In their agitated participation in the bloody terror, the news
media stylize their negative hero, the amok runner, into a symbol
for the blindness of fate in today’s technology-driven
world. He is the dark side of everyday life. Everyone is equal
in his sights.
And yet amok is not an invention of modernity. Through the origin
of the concept amok from the “exotic” Malay language
– there are hardly any other Malay words in common use
in English – the mass murder appears as something exotic
and puzzling. Blind violence has always existed, more or less
everywhere, one would assume. But the fact that precisely this
phenomenon could become a code-word for latent terror has a
complex history. It begins with the meeting of two cultures
in the era of European colonization in Southeast Asia.
The Malay word amok means “rage” or “frenzy”
and it originally referred to a special tactic in the struggles
between the region’s warlords and kings. It was practiced
by special suicide commandos that were ritually sworn to victory
or death. It took only a few of these elite soldiers to put
whole armies into a state of panic when they threw themselves
against the enemy lines with no regard for casualties. Fallen
amok warriors were held to be favorites of the gods. Those who
survived were dishonored. “They are considered maniacal,
amocous, and view themselves as dead men. They spread out among
the people of Calcutta, fearlessly ravaging among them. Like
people in desperation they comported themselves as devils before
they were slain, and they killed many people, among them women
and children,” wrote the Portuguese Gaspar Correa in 1503
about the amok warrior in the war against Calcutta. Anthropologists
report similar phenomenon among the aborigines of the Americas
and Africa. Among Filipinos, Polynesians and the Germanic tribes,
the kamikaze death is also said to have been considered a measure
of honor. And yet in contrast to these examples, a “private”
culture of blind killing off the battlefield arose in Southern
India, Java and Malaysia. Reports make reference to the complex
religious and ritual background of such acts. On Java these
people are referred to as being amucous. “And as soon
as one sees that they have begun their work, the cry of ‘Amouco!
Amouco!’ goes up, so that everyone can run for safety.”
It is not until they have achieved their death that the religious
murderers have achieved their goal.
There are few sources of information dealing with the many-layered
ritual economy of the individual amok incident. It is known,
for example, that the Dutch occupiers used the most ghastly
means in torturing surviving amok runners to death in order
to deny them the nimbus of invincible heroes. When in the nineteenth
century the collective, military variant of amok had completely
ceased to have any strategic purpose in view of the Europeans’
superior strength, the figure of the amok runner slowly began
to be given a new interpretation.
In the eyes of Dutch, Portuguese and British police, colonial
administrators and physicians, the amok runner appeared as a
pathological disturbance of the normal. Thus the West evolved
a complex cultural figuration for interpreting the contrast
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