[Sca-cooks] cannibalism and Kuru

[ariann]

----- Original Message -----
From: El Hermoso Dormido <ElHermosoDormido at dogphilosophy.net>
SNIP
> There apparently is a tribe or group of tribes in New Guinea(?) that
> were still occasionally practicing a ritual form of cannibalism of
> members of the tribe who'd died of old age(? - this is from memory,
> I haven't looked into it in years.  At any rate, it wasn't "captured
> enemies" or anything of the sort.)  Doing this was apparently the vector
> by which they spread Kuru, which is related to Creutzfeld-Jakob syndrome
> (i.e. the "human version" of "Mad Cow Disease"...).  Naturally, Kuru
> was a pretty rare disease....

This is true.  The researcher's name is Calton Gadjusek (sp?) and the
discovery of kuru won him the Nobel prize in medicine for the discovery of
"slow infectious diseases".

remembering back to Anthro 101:
Gadjusek noticed that the women and young children were afflicted with a
debilitating disease.  He traced it back to their eating the brain of their
deceased elder kinsman.  The male relatives ate the fleshy parts at the
funeral feast; whereas, the women, and the toddlers in their care, ate the
brain.  Apparently, this was a great honor.

In that class we also studied  Napoleon Chagnon's work on the Venezuelan
cannibals, the Yanomamo.  Apparently, they ate their enemies, to ingest
courage and other desirable traits.  They never ate strangers, because they
did not know what traits might become a part of them.  Thus, dispelling the
myth that they had eaten any number of missing European explorers.  At the
end of the semester, we viewed Chagnon's documentary: The Feast - which was
actually about a big canoe full of vegetable soup.

food for thought,

Ariann