Kuru sorcery and disease transmission

Kuru Sorcery in New Guinea

Introduction to Shirley Lindenbaum

The author of Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, Shirley Lindenbaum, is a cultural anthropologist and professor in the Ph.D. Program in the Department of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. In addition to her ground-breaking research in Papua New Guinea - studying the prion ailment called "kuru" (explored in depth in this paper) and linking cannibalism to kuru - Lindenbaum has conducted extensive research (and published books and scholarly articles) on cholera in Bangladesh, and on AIDS and HIV in the U.S. And elsewhere. She also has published books titled The Education of Women and the Mortality of Children in Bangladesh, and Knowledge, Power and Practice: the Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life, according to her bibliography in the City University of New York Web pages for faculty members (www.gc.cuny.edu/anthropology/fac_lindenbaum.html).

The Kuru and Shirley Lindenbaum's Impact on Research

To say that Lindenbaum's anthropological work in Paupa, New Guinea, in the early 1960s and in 1970, had a constructive and lasting impact on science, is truly an understatement. Indeed, twenty-four years after Lindenbaum published Kuru Sorcery, scientists studying diseases are using key portions of her research results to positive ends. For example, an article in the Nutrition Health Review (Spring, 2003) suggests that there could be a link between meat-eating by humans and Parkinson's disease; this research is based on initial work Lindenbaum conducted in the 1960s, linking the cannibalistic eating of human brains and the resulting kuru disease which killed large numbers of natives. And in Science News (Bower, 2003), researchers believe that "Cannibalism among prehistoric humans may have left lasting genetic marks," and they base their assumptions on studies of kuru, a "prion ailment" which Fore natives contracted between 1920 and 1950 as a result of "eating human brains and other tissue during funeral rituals." Those early kuru studies by Lindenbaum contributed to today's research and knowledge.

And, twenty-two years after her book was published, Lindenbaum published important research on the origins of epidemics (Annual Review of Anthropology, 2001), based, again, in part, on initial work she conducted in New Guinea, and on previous - and subsequent - research done by other scientists. So, the work continues, on new and higher levels of scientific importance, as researches try to solve mysteries about disease.

Meanwhile, in the Introduction to Lindenbaum's Kuru Sorcery book, the author describes the Fore - pronounced "FOR-AY" - peoples as 14,000 "slash-and-burn horticulturalists" (page 3) living in the forests of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The "South Fore" (hereafter referred to as "Fore") raise sugar cane, bananas, corn, sweet potatoes, and pigs; and they hunt mammals, reptiles, birds and cassowaries (large birds that do not fly but can actually attack and kill humans with slashing blows from its feet; its middle "toe" has a dagger-like nail). Lindenbaum describes the rainforest in which the Fore thrived as rich in edible vegetation, and stunningly colorful with ferns, tall fruit trees, and "Red, white, and salmon-colored impatiens" which "sparkle in the shafts of sunlight" which are filtered through the rainforest canopy. These are Stone Age peoples, real-life cannibals that she reports on through her investigations; and the incidence of deaths among these peoples is shocking. Since 1957, when records began being kept, and 1968, over 1,100 people died of kuru, and that is out of a Fore population of 8,000 people.

The early 1960s were crisis years for the Fore," Lindenbaum writes on page 7. "They hunted for sorcerers and consulted curers," basically because their culture was being decimated by a disease they did not understand, and they knew of no cure; and, too, the disease was particularly devastating because women were "the prime victims," and hence, reproductive capacities of the culture were largely decimated.

How Kuru Attacks Humans

The way the "first stage" affects the victim is, the patient initially feels unsteady, and the hands and eyes and voice have a tremor. There is a slurring of speech, and eye movements become "ataxic" (page 11), another word for the involuntarily shifting and twitching of eyes, as though from a nervous disorder. The eyes in a short time are crossed, the patient "shivers inordinately," and a lack of coordination progresses from "lower extremities" to "upper extremities" (page 12). And while attempting to keep one's balance, the patient's toes "grip and claw the ground more than usual." In the latter part of the first stage, the victim walks about the village with a staff, or rod, as a support to prevent falling.

In the "second stage" of the kuru disease, the patient no longer can walk without complete support from other persons. The tremors and ataxia mentioned in the first stage are "more severe" and there are "widespread repetitive muscular spasms, or sometimes shock-like muscle jerks and occasionally coarser [irregular, involuntary] movements, especially when the patient is thrown into an exaggerated startle response" (page 14). Another manifestation of the second stage is emotional in nature: "outbursts of pathological laughter [is] frequent...and smiling and laughter are terminated slowly." In this second stage, occasionally younger people become depressed, and even may develop a "pathological belligerence [in response to] disturbances by family members or others." One thing that does not normally happen in the second stage is a condition of "severe dementia," according to Lindenbaum.

The "third stage" is also known as the "terminal stage," and in this stage the patient is unable to sit without being supported. The tremors and ataxia become "progressively more severe" (page 14), and the patient suffers from urinary and digestive tract incontinence. Moreover, the patient has difficulty swallowing, becomes "mute and unresponsive," and suffers severe ulcerations of the skin "over bony prominences." Also, pneumonia sets in and the patient dies, "usually emaciated."

Original Theories as to the Cause of Epidemic Deaths in Fore Society

Western researchers initially believed the kuru was due to a "psychosomatic phenomenon" associated with "the threat and fear of what was believed to be a particularly malignant form of sorcery" (page 14). An example of that view was reflected in a medical diagnosis from a 1955 case sent to an Australian hospital in Kainantu, New Guinea: "acute hysteria in an otherwise healthy woman." But by 1957, Drs. Vincent Zigas and Carleton Gajdusek became the first Westerners to launch an in-depth study of kuru - Zigas with the New Guinea health department and Gajdusek representing the U.S. National Institutes of Health - and they came to the conclusion that kuru "cannot by any stretch of the imagination be identified with hysteria, psychoses or any known...psychologically-induced illnesses" (page 15).

Cannibalism becomes a likely Answer to the Puzzle

By 1962, anthropological evidence was gaining some momentum, as the author and Robert Glasse traced the kuru's movement through a "specific" route, and interviewed many members of the Fore communities. But more importantly, author Lindenbaum and her colleague, Glasse, began to form a cannibalism hypothesis, which "seemed to fit the epidemiological evidence" (page 19).

The high incidence of kuru in the early 1960s "was related to the cannibal consumption of deceased kuru victims," she writes. She learned that not all bodies of dead Fore peoples were eaten - those with dysentery or leprosy or yaws were not consumed. The author goes into great detail of how dead bodies were dismembered for cooking and eating on page 20. One body part that the Fore avoided was the gall bladder, whose "bitter contents would ruin the meat." Otherwise, marrow was "sucked from cracked bones, and sometimes the pulverized bones themselves were cooked and eaten with green vegetables." If that sounds a bit gross, imagine what the dead bodies smelled like in North Fore, where the corpse was "buried for several days, then exhumed and eaten when the flesh had 'ripened' and the maggots could be cooked as a separate delicacy" (page 20). There were some rituals for who ate what: the buttocks of Fore men "were reserved for their wives, while female maternal cousins received the arms and legs."

When the new information about kuru's likely causes became published, a great deal of attention was paid to the disorder. On page 25 Lindenbaum brings the "scrapie" disease into the picture; scrapie is a "degenerative disease of the central nervous system of sheep," and like mad cow disease (to be later "discovered"), there were "remarkable similarities" between the clinical and pathological features of kuru and scrapie. Given that connection, Dr. Gajdusek (National Institutes of Health) injected chimpanzee brains with "brain material from Fore patients who had died of kuru." It took up to 50 months, but the chimpanzees developed a "clinical syndrome astonishingly akin to human kuru," Lindenbaum writes. That was in 1966; and the findings gave credibility to Lindenbaum's earlier hypothesis that kuru was in fact caused - and spread - by people eating the brains of deceased community members who had been infected.

In Chapter 3 Lindenbaum discusses other diseases which are common to the Fore peoples, and in Chapter 4 the author reviews the various aspects of Fore kinships - which is "one that is spread laterally and based on optional bonding...kinship by election rather than ascription" (page 54). In Chapter 5, she discusses illnesses, and beliefs about illness; there are two "significant categories" of disease, she writes on page 56. One category is defined by "the malicious actions of men against men." These illnesses are the result of "acts of sorcery" - or in Fore vernacular, kio'ena, literally, "it is hidden." The second category is diseases which are caused by "nature spirits inhabiting spirit places associated with one's parish of residence...and by ghosts of the recently dead."

Sorcery and Ghosts

When a child is born deaf or blind, for example, the explanation is that the pregnant mother must have touched a particular vine, or tree, or other "spirit-inhabited object" in the forest. Ailments caused by ghosts will occur when a person "removes vegetables, bananas or sugarcane from the gardens of a man recently deceased" (page 57). Interestingly, Lindenbaum reports that between 1900 and 1962, "more than half of all deaths are assigned to sorcery," and on 2.4% were blamed on old age.

The ritual of a sorcerer is to steal a physical thing associated with the victim - even "excrement" or hair clippings - and then add to that bark, leaves, and a sorcery stone. Those items are then bundled with vines and canes, and beaten with a stick. As the sorcerer beats on the bundle, he or she chants, "I break the bones of your arms, I break the bones of your hands, I break the bones of your legs, and finally I make you die" (page 65). The bundle is then placed in the muddy ground, and as it rots in the ground, the victim's health is believed to deteriorate. It is usually the case that the sorcerer and the victim have had some social encounter, either abrasive or rivalry-spawned, but there are attempts to deprive the sorcerer of the materials he needs, to foil the sorcery.

One of the "cures" for kuru sorcery is to learn the identity of the sorcerer. And the "commonest divination technique uses the possum as a vehicle for supernatural revelation" (page 69). The family of the victim place some of the victim's hair snippets in one small bamboo tube; "in another tube they insert the body of a freshly killed possum." While striking one bamboo stick against the other, the name of the purported sorcerer is called out, then the bamboo with the possum meat in it is placed in a fire. If the possum's liver - "the locus of its consciousness" - remains "uncooked," even in the hot fire, the guilt of the accused sorcerer is then established beyond any doubt. Why incorporate a possum into this bizarre procedure? First, the possum is an inhabitant of the "powerful spirit world of the forest," which the Fore view as "undomesticated energy" (page 69). Secondly, the possum is believed by the Fore to be capable of transformation into "human shape," and also they provide the "metaphorical clues about the human condition."

Lindenbaum's research shows that there were up to 16 different kinds of sorcery associated with the Fore in the early 1960s; that is quite a few more than the 6 kinds of sorcery researchers learned about in the early 1950s. Why the difference in numbers as time passed by? The difference, Lindenbaum reveals on page 74, "represents a real shift in experience and belief," and Fore themselves are aware of the trend, she continues. It has to do with the advent of kuru ("Kuru is a recent form of sorcery" the Fore told Lindenbaum). And not only have Fore attitudes towards kuru changed, they also see ghosts - notably the forest ghost spirit Nokoti - in a different light: "In the last twenty years, Nokoti has lost his power to harm," Lindenbaum reports on page 75. The disappearance of Nokoti "coincides with the arrival of whites," and the building of the Okapa-Purosa road - the very first public thoroughfare in the region - which began in the 1950s. The "diminished powers of ghosts and spirits" - combined with the fading from view of Nokoti - illustrates the "oblique relationship between ideology and behavior," according to Lindenbaum. "The Fore have modified their beliefs in a way that enables them to make necessary ecological adjustments while at the same time avoiding blasphemy."

Kuru has taken its Toll on the Fore

Between the years 1957 and 1977 (page 89), about 2,500 Fore died from kuru, and the majority of the victims were adult women. This lopsided ratio (3 men to one woman in some of the villages) of course put a damper on the reproductive abilities of the Fore; "women were disappearing from the land" (page 89). In 1962, of 125 Wanitabe (an community of the Fore) males over the age 21, sixty-three had no living wife, ten had never married; in other words, just under half the men with without wives. These dramatic changes brought on by kuru have had "a major effect on social behavior" (page 91). To wit, of those 63 wife-less men, eleven have children less than 5 years of age, and 23 have children between five years and eleven years old. So, men are doing double duty. They care for their children, cook food, dig the ground, plant crops, weed, and harvest, as the women usually do; plus, they do their old duties of fencing and clearing garden sites.

Another noticeable change in social behavior is that "brideprice" (valuable things given to a bride in a traditional Fore marriage) is "withheld until the girl demonstrates her ability to survive long enough to produce at least one child" (page 92). It is a sad state of social affairs when "men of forty-five expect to outlive a girl of thirteen or fourteen."

The Search for a Stone Age Cure

But during the early 1960s, the Fore men didn't just stand by idly and watch women die of kuru. They searched for cures, and there was a man named Uwana in the heavily forested Gimi Valley in Uvai region, who claimed he had a cure. His "cure" was to pierce the feet, arms, legs, shoulders and scalp of the patient with his "medicinal bow and arrow, until blood flowing from the body" colored a small stream red from the blood. Following the letting of blood, Uwana's associates put on a pig barbeque, at which time medicinal ginger, salt, and bark was spat onto the pork and accompanying green leaves. The results were not spectacular; indeed, five months after a significant number of Fore people had trekked to the region of Uvai and received the treatment, Lindenbaum reports that the fate of 70 was empirically recorded. Nine died, 58 were near death, and three were "complete cures." But Uwana got some money out of it, in any event; it is reported (page 95) that he earned the equivalent of $210, which was a lot of money in New Guinea in the early 1960s.