Customer Reviews

Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands (Explorations in World Ethnology)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have used *Kuru Sorcery* for several university courses. It's a great book for its time (1978), but so much has been learned about *kuru* (a spongiform encephalopathy related to Mad Cow Disease) since this book was published. Anyone who reads or uses this book (which is a first-rate ethnography, as far as it goes) must add his or her own "appendix" or "final chapter." I recommend this book, with the understanding that the prospective reader will need to complete the amazing picture that Lindenbaum painted as best she could at the time of her writing it.

Shirley Lindenbaum is the anthropologist who discovered the key to kuru. And this book is a marvelous, brief, readable introduction to medical anthropology. I use it every single semester for every class I teach.

I was not impressed by this book, particularly by the title. Only a small portion is dedicated to explaining kuru and its causes/effects on the Fore. The rest of the book is an ethnographic description of the life of the Fore, their reaction to kuru, and the ultimate outcome. In short, kuru is a disease of the CNS caused by cannablism (similar to mad cow disease). The studies take place around the '70s, and by then cannablism was on the decline, and resultingly the disease also became rare. This dry read was hard to get through and quite disappointing because of the decieving title. I would not recommend it unless the reader is genuinely interested in learning more about the Fore of New Guinea. It's interesting for a medical anthropologist, but not a casual read.

This book is interesting but seems incomplete. Toward the end of the book the author begins relating a sequence of events, then stops in the middle and explains that she doesn't know the outcome because her fieldwork ended at that time. I found this odd. I would have liked to have read more information concerning Kuru, how it changed the Fore' and (as would be the natural course of the disease if the cause (cannibalism) had in fact been removed) if there are no new instances of the

disease. The book makes the point of attaching the incidence of cannibalism to a shortage of protein in the diet of Fore' women and children. Has this protein shortage been remedied, or are the Fore' merely claiming to have given up cannibalism to appease authorities?