Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands In her book, "Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands," Shirley Lindenbaum tells of the Fore people of New Guinea and their changing lifestyles when faced with the encroachment of modern society.

However, the focus of her book is the disease of the local indiginous people that was prevalent during the early 1960s, called kuru.

Those afflicted with kuru tremble. This is one of the reasons the Fore people of New Guinea believed those with kuru were possessed. Since the Fore had no analytic data inherent to their culture, they tried to solve and understand their afflictions in the customs of their culture, including the belief in sorcery.

Kuru has been proven to be a 100% fatal degenerative disease, believed to be brought on, Lindenbaum says from lack of protein in the food eaten by the Fore people. The disease is marked by unsteady walking, tremoring and outbursts of laughter and inability to stand, swallow or speak.

In the early 1960s, the population of the Fore people was roughly 40,000 in eastern Papua, New Guinea with the disease mainly affecting the 8,000 Fore of the southern area.

During that time, Lindenbaum estimated...

Females seemed to incur the disease more often than males. It was estimated that less than 10% of the female population made it to child-bearing age while the males only had a 20% chance of dying of the disease.
The Fore people thought that Kuru was caused by a wrong sorcery, which was done by an unfavorable person. The local natives treated the disease by figuring out who was the wrong sorcerer and keep him from performing his sorcery on the people. The mortality rate of women in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a result of Kuru was catastrophic, seriously reducing the number of women in the Fore society. The high rate of death among women was the reason the males assembled to decide how to prevent the wrong sorcerer from remaining in the tribe.

The disease, which had been isolated to a primitive tribe, had gained national attention drawing the likes of anthropologists Shirley Lindenbaum and her husband, who received Rockefeller Foundation backing to research geneology among the Fore. In addition, medical researchers D. Carleton Gadjusek of the United States National Institute of Health and Vincent Zigas of the Papua New Guinea Dept. Of Health began their Medical…