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Description
INTRODUCTION
I was still very young when I saw [kuru] and even after we treated it there was no help. Everyone was falling apart. [Kuru victims] were aware that there was no cure and that they would die. It wasn't just one person that this sickness came to--there were about three in a house line and then after they died there would be another three. It was ... ongoing ... there were many deaths. Once a [person] ... was affected by kuru [their] family would think that the clan had poisoned [them] and they would start ... shooting at each other and that made it worse. It was chaos! (Tauribi).
The above recollection of the impact of kuru on the South Fore people of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea presents a grim picture of a socio-medical crisis. This is significant for two reasons. First, it was formed at a time when the epidemic was nearing its peak. By this time the Fore, who had initially regarded the condition as benign, recognised kuru (a Fore word which means shaking or fear) as a uniformly progressive, fatal illness caused by sorcery (Lindenbaum 1979: 2001). Second, it draws attention to the crisis that accompanied the epidemic, and hints at the manner in which the Fore currently view its impact. In this way, Tauribi's comment sets the scene for this paper, which explores dominant themes from the oral narratives of five South Fore men. These, like Tauribi, survived the epidemic and assisted in its investigation by European scientists. While much has been published on the scientific results of the kuru investigation and associated inquiries, little has been written on the Fore perspective. (1) This paper attempts to redress this imbalance.
Lindenbaum (2001: 364) argues that, in precipitating a crisis, epidemics evoke social responses that reflect the values and world views of people under threat. Citing Rosenberg (1992), she points out that as social phenomena epidemics take on a particular 'dramaturgic form' (Lindenbaum 2001:367):
They start at a moment in time, proceed on a stage limited in space and duration, following a plot line of increasing and revelatory tension, move to a crisis of individual and collective character, then drift toward closure.
The form of an oral narrative is shaped by the context and performance of the storytelling, and the meaning of events recalled (see Beasley 2006; Friedman 2000; Polier 1998). The temporal and spatial content of the Fore narratives reflect the dramaturgic form of epidemics, which is used as the framework for this discussion. The drama begins with the narrators' childhood memories of the crisis at the height of the epidemic, ascends during their adolescence and adulthood to a peak of optimism associated with the arrival of the scientists and the search for a cure, before sliding into disillusionment over the lack of a cure and unrealised aspirations for a better life.
BACKGROUND TO THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION
At the time of Tauribi's evidence, the plight of the Fore remained largely unknown to the outside world. The rugged, mountainous area inhabited by these people lies approximately 80 kilometres to the southeast of Goroka, capital of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. From the 1930s, goldminers, missionaries, colonial administrators and planters took up residence in this area. Traditionally subsistence agriculturalists reliant on stone implements, the Fore were gradually exposed to their new commodities and technology. (2) The Fore region came under the Australian administration from 1947. By the early 1950s, police and patrol posts had been established and regular patrols were conducted in an attempt to establish law and order in a region known for its inter-tribal warfare (Nelson 1996). Following close behind were the first missionary teachers, who established several posts in the district. However, much of the Fore territory (particularly in the south) remained largely beyond European influence until the late 1950s, when news of an exotic new disease attracted international media and scientific attention.
Patrol reports of the early 1950s noted a great fear of sorcery among the Fore people, and an associated condition of 'shivering', known locally as kuru (see Nelson 1996). Recognising the force of sorcery in Fore belief, the local administrators initially dismissed kuru as an illness (Mathews 1976). This view may also have been influenced by anthropologist, Ronald Berndt (1954a, 1954b), who, when working among the North Fore in the early 1950s, concluded that kuru was a manifestation of hysteria in reaction to European contact. It was the practice of sorcery rather than the possibility of an epidemic that dominated the Administration's view of kuru (Coleman 1954/55: 8-9):
The Fore are bound up with sorcery. Below are descriptions of some of the forms:
Kuru:- An article of clothing of some person is obtained, and is buried in swampy land. The person becomes sick, the skin trembles violently, and he dies. Should the article be retrieved from the swamp, he recovers.
Patrol officer, Coleman (1954/55: 9) went on to describe the 'detection of sorcery' as a process whereby food is cooked in a number of bamboo containers each representing a particular village:
The village which has made sorcery is the one represented by the container in which the food does not cook completely. [Coleman concludes] I cannot say how much of their sorcery is true, or whether it may all be faked ... certainly it is difficult to reason out 'kuru'.
By the mid-1950s, as further cases came to notice, it was apparent that kuru was not only a notable cause of Fore mortality, particularly among women and children, but also a source of local conflict. In 1955, concerned over social disruption, John Coleman sent a 'typical case' of kuru to a government doctor, Vincent Zigas. Zigas made a provisional diagnosis of kuru as 'acute hysteria in an otherwise perfectly healthy woman' (McArthur 1955 cited in Mathews 1976:84). The following year, Zigas travelled at Coleman's request to the Kainantu area, where he realised he was facing a disorder of epidemic proportions. In his report to the Director of Public Health in Port Moresby, Zigas (1975:483) requested relief 'from some of [his] duties as medical officer so that [he] could spend more time in studying the disease'.
Early in February 1957, Zigas was joined in the Fore area by an American paediatrician and virologist, Carleton Gajdusek. Together they established a 'jungle hospital' near the South Fore Okapa Patrol Post where they treated kuru patients and studied the disease (Zigas and Gajdusek 1957: 746). In a landmark publication, the two doctors described kuru as 'closely related to the ill defined group of heredofamilial neurologic degenerative disorders of the central nervous system' (Gajdusek and Zigas 1957: 2). This publication encouraged a large number of scientists to study the disease.
Australian scientists grew concerned at the demographic impact of kuru, and the Administration's inability to control medical researchers working among the Fore. This culminated in the establishment of the Papua and New Guinea Medical Research Advisory Committee (MRAC) in 1962 (Papua and New Guinea Medical Advisory Research Committee 1962). (3) One year later, the Committee formalised kuru research by establishing an official multi-disciplinary investigation under the directorship of New Zealand neurologist, Richard Hornabrook (Schofield, 1963). Within four years, the colonial government founded the Papua and New Guinea Institute of Human Biology (IHB)--later renamed the Papua New Guinea Institute of Medical Research (IMR). Over time, these developments led to an influx of scientists, and a broadening of research both within and beyond Fore territory.
Toward the end of the 1960s, kuru was identified as a 'slow virus' of the central nervous system, transmitted through the Fore practice of cannibalistic mortuary rites (see Gajdusek, Gibbs and Alpers 1966; Mathews, Glasse and Lindenbaum, 1968). A Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine was awarded to Carleton Gajdusek in 1976 for his detection of the infectious agent as a slow virus. Since then, kuru has been classified as belonging to the group of neurodegenerative disorders acquired through exposure to an infectious proteinaceous agent known as a prion. Related diseases include scrapie in sheep and goats, bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle, and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans. All of these diseases slowly attack brain tissue, which characteristically acquires a sponge-like appearance. Minute holes are formed from the accumulation of abnormal forms of the prion protein that naturally occurs in brain tissue (Collinge 2001; Lindenbaum 2001).
COLLECTING THE SOUTH FORE NARRATIVES
In June 2003, I spent four weeks in the Eastern Highlands collecting oral narratives from a group of South Fore men and women who had been associated with the kuru scientists. (4) The purpose was to obtain a Fore perspective on the investigation as a counter to the European view. Contact, field accommodation at a mission guest house at Ivingoi, and a local translator were arranged prior to my arrival.
Ivingoi's central location in the South Fore region makes it an ideal site for a small district hospital, a mission ambulance service, and a district high school that accommodates over 400 boarder students. My accommodation proved a suitable venue for recording the narratives. Not only was it within a day's walk of most of the participants, it also offered the advantage of being a neutral and locally respected site beyond the influence of village politics.
The translator, who was Tauribi's nephew, was well known to all the narrators, some of whom were his kin. His late father had been one of the longest serving, most trusted Fore kuru workers. As a boy aged ten, he was taken to the United States of America by Carleton Gajdusek to be educated. (5) Later he studied for two years at the University of Indiana towards a degree. He was a skilled linguist who spoke excellent English in addition to his mother-tongue and Pidgin. He also had a good understanding of local languages and dialects.
The narratives of fifteen men and three women were recorded. They didn't know their age, which I estimated to be between the late-fifties and mid-sixties for the men, and the late-thirties and early-fifties among the women. By Fore standards, the men were... |
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