review

REVIEW OF KURU SORCERY

R E V I E W

Shirley Lindenbaum: Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea

Highlands, Palo Alto, California: Mayfield Publishing Co., 1979, xxi + 174 pp.,

$ 4.95.

The years when kuru worst afflicted the Fore were the early 1960s. The people

themselves began to think they were doomed to extinction for so many of their

women were dying by kuru. These years also brought rapid social and political

changes. The first government patrol post in this area of the Eastern Highlands

of New Guinea had been established only in 1954. Shirley Lindenbaum worked

there seven years later and her book Kuru Sorcery is about the years of greatest

stress for the Fore, their crisis years. By that time it was clear to the Fore that

kuru sorcerers were rampant among them without restraint. She quotes from

speeches at public gatherings in 1962:

Why are you men killing off all the women, stealing our feces from the latrines to perform sorcery? We women give birth to you men. Try to find one man who is pregnant now and show him to us. Or go and search the old burial grounds and bring us the skull or bones of one man we women have killed. You won't be able find any. You men are trying to wipe us out. (Speech of a Fore woman)

Men don't have vaginas from which they can produce children. Where will you find wives from in the future - if women are completely finished? Look at the bush growing up around us where we once had lines of people working in their gardens. You men want to plant coffee now to begin your own business. Soon there will be no one here to look after it..(Speech of a young man of Wanitabe)

Shirley Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse stayed at Wanitabe among the South

Fore: it was in the worst affected region. Their work there between 1961 and

1963 as social anthropologists contributed information crucial to the eventual

discovery of what kind of disease kuru was. The medical side of kuru and the

story of the research which led to showing it was a fatal neurological disorder

due to infection by a virus with an extremely long period of incubation have

been very fully reported by Dr. Carleton Gajdusek and others spurred on by

him to f'md it out (Gajdusek 1976, 1977; Hornabrook ed. 1976). But, until now

with the publication of Shirley Lindenbaum's book, there has been no com-

parably full account of what in social terms kuru meant and did to the people

who suffered it. Despite so much anthropological research, both pure and ancil-

lary to the medical research, no broad coherent analysis of the Fore response to

the disease appeared. The imbalance of at tention to the medical, but not the

social, effects of the illness is striking. Bits of the story of what had happened

Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 4 (1980) 377-386. 0165-005X/80/0044-0377 $01.00. Copyright © 1980 by D. Reidel Publishing Co., Dordrecht, Holland, and Boston, U.S.A.

378 GILBERT LEWIS

could be gleaned from scattered articles on Fore politics, marriage, sorcery (for example, Berndt 1958, Glasse 1969; Glasse and Lindenbaum 1969; Lindenbaum 1971 ; Hayano 1973), but they were not linked up so as to provide a full account and give the disease, which had brought so many persistent and probing inves- tigators among them, an adequate social context. Shirley Lindenbaum does do this. Her book is very welcome and redresses the balance. It is written with com-

passion. The title of the book states its main theme. The theme is skillfully linked to

a narrative of events in the Fore region over the past four decades. Unlike most epidemics of infectious disease, the pace of the disease and its mode of transmis- sion led to a social crisis developing slowly spread out over years rather than months. The timing of greatest prevalence coincided with the first fifteen years of contact with alien whites and experience of their administrative control and missionary work. Fore responses to the spread of kuru must be followed through times that abruptly changed the political frame of their society and lives, as well as changing or challenging assumptions they had taken for granted before about the scope and nature of the world 'in which they lived. At the same time as they faced problems of adaption and adjustment in the early phase of contact, they also faced the grown menace of a fatal disease so distinctive in its effects that older people could remember the cases which first appeared among them in the

1930s or in some villages in the 1940s. Between 1957 and 1968, over 1100 kuru deaths occurred in a South Fore

population of 8000. The disease was highly localised to Fore-speaking people. They provided 80% of all cases, with the remaining 20% occurring among their

immediate neighbors. In the worst years, over 200 people died annually: the rate approached 1% per annum of the affected population. The rates have declined steadily, and in 1977 only 31 persons died of the disease. Throughout this time, many more women have died than men. Women were particularly likely to succumb just after giving birth to a child. The motherless nuclear family was a common domestic unit. The ratio of males to females was distorted so that there were three males to one female in some hamlets, and two to one in the South Fore as a whole. In Wanitabe in 1962 almost half the adult men were without wives, and of these many had young children to look after. They had to act as mother and father to their children; they were forced by circumstance to take on women's tasks, such as handling small children, cooking, weeding, unless they were so fortunate as to have a daughter old enough to do them. At marriages, sometimes brideprice was withheld until the bride had shown she could survive long enough to produce a child. The speeches at marriages sometimes included directions for the distribution of the death payment for the bride if she should not survive long - no further payment could be expected in such a case. Ambit- ious and successful men depended on the support and hard work of their wives,

REVIEW OF KURU SORCERY 379

tending pigs and gardens, providing food for their guests; the reputations and hopes of such men foundered with the illness and loss of their wives.

To this day, Shirley Lindenbaum writes, Fore universally believe that kuru is caused by malicious sorcery in their midst. They have ascribed it to sorcery from the beginning. They have a terrible reputation among their neighbors as sorcerers, and that reputation, as well as their own conviction that the canker of sorcery was destroying them, fed upon the evidence of death by kuru. Her book develops around that theme to provide an analysis and interpretation of the reasons for its particular elaboration among them. Some time ago Marwick (1964)noted that there was a surprising lack of perceptive illuminating work on sorcery in Melanesia that could compare with the work done on the subject in Africa, despite the famous early study of Fortune (1932) and the large amount of ethnography published since then. Kuru Sorcery goes some way to remedy this. It also makes a distinctive contribution to the sociology of sorcery and witch-

craft because of the relatively long time-span within which she considers changes in ideas about it and the struggle to contain it. Most accounts of sorcery and witchcraft have portrayed them as observed for the slice of time that the ethnog-

rapher happened to stay there. The stresses were on synchronic analysis of the system of ideas concerned, the reasoning involved, and on the actual use of the ideas, that might reveal their functions in relation to particular social pressures and politics. Questions of what may lead to change in such ideas have come out of historical study, mainly in Europe (Macfarlane 1971; Thomas 1972), with anthropologists able to say little in answer to them from their own work. The Berndts stayed with the North Fore between 1951 and 1953 when they recorded seven types of sorcery, but Lindenbaum ten years later with the South Fore recorded sixteen types. The Fore themselves recognize the trend: it is not just attributable to differences of the fieldworkers. Lindenbaum's analysis of

their preoccupation with sorcery starts at the time she observed them. The distribution of kuru sustained the belief that Fore sorcery is vastly more powerful than that of their neighbors.

The Fore themselves distinguish between two main categories of illness: those caused by the malicious acts of men against men; and those caused by nature

spirits and ghosts to punish people for breaking social rules. The malicious acts of men are hidden, they are the acts of sorcery; they cause life-threatening diseases which endanger vigorous adults. Nature spirits and ghosts are less malign; they cause minor afflictions and temporary illness in adults, and sickness and death among children. The general Fore view of sorcery is that those who protect the community and provide for it, the adults, run some risk that they may be struck down by other men who cause their death by acts of sorcery. Linden- baum links in her analysis this general view to the social constitution and culture of the people. The community should be a circle of security. Food can be shared

380 GILBERT LEWIS

among friends without fear of poisoning or pollution. But Fore society is charac- terized by small communities with members often changing their attachments. The South Fore have been encroaching on sparsely settled or empty land to the south. They have a sense of recent settlement in their present location. The problem has been to maintain group size and strength in the face of aggressive neighbors; the solution to tolerate and encourage the ready adoption of immi- grants. The chapter on 'Extensions of Self' describes the proliferation of forms of fictive kinship and affiliation by which the Fore improvise bonds like those of kinship between those who are not kin. They call it kinship 'of the midday sun'. A web of attachments is created, it is a pastiche of ties by choice and birth serv- ing to incorporate the unconnected, to extend friendship and create security. But just as changes of residence and attachment are made easier by such flexible forms of affiliation, so ties may also be broken easily and they cannot be depended on or loyalty assured. The mobility of Fore society breaks ties of bio- logical kinship as well as those of fictive kinship. The community which should be the circle of security, comprises those who have long been there and others more recently come; it is not certain who will stay, nor the exact state of their ties to others outside the community, nor their loyalty. Each man has a discrete network of personal affiliates outside his own residential community. They extend his possibilities of refuge or a future home. But such arrangements in the composition of political units encourage mutual mistrust at close quarters.

The line round the circle of security is too easily crossed. The kuru sorcery bundle must contain some fragment of food or body leavings of the victim. How did the sorcerer come by them? He must have had some means of contact with the victim. Most accusations of sorcery occur between men of different communities who have a history of rivalry or dispute. Given the ties ramifying

outside, it is easy to suspect that the sorcerer has been assisted by a disloyal insider. The sorcerer must bind the bundle with materials from the forest in his own parish, and beat the bundle, calling the name of his victim, then bury it in muddy ground to rot. The bundle, in that it contains items from both inside and outside the community, is consonant in symbolism with their experience of the social system and the kind of attack most feared. Here Lindenbaum follows Mary Douglas in looking for social and symbolic correspondances: anxiety to protect body boundaries and orifices reflects a group concern to protect political boundaries. Severe illness in adults, and their deaths from illness, endangers the viability of the group just as war used to, so the people represent such illness to themselves as attack by political rivals, but hidden attack not open war. When the incidence of kuru increased, they intensified watch on their boundaries and placed guards.

But such a theory calls for an explanation for why women predominate among the victims. Since a wife is essential as provider, worker and supporter for


any man of ambition, so to strike her down will topple him. Fore perceive the husband of the victim as the true victim. The man of reputation, the Big Man,

has further to fall. They think that the wives of Big Men are especially vulnerable to kuru. Those who are jealous of the success of others will use hidden methods to bring them down. The idiom of sorcery fits with this. It is a secret and hot power. Its evil use is the recourse of those who desire to be equal but cannot become so by their own merit and efforts, and failing to achieve equality by fair means, they turn to foul ones.

Shirley Lindenbaum argues that ideas of pollution, witchcraft and sorcery reveal a common theme, which is that those who are strong are yet vulnerable to

harm from the weak. The weak release or use forces that the strong cannot con-

trol. The weak sap their strength: women may pollute men, the youths their elders, the dirty deformed 'rubbish' man may bring down the Big Man, the

widower kill the wives of more fortunate men. Even in a society supposedly as

egalitarian as the Fore's, some are more equal than others. Those who have

power control access to resources and seek to institute and establish some

hierarchy in favor of themselves. The Fore system authorizes a differential pattern of resource use by age and sex. Men, for example, commandeer the best

protein, the pork from domestic pigs; they say women have less right to it because other protein (insects, small game, wild pig) is appropriate for them.

But men fear pollution by women and the danger in their menstrual blood. Women must not step over men.

The polluting power of menstrual blood is an intrinsic, involuntary power: sorcery is a willed act. There is a graded estimate of intention and control implicit in such ideas about the sources of potential harm. The vulnerability of those who are strong and successful shows up also in a wider political context. It underlies a regional view of the distribution of more powerful sorcery, a rank- ing and geography of fear. The populations to the north of the South Fore have more complex agricultural techniques and have had more contact with whites. They are now stronger and richer than those to the south whom they regard as backward. They have exploited them yet they also fear their power to bite back. The relative balance of power and affluence has been disturbed by the coming of whites; traditional rules for obtaining wealth and prestige are cut or weakened;

wealth and authority come from new sources. But the incipient social hierarchies have not yet settled into stable pattems. Lindenbaum argues that such condi- tions foster in those who have the advantage fears that they may not be able to

hold onto it. To justify a new-found dominance over others, they assert that there are dangers for the new order they are establishing for themselves that come from the weaker by their exercise of hidden evil powers. Such ideas flourish in the ferment of rapid social change, desire for dominance, for wealth,

and an uneasy sense that things might not be fair or were not like that in the

382 GILBERT LEWIS

past. If the new positions were more secure, the mastery more firmly based on direct effective power, the better-off would not have such need to fear.

Those are the outlines of the larger scheme within which the Fore responded to kuru. Deaths from the disease and the continued discovery of new cases gave their ideas of sorcery immediate urgent point. The Fore were in desperate straits, and their concern with sorcery hypertrophied. The end of 1961 was marked in Wanitabe by repeated searches for cures, by journeys to neighboring language groups where the finding of a new cure had been announced. Some men, ex- ploiting the hopes and credulity of the sufferers and their families, gained wide

renown as curers for a while and many came. One of them set up three 'hospi- tals' in his village to house the sick undergoing his treatment for the week or two

it took. But death, overtaking every case after some weeks or months, destroyed each reputation, each new claim to have the cure. The effort, expense and dis- ruption of the searches for cure bear witness to frantic hope and growing dis-

illusionment. Individual Fore sceptics discovered some of the tricks used to dupe

sufferers or their husbands, but the unmasking of one imposter was not enough

to dissolve hope. Early 1962 brought a change in how they sought to cope, arising partly perhaps from their disillusioned hopes of finding cure, but also from reflection on their state. They recognised their society risked extinction from loss of women to bear children. Kuru had been with them for only a few

decades. In past times neither killing by warfare nor killing by sorcery had been

so reckless of all bounds. Hate, revenge and jealousy had got out of hand. So for

a time in early 1962, many gatherings were held to discuss their plight. These

gatherings, kibungs, brought together people of different communities in an

attempt to end the excesses of sorcery that were destroying them. They called for unity and amity. They remembered the past as a better time and recalled dim myths of common origin as charters to reforge their unity in resuscitated

terms more inclusive than the bitterly divided tiny political communities of their present state. They asked for and heard confessions of sorcery in the hope that by making open what had been secret they might see what had been, wipe clean the slate, and start afresh, all resolved to live regenerated by a new and wider common moral purpose. The past was past, the whites had come, they must look to the future. The North Fore had adopted more of the ways and rules of the whites: they were richer and better off than the people to the south. The north- erners had reined in sorcery; the evidence was plain because kuru was diminish- ing among them. The early months of 1962 were a visionary interlude, Shirley

Lindenbaurn writes, in which the South Fore called for a kind of moral rearma-

ment of their society. But it was an interlude: the kibungs stopped suddenly. The reason they

stopped conveys curious insight into the Fore trying to understand white people's

ideas. They were all aware that white people told them kuru was a sickness. But


to the Fore this was clearly false. Sickness was something less than sorcery. It did not kill adults in their prime. Sickness in their view was caused by nature spirits and ghosts, and nature spirits were liable to strike if someone ventured to

the forest spirit-places, the pies masalai, or in forest generally. Women rarely went in forest land yet women were the main victims of kuru. If kuru was a

sickness, then why should women be selected? And kuru victims never recovered.

White people kept to their mistaken view that kuru was sickness. After the

redemptive kibungs had been going for some months, three new people came down with kuru. These three cases were at first hidden from white administra-

tors. What the Fore feared, after their outpouring of confessions, their declara-

tions and their new resolve, was official punishment because their 'sweet talk' would stand exposed as deceit. For all their talk of abjuring sorcery, the new

cases, the new deaths, accused them and showed them guilty of continued sor-

cery, of failure to comply with administrative demands that sorcery must cease. The administrator's or the missionary's stated~views on sorcery are paradoxical.

I f sorcery does not work, then why does the administrator demand they stop it

and punish them so severely for it? Why does the missionary inveigh against it? What the white people said about it looked like a disguise for their real opinions. The people feared punishment. So in early 1963 the leaders of Wanitabe and

Kamila delivered a new message. It was now their considered opinion, they said,

that kuru was indeed a sickness, and had nothing to do with sorcery. In evidence

they pointed to named men who had tried to work kuru sorcery and had failed, to old women they had seen with kuru who were well beyond an age to be the object of sorcery, to the Kukukuku people's advice to them not to rub the legs of the deceased while mourning, for the disease was spread that way. For these reasons, kuru was without doubt a sickness, and therefore could not be caused by men. Their new statement should be reported to the patrol officer and he

should be asked to find a medicine to cure it. This, Lindenbaum points out, represented a change of tactics, an attempt to avoid punishment by denying

involvement. She implies that their declaration was not sincere, the reasoning from evidence a sophistry on their part. In view of her earlier remark that they believe universally that kuru is caused by sorcery to this day, we must take it she is right. But what happened next is not clear because she left the field in May

1963. The chapters on the crisis years and the kibungs give a sharp and memorable picture of their sufferings and struggles at that time. Though the setting of

the kuru crisis is most exotic, though the slow-paced illness gave the crisis a different momentum, yet the Fore struggle to make moral sense of suffering, to reason out and wrestle against the possibilities given by a constellation of ideas, puts one in mind of other accounts of response to epidemic crisis, whether

observed as by Boccaccio, or historical as in CipoUa's studies of the plague, or

fictional as with Camus.

384 GILBERT LEWIS

Epidemics do force people sometimes to question ideas about illness that they have taken for granted, and to raise new ones. A young man of Wanitabe gave this report of one kibung:

"The men gathered at Kamila to talk about kuru. They turned their hands palm upward and confessed that they had killed women with those hands. When the women heard this, they began to cry. I asked the women if they thought they had a sickness, or whether men had performed sorcery against them. One woman said: We don't really know. Perhaps we have a sickness, or perhaps men are responsible. Our only knowledge is about giving birth to children. We don't

think about making sorcery. Sometimes we have thought we might be suffering from sickness, but the men have now spoken and admitted their part. There are so many men and only few of us women. Why are the men killing us off?." Here

and elsewhere there are indications of doubt of assumptions, scepticism, prag-

matic reasoning and readiness to listen to alternative ideas. But here too is the

voice of a Fore woman. The book, as Lindenbaum recognises, presents a largely male Fore view of their condition. It would be interesting to know more about

how women as the chief victims saw the things that were happening to them,

and to know how far they accepted the views of men on what should be done. The value of wives to men, the hardship of the widower with young children are

both made clear: but did the women too agree that the husband of the kuru victim was the true victim? Glasse pointed out (1969 p19) that the scarcity of

marriageable women, coupled with administrative attitudes to arranged marriage,

had begun to alter the status of women in Fore society so as to allow them more voice in their own marriages and a greater measure of consideration. What were their views and particularly what did the victims themselves say?

I would like to know more too about Fore views on white people's interest

in kuru and what they thought the white people were doing to help them. The Fore were exposed to intensive research: cases were traced and followed, they were examined repeatedly and their downward path recorded, autopsies were carried out on many kuru dead, bits of them, like whole brains, were removed for pathological study, blood was taken, their genealogies worked out, their diet analysed. It must have been a most bizarre experience of early contact with white people and their demands. To the Fore who were convinced of kuru sorcery, what did they make of this driving curiosity, this desire to get at the dead and cut them up? What did they think was its motive? Lindenbaum reports that the South Fore said that the doctors were after the wrong things. They

should go to the heart of the problem, the wickedness of their enemies. Failure to cure kuru resulted from the misdirected efforts of Western medicine, Fore said, which focussed exclusively on medical therapy. Modern technology should be applied instead to improved intelligence gathering, to detecting the covert operations of those who endanger the general welfare. By 1970 further exposure


to medical research had led them to the hope that if properly used, the ophthal- moscope could reveal the sorcerer's rotting interior. Yet did they always see

white interest in kuru, though ineffectual, as benign? The worst kuru years came with white contact, a contact which had brought new diseases and other

epidemics to them. Were white people always sheltered from suspicion by their power and foreignness? Did the Fore submit in the hope of benefit to all that

was asked of them without questioning it? The story of the Western theories about kuru is instructive. Shirley Linden-

baum tells it at the outset of the book. The first Western observers (anthropologists I am sorry but not surprised to say) put it down to a psychosomatic

phenomenon directly associated with the threat and fear of what was believed

to be malignant sorcery. The first case sent to a government hospital in 1955 was provisionally given the diagnosis of acute hysteria in an otherwise healthy

woman. But when Zigas and Gajdusek got to work in 1957 its clinical and pathological features were made clear. Because the illness was restricted to the popula-

tion of one small region and seemed to run in families, it was then supposed that

it must be a hereditary disorder. The question was raised as to whether it would be feasible and morally acceptable to cordon off the/affected population so as to

protect other people against the lethal kuru gene. But it was hard to understand how an inevitably fatal genetic disorder couKt have reached the incidence kuru had among the South Fore without soon killing off the host population. In fact

the genetic hypothesis had a fair run until the anthropological evidence collected by Lindenbaum and Glasse showed that it could not stand up. The disease was of very recent origin; the way it spread through families involved affmes and friends as well as kin. The risk of kuru in females related to kuru victims by marriage was almost as high as the risk to females genetically related to kuru

victims. The wives of a victim's brothers had three or four times as great a risk of kuru as a control group of women not related genetically or by marriage to

kuru victims. Glasse and Lindenbaum also found out that cannibalism was a

fairly recent innovation among the Fore, that the women who were relatively

deprived of pig protein were the chief consumers of human flesh, and that the distribution of body parts of a dead kuru victim was decided by rules of kinship

so that a woman's brain would often go to her son's wife or her brother's wife.

Men tended to abstain from eating the dead and they avoided eating the bodies of women. Boys until the age of ten would eat as their mothers and sisters did.

The pattern of cannibal practice and the sex and age distribution pattern of kuru cases showed a most suggestive fit. The anthropological research played an important part in focussing the medical research on the link between cannibal-

ism and the spread of the disease. It led into the research by which Gajdusek and his colleagues were able to transmit the disease to chimpanzees by inoculation and show the properties of the atypical virus of kuru. Shirley Lindenbaum's

386 GILBERT LEWIS

book tells the story of this remarkable and most exotic piece o f medical research,

but more important , she gives it a social context that was lacking before. She

does justice to the afflicted people's view of what had happened to them and

shows their resilience in adversity. She has made a fine and memorable contribu-

tion to the anthropology of sorcery and to medical anthropology. The circum-

stances and the opportuni ty were unique.

Department of Social Anthropology Free School Lane, Cambridge University Cambridge, England

GILBERT LEWIS

REFERENCES

Berndt, Ronald 1958 A 'Devastating Disease syndrome': Kuru Sorcery in the Eastern Central Highlands

of New Guinea. Sociologus 8: 4. Fortune, Reo

1932 Sorcerers of Dobu. London: Routledge. Gajdusek, D. C.

1976 Correspondence on the Discovery and Original Investigations on Kuru. Smadel - Gajdusek Correspondence, 1955-1958, US DHEW.

1977 Unconventional Viruses and the Origin and Disappearance of Kuru. Science 197: 943-960.

Glasse, R. M. 1969 Marriage in South Fore. In R. Glasse, and M. Meggitt, eds. Pigs, Pearlshells and

Women. Engiewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall; pp. 16-37. Glasse, Robert, and Shirley Lindenbaum

1969 South Fore Politics. Anthropological Forum 2: 308. Hayano, David M.

1973 Sorcery Death, Proximity and the Perception of Out-Groups. Ethnology 12: 179-193.

Lindenbaum, Shirley 1971 Sorcery and structure in Fore society. Oceania 41:227-287.

Hornabrook, R. W. L., ed. 1976 Essays on Kuru. Farfingdon: E. W. Classey Ltd.

Macfarlane, A. D. J. 1970 Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Routiedge and Kegan Paul.

Marwick, M. G. 1964 Witchcraft as a Social Strain-Gauge. Australian Journal of Science 26: 263-268.

Thomas, Keith 1971 Religi°n and the Decline °f Magic" L°nd°n: Weidenfeld and Nic°ls°n"

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