Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(68)
By the time Ronald and Catherine Berndt arrived in the New Guinea highlands in 1951, they had already spent years in the field studying Australia’s aboriginal communities. The thought was that the Fore would become another notch on Ronald’s impressive anthropological belt and, at first, things looked promising. The indigenous highlanders threw parties for the couple, reportedly believing them to be the spirits of their dead ancestors, returning to the fold to relearn the language they had apparently forgotten. Soon enough, though, the Fore lost interest in rehabilitating their pale relatives—but not in the strange goods they had brought along with them. Fascination soon turned to envy, and not long after the Berndts settled in, they wrote that the locals were “difficult people to deal with,” requiring “payments for stories: salt, tobacco, newspapers, wool strands, matches, razors, and so on.” The anthropologists also reported “plenty of cannibalism.”
“Actually these people are ‘bestial’ in many ways,” Ronald Berndt wrote. “Dead human flesh, to these people is food, or potential food.” He also described cannibalism among the Fore as an outlet for sexual violence, and “orgiastic feast” was a phrase he seemed to regard with fondness.
A decade later, the not-yet-controversial anthropologist Bill Arens commented on Ronald Berndt’s influential 1962 book on social interactions among the Fore. According to Arens, Berndt’s tome, Excess and Restraint, displayed “too much of the former and too little of the latter.” Arens was particularly galled by Berndt’s description of a Fore husband copulating with a corpse as the man’s wife simultaneously butchered the body for a meal. As these things go, she accidently cut off her husband’s penis with her knife. “Now you have cut off my penis!” the man cried. “What shall I do?” In response, according to Berndt, the woman “popped it into her mouth, and ate it. . . . ”
Arens was not alone in his criticism of the Berndts, as others concluded that, while the pair had made some important anthropological contributions, there were more than a few problems with their work. Most of these related to the many instances of outrageous behavior Berndt detailed in his book—coupled with the growing suspicion that he had made much of it up.
As I began my own research on cannibalism, I found it odd that the Berndts’ reputation, especially as it related to their claims about extreme behavior by the Fore, seemed to have recovered quite nicely with the passage of time. In fact, I noticed that the Berndts were cited in many of the more recent papers on kuru and cannibalism as having presented solid evidence that the Fore practiced man-eating.
But more on that later.
Back in the New Guinea Highlands of 1952, relations between the Berndts and the Fore failed to improve during the couple’s second field season. Ronald reportedly slept with a pistol under his pillow, at one point firing it to scatter some villagers who had been bothering him. As for kuru, the Berndts had seen the disease among the Fore but apparently never made any meaningful connections concerning its cause. Within two years of their arrival in New Guinea, the pair left the country for good.
Fortunately, after the Berndts’ inauspicious start, the researchers who followed them had far better luck, some of them initiating studies that would become classics in the fields of anthropology and disease hunting—and eventually garnering a pair of Nobel Prizes.
One of the researchers was Daniel Carleton Gajdusek (GUY-doo-shek), a Yonkers, New York, native and 1946 graduate of Harvard Medical School. Gajdusek had no real interest in practicing medicine but instead chased his fascination with viral genetics and the anthropology of what he called “primitive” communities across the world. He studied rabies and plague in the Middle East, hemorrhagic fever in Korea, and encephalitis in the Soviet Union. Arriving in Melbourne in 1955, the brilliant but eccentric researcher frequently “went bush,” studying child development among the aboriginals and collecting blood serum for several Australian research labs.
Gajdusek flew to New Guinea in 1957 and, with nothing but his own meager funds to support this venture, he began working on a new problem. To a colleague in the United States, Gajdusek wrote:
I am in one of the most remote, recently opened regions of New Guinea, in the center of tribal groups of cannibals, only contacted in the last ten years—still spearing each other as of a few days ago, and cooking and feeding the children the body of a kuru case, the disease I am studying—only a few weeks ago.
But Gajdusek had never seen any actual cannibalism and he had very little real knowledge about kuru. Beyond the stress-related hypothesis, there was some conjecture that the deadly condition might be the result of an environmental toxin. Others believed that kuru was a hereditary disorder. Consequently, Gajdusek got busy. He spent months collecting blood, feces, and urine from the locals. He ran tests on those stricken by the disease and, with the aid of translators, he conducted interviews with victims and their family members.
By mid-1957, Gajdusek was working with Vin Zigas, a medical doctor who had already been gathering information, as well as his own blood samples. That November their initial findings were published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine. Kuru, the authors claimed, was a degenerative disease of the central nervous system. They described the clinical course of the disease as well as its curious preference for striking three times as many women as men. The skewed sex ratios were difficult to pick up, however, since more men were being killed for having been kuru sorcerers. For the Fore, ritual murder had become the great equalizer. In what would later become an important observation, Gajdusek also noted that kuru occurred equally in children of both sexes.