literaria, [online] 1(2), pp.180–190. doi:https://doi.org/10.48189/nl.2020.v01i2.022.

van Rossum, M. (2013). ‘Amok!’: Mutinies and Slaves on Dutch East Indiamen in the 1780s. International Review of Social History, 58(S21), pp.109–130. doi:https://doi.org/10.1017/s002085901300031x.

Walter William Skeat (1900). Malay magic, by w.w. skeat. Macmillan.

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[1] Barbosa, D. (1866). A Description of the Coasts of East Africa and Malabar: In the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century. United Kingdom: Hakluyt Society. P.194

[2] American Psychiatric Association (1994). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. American Psychiatric Publishing p.845