Reviewed by: The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen Holly Wardlow Warwick Anderson. The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. 318 pp. Ill. $26.95 (978-0-8018-9040-6). In its depiction of how kuru, a fatal neurological disorder found among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, was investigated and eventually understood, The Collectors of Lost Souls is both a gripping and academically rigorous read. Although it is a chronicle of the kuru investigation and an analysis of colonial medical science, the chapters describing the competing explanatory paradigms read a bit like a whodunit (the slow virus or the prion?). The book is organized chronologically, with each chapter taking the reader a bit farther along the tortuous path of biomedical revelation. Kuru’s initial observers in the early 1950s interpreted the symptoms (uncontrollable shaking, partial paralysis) as hysteria. Later, medical investigators examined the gamut of possibilities from toxins in the environment, to nutritional deficiencies, to infectious agents, to genetic heritability. All of this research required the cooperation of the Fore people and especially their consent for the collection of tissue samples, namely brain matter. The acquisition of brains became increasingly important in 1959 when William J. Hadlow, a veterinary pathologist, observed that kuru-afflicted brains resembled the brains of sheep that had succumbed to scrapie, another fatal neurological disease. This observation led to the inoculation of kuru victims’ brain tissue into chimpanzees, and by 1967 these experiments demonstrated the infectious nature of kuru, even if the agent and the mechanism by which it was [End Page 143] spread was a mystery. Later experiments showed that the mysterious infectious agent was impervious to nucleic acid destruction but highly vulnerable to enzymes that disrupted protein structure, which supported the theory that kuru was caused by a pathogenic protein (prion) and not a virus. Not surprisingly, over time the Fore became resentful about the never-ending requests for the brains of their dead kin, especially since no cure ever appeared even after decades of research. Anderson’s account is notable for its depiction of conflict. First, there was nationalist conflict, with Australian scientists and colonial officers trying to control or obstruct the research of the maverick American interloper, Carleton Gajdusek, who managed, through charisma, doggedness, and bullying to acquire a monopoly over the kuru brain economy. Then, of course, there were the scientific conflicts, with each new paradigm initially seen as impossible before eventually being accepted as truth. And finally, there was the conflict over whether cannibalism among the Fore was the mechanism through which prions were transmitted. Although Anderson devotes less attention to this issue, what emerges is that Gajdusek and other researchers were convinced as early as 1970 that cannibalism played a causal role and yet to some extent resisted this line of inquiry because of their fears that the Fore, and Papua New Guineans more generally, would be yet further depicted as primitive savages. This strange paradox—Gajdusek’s own fetishistic acquisitiveness for Fore brains combined with his equally possessive desire to protect the Fore from less sympathetic outsiders—haunts the text, for it suggests that it is precisely this kind of relational dynamic that animated the colonial scientific encounter. There are, of course, some critiques to be made. As an anthropologist who does research in Papua New Guinea, I couldn’t help wondering what the book would have been like if it had been cowritten with an anthropologist who might have more thoroughly taken into account Fore beliefs and practices concerning sorcery and gender. Anderson repeatedly asserts that the Fore held fast to the belief that sorcery was the cause of kuru; however, he never discusses what happened to the presumably many people accused of kuru sorcery or why sorcery beliefs remained so robust. Similarly, Papua New Guinea societies are known for the complexity of their gender beliefs and practices and the fact that most kuru victims were women would have been interpreted through and, in return, shaped Fore notions of gender. These concerns might seem to fall outside the purview of Anderson’s investigation, and yet because he draws so much (and yet quite...
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Aug 26, 2023
Raymond Apthorpe 
Open Access