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 to 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.