Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the

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 roughly one percent of the population that had kuru was dying each year. 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 research began in the late 1950s. Lindenbaum and her husband carried out an lengthy study of South Fore culture and society then check their work against findings throughout neighboring groups to the north and west where kuru was found. Lindenbaum recorded events in relation to the age of the informants, birth order and marriages, therefore keeping a history of the disease.

Among some of the findings by Lindenbaum were: The disease first appeared between 1900 and 1920, that myth and ritual contained no reference to kuru despite the seriousness of the disease and the toll it was taking, older tribespeople would reminice, marking the recording of the first appearance of the kuru in their area. But most notably, Lindenbaum said the Fore say they started cannibalizing their dead around the time the disease first appeared. Lindenbaum put together her theory that kuru is caused by transmission of a biological substance through cannibalism.

Lindenbaum discovered that like kuru, cannibalism was first practiced in North Fore and then spread south. While human meat, predominantly the brain, was what the women were allowed to eat, there were emerging feelings on Lindenbaum's part that there was a direct correlation between cannibalism and kuru. In the book, the author says the shortage of protein in the indiginous peoples' diets is related to cannibalism. Yes, cannibalism was abandoned by rule of law, but did the indiginous Fore ever attain the needed protein? Lindenbaum, more.