Boo Culture, Experience, and the Startle Reflex [Hardcover]

The startle reflex provides a revealing model for examining the ways in which evolved neurophysiology shapes personal experience and patterns of recurrent social interaction. In the most diverse cultural contexts, in societies widely separated by time and space, the inescapable physiology of the reflex both shapes the experience of startle and biases the social usages to which the reflex is put. This book describes ways in which the startle reflex is experienced, culturally elaborated, and socially used in a wide variety of times and places. It offers explanations both for the patterned commonalities found across cultural settings and for the differences engendered by diverse social environments.Boo!will intrigue readers in fields such as psychological anthropology, medical anthropology, general cultural anthropology, social psychology, cross-cultural psychiatry, evolutionary psychology, and human ethology.

PART I: Startle and Hyperstartle
1. Introduction
2. Startle as a Personal Experience and as a Social Resource
3. Making People Jumpy: Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn Create a Hyperstartler
4. Variations on a Theme: Being Startled Makes One Ill
5. The Startle Museum I: Exhibits of Startle Sorted by the Expository Uses
6. The Startle Museum II: Exhibits of Startle Sorted by Properties of Startle Events
PART II: Latah and Other Startle-Matching Syndromes
7. Attention Capture and the Startle-Matching Syndromes
8.Latah: The Paradigmatic Startle-Machine Syndrome
9. ExplainingLatah: The Importance of Descriptive Detail
10. The Startle-Matching Syndrome in Other Cultures
11. Culture, Biology, and Individual Experience

. . .a useful source for those who want to pursue studies of similar behaviors. --Journal of Anthropological Research

A car backfires, your foot slips, a child shouts 'Boo!' In these and many other situations we respond. That brief, blsl