ANTHROPOLOGICAL R

CHILDHOOD AND DEVELOPMENT

AMONG THE WIND RIVER SHOSHONE

BY

D. B. SHIMKIN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY AND LOS ANGELES

1947

Pv- E ) R, ID

This is a brief account of several phases of the
life of an American Indian tribe of the western
plains as that life was carried on between about
I825 and I875. The data for the monograph were
collected from the testimony of old men and women
who could recall the old ways.

As anthropological works frequently do, this
monograph serves to illustrate the possible varia-
tions in the cultural matrix of individual behavior.
Thus marriage is depicted in Shoshone mythology
as a ". . . . lustful, bitter relation, ever with the
possibility of murder by either spouse." In striking
contrast is the tenderness of love between brothers.
When a man died there was usually the suspicion
that the widow had committed the murder by
witchcraft. A life history of an old woman, who
had been married three times, tells how greatly
she hated each of her husbands in turn, especially
just before she married them.

Such departures from the ideal patterns of the
culture in which most psychiatrists participate are
not, of course, confined to the exotic customs of
extinct societies. The Shoshone concept of the
marriage relationship is shared by more than a
few individuals and by some subgroups within the
larger Euroamerican society. The Shoshone ex-
ample and others from the literature of anthro-
pology remind the psychiatric therapist that the
"normal" situation to which his patient must ad-
just differs from group to group, and that any
rigidly defined notion of normality invariably turns
out to be abnormal from the point of view of

neuroses, insofar as we now know, occur in the
social life of every society. Shimkin cites several
such cases among the Shoshone. In that sense,
then, aberrant states are normally to be expected
in every society, though expressed in different ways
and of varying degree of incidence. Because the
symptoms exhibited by psychotics have the effect
of detachment from the reality of social life, it
does not follow-as is sometimes assumed-that
the etiology of the psychosis is also somehow di-
vorced from society. On the contrary, aberrant
mental states are to be understood as potentialities
latent in each member of society, which indeed
are manifested in attenuated form in everyday re-
sponse to various situations and which appear as
classic formulations of aberrancy as a final resort
for the individual.

Shimkin's fine work with the Shoshone, of which
this paper is only part, is part of a growing litera-
ture on the dynamics of various types and varieties
of normality. Out of such studies there well may
come a more powerful understanding of the dy-
namics, types, and varieties of social abnormality.

DAVID G. MANDELBAUM, PH. D.,

University of California,

7 |I  3 7 *                     Berkeley, Calif.