Epidemiology, social history, and the beginnings of medical anthropology in the highlands of New Guinea

Warwick Anderson

doi:10.17157/mat.5.1.591

Abstract

Shirley Lindenbaum’s study in the early 1960s of the origins and transmission of kuru among the Fore people of the eastern highlands of New Guinea is one of the earliest examples of an explicitly medical anthropology. Lindenbaum later described her investigations as assembling ‘an epidemiology of social relations’. How might the emergence of medical anthropology, then, be related to the concurrent development of the social history of medicine and global epidemic intelligence? Are these alternative genealogies for medical anthropology?

Highlights

Lindenbaum’s ethnographic engagement with Fore began in the early 1960s, coinciding with the rise of what came to be known as ‘epidemiological intelligence’, or surveillance, and with the emergence of the social history of disease
‘an epidemiology of social relations’ (vii). This curious phrase, ‘an epidemiology of social relations’?1 To me, it suggests a means of disentangling the threads of history, sociality, and subjectivity entwined in the early years of medical anthropology
Was the epidemiology of social relations another way of talking about historical configurations of disease? What might such framing entail in representing suffering and intersubjectivity in nascent medical anthropology? In 1961, Shirley Glasse, as she was named,2 entered the eastern highlands of New Guinea – an Australian-mandated territory newly opened up and subject to the imperial gaze – just as epidemiology and the social survey were taking off, going global, and just as the social history of medicine was developing in the northern hemisphere

Summary

Introduction

This curious phrase, ‘an epidemiology of social relations’?1 To me, it suggests a means of disentangling the threads of history, sociality, and subjectivity entwined in the early years of medical anthropology. Lindenbaum’s ethnographic engagement with Fore began in the early 1960s, coinciding with the rise of what came to be known as ‘epidemiological intelligence’, or surveillance, and with the emergence of the social history of disease. 2 Born Shirley Inglis, Lindenbaum was first married to Robert Glasse, with whom she conducted research on the Fore.

Results

Conclusion