Kuru Sorcery and Disease in the New Guinea Highlands

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 of the City University of New York. In addition to her groundbreaking 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 United States and elsewhere. She has also published works titled The Education of Women and the Mortality of Children in Bangladesh and Knowledge, Power and Practice: The Anthropology of Medicine and Everyday Life.

Lindenbaum's Impact on Research

To say that Lindenbaum's anthropological work in Papua New Guinea in the early 1960s and in 1970 had a constructive and lasting impact on science is truly an understatement. Twenty-four years after she published Kuru Sorcery, scientists studying disease were still drawing on key portions of her research. For example, an article in the Nutrition Health Review (Spring 2003) suggests a possible link between meat consumption by humans and Parkinson's disease, building on initial work Lindenbaum conducted in the 1960s that connected the cannibalistic eating of human brains to the kuru disease that killed large numbers of Fore people. In Science News, researcher B. Bower (2003) reported that scientists believe "cannibalism among prehistoric humans may have left lasting genetic marks," basing their assumptions on studies of kuru, a "prion ailment" that Fore natives contracted between 1920 and 1950 as a result of "eating human brains and other tissue during funeral rituals."

Twenty-two years after her book was published, Lindenbaum also contributed important research on the origins of epidemics in the Annual Review of Anthropology (2001), drawing again in part on her initial fieldwork in New Guinea as well as on subsequent research by other scientists. The work continues on new and higher levels of scientific importance as researchers work to solve mysteries about disease.

In the introduction to Kuru Sorcery, Lindenbaum describes the Fore — pronounced "FOR-AY" — as 14,000 "slash-and-burn horticulturalists" (p. 3) living in the forests of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The South Fore raise sugar cane, bananas, corn, sweet potatoes, and pigs, and they hunt mammals, reptiles, birds, and cassowaries — large flightless birds that can attack and kill humans with slashing blows from their feet, whose middle toe bears a dagger-like nail. Lindenbaum describes the rainforest in which the Fore lived as rich in edible vegetation and stunningly colorful, with ferns, tall fruit trees, and "red, white, and salmon-colored impatiens" that "sparkle in the shafts of sunlight" filtered through the forest canopy. These are Stone Age peoples whose death toll from kuru was shocking: between 1957, when records began to be kept, and 1968, over 1,100 people died of kuru out of a Fore population of approximately 8,000.

"The early 1960s were crisis years for the Fore," Lindenbaum writes (p. 7). "They hunted for sorcerers and consulted curers," largely because their culture was being decimated by a disease they did not understand and for which they knew no cure. The disease was particularly devastating because women were "the prime victims," and consequently the reproductive capacities of the community were severely diminished.

How Kuru Attacks Humans

In the first stage of kuru disease, the patient initially feels unsteady, and the hands, eyes, and voice exhibit tremors. Speech becomes slurred, and eye movements become "ataxic" (p. 11) — involuntarily shifting and twitching as though from a nervous disorder. Within a short time, the eyes cross, the patient "shivers inordinately," and a lack of coordination progresses from the lower extremities to the upper extremities (p. 12). While attempting to maintain balance, the patient's toes "grip and claw the ground more than usual." Toward the end of the first stage, the victim walks with a staff as a support to prevent falling.

In the second stage, the patient can no longer walk without complete support from other persons. The tremors and ataxia become "more severe," accompanied by "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" (p. 14). An emotional dimension also emerges: "outbursts of pathological laughter [are] frequent...and smiling and laughter are terminated slowly." Younger patients in this stage may become depressed or even develop a "pathological belligerence" in response to disturbances by family members. Notably, "severe dementia" does not normally occur in the second stage.

The third, or "terminal," stage renders the patient unable to sit without support. Tremors and ataxia become "progressively more severe" (p. 14), and the patient suffers from urinary and digestive tract incontinence. Swallowing becomes difficult, the patient grows "mute and unresponsive," and severe ulcerations of the skin develop "over bony prominences." Pneumonia sets in, and the patient dies, "usually emaciated."

Cannibalism as the Likely Cause

Western researchers initially believed kuru to be a "psychosomatic phenomenon" associated with "the threat and fear of what was believed to be a particularly malignant form of sorcery" (p. 14). This view was reflected in a 1955 medical diagnosis sent to an Australian hospital in Kainantu, New Guinea: "acute hysteria in an otherwise healthy woman." By 1957, however, 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 concluded that kuru "cannot by any stretch of the imagination be identified with hysteria, psychoses or any known...psychologically-induced illnesses" (p. 15).

By 1962, anthropological evidence was gaining momentum as Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse traced the disease's movement through a specific route and interviewed many members of Fore communities. More importantly, the two researchers began to develop a cannibalism hypothesis that "seemed to fit the epidemiological evidence" (p. 19). The high incidence of kuru in the early 1960s, Lindenbaum concluded, "was related to the cannibal consumption of deceased kuru victims." She found that not all bodies of dead Fore people were eaten — those who had died of dysentery, leprosy, or yaws were not consumed. She describes in detail how bodies were dismembered for cooking and eating. One body part the Fore consistently 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" (p. 20). In North Fore, 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" (p. 20). Certain ritual rules governed who ate what: the buttocks of Fore men "were reserved for their wives, while female maternal cousins received the arms and legs."

When information about kuru's likely causes was published, it attracted considerable scientific attention. Lindenbaum also introduces the disease scrapie — a "degenerative disease of the central nervous system of sheep" — noting "remarkable similarities" between its clinical and pathological features and those of kuru (p. 25). This connection led Dr. Gajdusek to inject chimpanzee brains with brain material from Fore patients who had died of kuru. After up to 50 months, the chimpanzees developed a "clinical syndrome astonishingly akin to human kuru." That experiment, conducted in 1966, lent strong credibility to Lindenbaum's earlier hypothesis that kuru was caused and spread by the consumption of infected brain tissue.

In Chapter 3, Lindenbaum discusses other diseases common to the Fore, and in Chapter 4 she examines Fore kinship structures, which she characterizes as ones "spread laterally and based on optional bonding...kinship by election rather than ascription" (p. 54). In Chapter 5, she explores illness and beliefs about illness, identifying two significant categories of disease (p. 56): those caused by "the malicious actions of men against men" through acts of sorcery — or in Fore vernacular, kio'ena, literally "it is hidden" — and those caused by "nature spirits inhabiting spirit places associated with one's parish of residence...and by ghosts of the recently dead."

References

Bower, B. "Gene may signal ancient prion-disease outbreaks (Cannibalism's DNA Trail)." Science News 163 (2003): 229–231.

Lindenbaum, Shirley. "Kuru, Prions, and Human Affairs: Thinking About Epidemics." Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 363–385.

Lindenbaum, Shirley. Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands. Palo Alto: Mayfield Publishing Company, 1979.

Nutrition Health Review. "Kuru, a Meat-Eating Disease that Affects Cannibals." (2003).