Cannibalism

by Bill Schutt

  The Time story then went on to describe how the Fore were “only now emerging from the Stone Age” and that they still practiced cannibalism and the ritual murder of kuru sorcerers (“when they think they can get away with it”). Even when dealing with the scientific aspects of the story, the article’s anonymous author took ghoulish satisfaction in reporting Gajdusek performed autopsies without gloves, atop the same dining-room table where meals were eaten. Additionally, the article continued, the researcher, “had to haggle with victims’ relatives for the bodies” of kuru victims and “he got some bodies at the bargain price of only one ax.” For his part, Gajdusek hated the media coverage and he considered the term “laughing death” to be a “ludicrous misnomer.”

  The worldwide media coverage did have at least one positive effect, in that it increased the public’s awareness of the deadly problem facing the Fore. Because of this, universities began to funnel funds into kuru research, and this money helped support a new influx of professional researchers into the region.

  Two of the first to arrive were cultural anthropologists Robert and Shirley Glasse (now Shirley Lindenbaum), who came from Australia to New Guinea on a university grant in 1961. Studying kinship among the Fore, they returned to continue their research in 1962 and 1963. Their work in the New Guinea Highlands would ultimately allow them to make the connection between kuru and cannibalism.

  I met Dr. Shirley Lindenbaum half a century later at an Upper West Side apartment, which had been decorated with art and other memorabilia collected during a long and distinguished career. In a voice that still retained the hint of an Australian accent, she talked about her studies.

  “What was it that finally convinced you that cannibalism was the mode of kuru transmission?” I asked her.

  Lindenbaum explained that once the epidemic began in the New Guinea Highlands, she and her husband were instructed to gather genealogical data about people who had kuru. In doing so, they spoke to Fore elders who had seen the first cases of the disease in their villages.

  “They could remember these cases and even the names of the people in the North Fore who came down with the disease some couple of decades earlier. There were these tremendously convincing first stories and we said, ‘What happened to those people?’ And the Fore said, ‘Well, they were consumed.’ We knew they were cannibals.”

  I pressed on, asking Lindenbaum how she knew for sure that the Fore were cannibals. Without hesitation, she cited “fieldwork in the area by Ronald and Catherine Berndt in the 1950s” as well as “government patrol reports throughout the Eastern Highlands.”

  I may or may not have raised an eyebrow at the mention of the Berndts but I did ask Lindenbaum if she was bothered by the fact that no anthropologist, including the Berndts, had ever seen ritualized cannibalism firsthand.

  “No,” Lindenbaum replied. “Because there are a lot of things we haven’t seen firsthand—sexual intercourse among them. But there’s evidence that it occurs.”

  At this point, something like an alarm went off in my brain. Basically, this line about sexual intercourse has become something of a mantra for those anthropologists who claim that ritual cannibalism occurred in a particular group, even though they had not seen it with their own eyes.

  After encountering this undeniably catchy analogy several times in the literature, I became curious as to its origin. As far as I can tell, it was coined by Pulitzer Prize–winning anthropologist Jared Diamond, in an article he wrote for Nature in 2000.48 Here’s the relevant passage:

  Finally, any society has practices considered acceptable in private but inappropriate to practice in public, in the presence either of anyone else (for example, sex or defecation) or of non-clan members (for example, initiation rites or cannibalism). The abundance of New Guinea babies, my knowledge that babies are conceived by sexual intercourse, and secondhand accounts persuade me that New Guineans practice sex, but I have no firsthand observations of it even after many years there.

  The reason for my unease at the mention of this particular notion was based on my interview with Bill Arens, who eventually acknowledged a “clear-cut association” between cannibalism and kuru. Still, though, he had a major problem with the cannibalism/sexual intercourse comparison. Approximately two seconds after asking Arens what he thought about Diamond’s famous line, he answered my question with one of his own.

  “You ever been in the field with an anthropologist?”

  I admitted that I hadn’t.

  “They’re always screwing the natives! So they know sexual intercourse takes place.”

  “O . . . kay.” I said, scanning the paper I had been holding for another question, something about Arens’s favorite ice cream flavor, perhaps.

  The anthropologist smiled at what I thought was some well-camouflaged discomfort on my part. “Well, I’m just telling you,” he said. “You gave me the example. And it’s absurd. No anthropologists should ever say that we don’t know sexual intercourse takes place among those people because we’ve never seen it, because that’s really a falsehood. They’ve seen it. And I know they’ve seen it. And if they haven’t seen it . . . they should get a mirror!”

  Months later on the Upper West Side, Lindenbaum was completely unaware of my unease with what had obviously become a standard line among anthropologists studying aspects of behavior that were, for whatever reason, hard to observe. She continued with her story.

  “We knew cannibalism was customary in this area but that the disease had only appeared in the last few decades. And so we thought, Well, that’s very interesting. When we began collecting ethnographic data about who ate whom, it became clear that it was adult women, not adult men, but children of both sexes. At that time the director of kuru research in New Guinea was a guy named Richard Hornabrook, a neurologist. And he said to us, ‘What is it that adult women and children do that adult men don’t do?’ and we said, ‘Cannibalism, of course.’ The epidemiological evidence matched the cultural/behavior evidence, and that matched the historical origin evidence. It was such a neat package, you know?”

  I nodded. “So what did you do with that information?”

  “We told everybody,” she said.

  “And?”

  “And nobody believed us.”

  Nevertheless, Robert Glasse published his and his then-wife, Shirley’s, hypothesis that kuru was transmitted by consuming the body parts of relatives who had died from the disease. As support, he cited the fact that women commonly participated in ritual cannibal feasts but not men. He also wrote that children of both sexes had become infected because they accompanied their mothers to these ceremonies and participated in the consumption of contaminated tissue, including brains. Finally, Glasse calculated that kuru appeared anywhere between four and 24 years after the ingestion of cooked human tissue containing an unidentified pathogenic agent.49

  Nearly 50 years after Glasse published the couple’s findings, anthropologist Jerome Whitfield and his colleagues used an extensive set of interviews as well as previously collected ethnohistorical data to provide a detailed description of Fore mortuary rites. Whitfield told me how his research group deployed the “educated young Fore members of their team to conduct unstructured interviews in a sample group composed of elderly family members who had witnessed, taken part in, or were informed about traditional mortuary feasts.”

  The interviews revealed funerary practices that ranged from burial in a basket or on a platform to the practice of “transumption,” a term Whitfield and some of his colleagues adopted as an alternative to using “cannibalism” to describe the ritual consumption of dead kin. As for how the funerary practices would be carried out: If possible, according to Whitfield, the dying person made his or her preference known. In other cases though, the deceased’s family made the call. Generally, the Fore believed that it was better to be consumed by your loved ones than by maggots and, that by eating their dead, relatives could express their grief and love, receive blessings, and insure the passage of the departed t
o kwelanandamundi, the land of the dead. For these reasons, transumption was the funerary practice favored by the Fore.

  According to those interviewed by Whitfield’s team, the corpse was placed on a bed of edible leaves in order to ensure that “nothing was lost on the ground as this would have been disrespectful.” The body was cut up with a bamboo knife and the parts handled by several women whose specific roles were defined by their relationships to the deceased. Pieces of meat were placed into piles to be divided up among the deceased’s kin. Next, the women leading the ceremony enlisted the daughters and daughters-in-law of the deceased to cut the larger pieces of flesh into smaller strips, which were stuffed into bamboo containers with ferns and cooked over a fire. Eventually the deceased’s torso was cut open, but during this portion of the ritual the older women formed a wall around the body to prevent younger women and children from seeing the removal of the intestines and genitals. These parts were presented to the widow, if there was one. Once the flesh was cooked, it was scooped out and placed onto communal plates made of leaves. The funerary meal was shared among the dead person’s female kin and their children.

  The head of the deceased also became part of the ritual. It was cooked over a fire to remove the hair before being de-fleshed with a knife. Next, the skull was cracked with a stone axe and the brain was removed. Considered to be a delicacy, the semi-gelatinous tissue was mixed with ferns, cooked, and consumed. Bones were dried by the fire, which made it easier to grind them into a powder that would be mixed with grass and heated in bamboo tubes. According to the accounts obtained by Whitfield’s team, the Fore ate everything, including reproductive organs and feces scraped from the intestines.

  Shirley Lindenbaum told me that, initially at least, members of the Fore were receptive about answering questions related to kuru and cannibalism. Later though, “as more missionaries came in and journalists came through and wanted to talk to people, and said ‘tell us about that’ [i.e., cannibalism] . . . they became very defensive and wouldn’t talk to people about it.”

  So how did kuru spread from village to village and from one region of the Fore territory to another? According to Lindenbaum, kinship relations were the key. She explained that although Fore women moved from their natal homes to marry men from other groups, they still maintained their kinship affiliations with their former communities. When deaths occurred, women from adjacent and nearby hamlets, who were related to the deceased persons, traveled and took part in the mortuary feasts. Similarly, individuals and families who moved into new communities maintained kinship ties with their former communities, especially on special occasions. Additionally, like other diseases throughout history, kuru traveled along well-defined trade/exchange routes, in this case those connecting the villages of the New Guinea Highland.

  Factors like these did much to explain how kuru had spread through the villages and additional research put a timeline on the spread. By tracing the path of the kuru reports, from the earliest to the latest, Lindenbaum and her husband calculated that the first cases of kuru occurred around the turn of the 20th century in Uwami, a village in the Northwestern Highlands. By 1920 kuru had spread to the North Fore villages, and by 1930 into the region inhabited by the South Fore.

  Jerome Whitfield, who conducted nearly 200 interviews in the kuru-affected region for his dissertation, believes that the practice of cannibalism in the New Guinea Highlands may have begun 40 or 50 years earlier than the first cases of kuru—which would make it sometime in the mid-19th century.

  Eventually these findings became strong evidence against a genetic origin for the disease—since had there been a genetic link, researchers would have not have expected the first reports of kuru to begin so suddenly and only 60 years earlier. Additionally, had kuru been a genetic abnormality, in all likelihood it would have reached something known as epidemiological equilibrium, a condition in which the prevalence of a genetic disorder in a population becomes stable, rather than changing over time. In this case, the Glasses’ data indicated that, from its first appearance at the turn of the century, kuru-related deaths had increased for the next five decades, peaking in the late 1950s. In 2008, Michael Alpers wrote that kuru deaths among the Fore peaked between 1957 and 1961 with around 1,000 victims. With the prohibition of cannibalism beginning in the late 1950s, the number of kuru deaths hit a steep decline in the 1960s and 1970s, with less than 300 deaths between 1972 and 1976.

  The plague was over. Or so it seemed.

  * * *

  45 Admittedly, “Swiss cheesiform” doesn’t have the same ring.

  46 The Territory of New Guinea was administered by Australia from 1920 until 1975.

  47 Once attached to their specific antigens, the antibodies either interrupt the normal function of the foreign cell or virus, or mark it for destruction by other cells of the immune system like macrophages.

  48 For the record, Diamond’s stance is that cannibalism was a widespread practice throughout human history.

  49 We now know that the symptoms may not appear until five decades after exposure.

  18: Mad Cows and Englishmen

  Unfortunately, the custom of consuming human flesh, like exotic sexual practices, polygamy, and other alien habits, raises violent, unintellectual passions in the Western scholars who study them.

  — Brian Fagan, The Aztecs, 1984

  In the 1980s, researchers in the United Kingdom, like those in New Guinea, were also seeking to explain how a strange form of spongiform encephalopathy was being transmitted, and where it had come from. Like their New Guinea counterparts, they struck pay dirt after making a connection to diet—in this case, after examining the diets of English dairy cows.

  In order to maximize milk production, farmers typically supplemented livestock diets with protein—most often in the form of soybean products. In England, however, where there is no substantial soybean agriculture, using soy as an additive would have been an expensive proposition. Because of this, in the 1940s meat and dairy industries in the UK began to render the waste products of livestock slaughter into an innocent-sounding material they called “meat and bone meal.” Noting the cost-saving benefits, the U.S. and other nations followed suit. In addition to ingredients like bones, brains, spinal cords, heads, hooves, udders, and viscera, the recipe du jour for meat and bone meal also called for the bodies of sick animals (including poultry, pigs, sheep, and so-called downer cattle)50 that had been deemed unfit for human consumption. This gruesome mess was sent off to the “knacker’s yard,” a British slang term for a rendering plant. During the rendering process, the above-mentioned goodies were ground, cooked, and dried into a greyish, feces-scented powder which was sold as a source of dietary protein, calcium, and vitamins for dairy cows, beef cows, pigs, and poultry.

  Although a comparison of livestock-feeding practices with the ritualized consumption of relatives by the Fore seems to be a bit of a stretch, in reality there is an important similarity. In the case of the Fore, ritual cannibalism of kuru victims exposed practitioners to a deadly infective agent. And although nobody knew it at the time, beginning in the 1940s, livestock were exposed to similar pathogens after being forced to consume dietary supplements derived (at least partially) from sickened members of their own species.

  But why had the Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (or BSE) epidemic struck so suddenly four decades later? The livestock industry had been using meat and bone meal for 40 years and nothing like this had ever happened before.

  In searching for answers, the British government enlisted epidemiologist John Wilesmith, who examined the records (where they existed) of rendering plants across the UK. He soon determined that several modifications related to the rendering process had been instituted in the early 1980s. The first was that most of the plants had discontinued the separation of tallow (a creamy fat used to made candles and soap) from the material being converted into meat and bone meal. Previously, dangerous solvents had been used to extract tallow during the rendering process, but after a m
assive industrial explosion in 1974, safety measures were introduced regarding the handling of solvents in the workplace. Rather than deal with the expensive modifications mandated by the new rendering industry regulations, all but two of the plants chose to abandon the tallow extraction process altogether. As a result, substances that had once been removed by the solvent extraction process now remained in the resulting meat and bone meal. Presumably, these substances included the infective—and still unidentified—agent causing Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. There was more, though.

  Wilesmith and his team learned from herdsmen that several recent changes had been made to livestock diets. The first was a significant increase (from 1 percent to 12 percent) in the amount of meat and bone meal added to dairy cow feed. Calves were also receiving the protein supplement at an earlier age. As in other spongiform encephalopathies, there appeared to be a direct correlation between the amount of contaminated material ingested and the likelihood of contracting BSE. Similarly, the incubation period for BSE was apparently shorter in younger animals. In theory, then, before industry-wide changes in diet were implemented, calves received less of the contaminated supplement and did not start ingesting it until later in their lives. As a consequence, infected animals would have been slaughtered before they had a chance to get sick.

  The results of Wilesmith’s epidemiological study were presented to ministry officials in May 1988. He told them that the BSE problem could be traced to the popular nutritional supplement that had been contaminated with sheep scrapie. This material had subsequently been fed to cows, sickening them. In retrospect, Wilesmith’s detective work was remarkably efficient, but ultimately his belief that BSE and scrapie were one in the same disease would place British consumers in peril for over a decade.

  Back from New Guinea in 1963, Carleton Gajdusek realized that his fellow researchers had been correct about the striking similarities between kuru-infected brains, brains from victims of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and those from sheep with scrapie. The puzzle was just beginning to come together when yet another piece was discovered—but this one was several decades old.