Cutting and Connecting

'Afrinesian' Perspectives on Networks, Relationality, and Exchange

Knut Christian Myhre, Knut Christian Myhre

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785332647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Questions regarding the origins, mobility, and effects of analytical concepts continue to emerge as anthropology endeavors to describe similarities and differences in social life around the world. Cutting and Connecting rethinks this comparative enterprise by calling in a conceptual debt that theoretical innovations from Melanesian anthropology owe to network analysis originally developed in African contexts. On this basis, the contributors adopt and employ concepts from recent studies of Melanesia to analyze contemporary life on the African continent and to explore how this exchange influences the borrowed anthropological perspectives. By focusing on ways in which networks are cut and connections are made, these empirical investigations show how particular relationships are created in today's Africa. In addition, the volume aims for an approach that recasts relationships between theory and place and concepts and ethnography, in a manner that destabilizes the distinction between fieldwork and writing.

Chapter 1

KURU, AIDS, AND WITCHCRAFT

Reconfiguring Culpability in Melanesia and Africa

Isak Niehaus

I almost wish cannibalism is more prevalent than it is.

— Carleton Gajdusek, Nobel laureate

Notes for this chapter begin on page 38.

The emergence of AIDS has prompted researchers to consider the social configurations of epidemics (Herring and Swedlund 2010; Jonsen and Stryker 1993; Lindenbaum 2001). Rosenberg (1992) observes that epidemics follow a common dramatic pattern of increased revelatory tension, a move toward crisis, and a drift toward closure. Epidemics, he argues, are social ‘sampling devices’, disrupting once stable modes of social reproduction and stripping life bare, revealing ideas, structural inequalities, and conflicts that are kept subdued in less critical times.

These studies emphasize the attribution of blame and culpability. Throughout the history of epidemics, diverse actors have stigmatized disease carriers and other ‘scapegoats’. Foreigners were singled out for blame during epidemics in Renaissance Italy, untouchables in India, and Jews in Europe (Herring and Swedlund 2010). Likewise, the AIDS epidemic has spawned various ‘geographies of blame’ (Farmer 1992). In the global North, epidemiologists designate ‘disreputable’ populations—such as intravenous drug users, gay men, and immigrants—as ‘risk groups’. This contributes to various forms of discrimination. Competing discourses flourished in the global South. Popular conspiracy theories posited that the American military deliberately created AIDS as a means of biological warfare or as a strategy of discouraging black people from procreating. There were also claims that European sex tourists introduced HIV. Within village communities, elders blame the youth, and men blame ‘free women’ for the AIDS epidemic (Farmer 1992; Schoepf 2001; Weiss 1993).

In this chapter, I investigate the spate of witchcraft accusations that AIDS has unleashed in Southern Africa. Sufferers, their kin, diviners, and Christian healers often interpret as evidence of witchcraft the very same symptoms that are diagnosed by physicians as AIDS. Ashforth (2002) shows how residents of Soweto see common symptoms of AIDS as those of slow poisoning, called isidliso. They allege that witches insert a small creature into the gullet of their victims, which gradually devours them from the inside. Isidliso covers literally anything that affects the lungs, stomach, and digestive tract and leads to a slow, wasting illness. Ashforth finds the association of AIDS with witchcraft to be particularly plausible in contexts of inequality and insecurity. Other parts of Southern Africa have witnessed a resurgence of witch-finding and witch-cleansing movements (Andersson 2002; Probst 1999; Schoepf 2001; Yamba 1997).

A similar situation can be found in Impalahoek, a village in the Bushbuckridge municipality of South Africa’s Mpumalanga Province,¹ where I have conducted intermittent fieldwork. Starting in 1990, I visited Impalahoek for a period of at least one month each year, doing participant observation and conducting open-ended interviews on topics such as witchcraft beliefs and accusations, politics, sexuality, and the AIDS epidemic. Villagers did not believe that witches actually sent AIDS, but they were of the opinion that witches manufactured sicknesses that mimicked its symptoms. In this manner, witches took advantage of the epidemic and used AIDS as a shield to disguise their nefarious activities (Niehaus 2013: 155–157). Researchers often see the framing of AIDS in terms of witchcraft as a matter of indigenous belief obstructing effective health seeking (Pronyk 2001).

To gain deeper, intercontextual insight into the significance of witchcraft accusations during the AIDS epidemic in Bushbuckridge, I have utilized theoretical insights from Melanesian anthropology, notably studies of the kuru epidemic in Papua New Guinea. Certain similarities between AIDS and kuru enable a comparative analysis. Like AIDS, kuru is an incurable disease—a slow infection that can remain dormant in the human body for years before its first symptoms appear. As with AIDS, the host population also invoked mystical explanations, blaming sorcerers for the kuru epidemic.²

I am particularly drawn to the work of Warwick Anderson (2000, 2008), who analyzes the labeling of kuru in terms of multiple networks of relatedness, interaction, and exchange. His use of ‘network’ is considerably broader than that of Thornton (2009: 413–414), who has fruitfully investigated the nature of ‘sexual networks’ as “intricate social structures constituted primarily by sexual relationships” in South Africa and in Uganda. Anderson treats networks as comprising a broad range of human and non-human actors that are involved not only in the transmission of disease (pathogens, bodies, corpses), but also in the articulation of illness (sick people, their caretakers and kin, diviners and healers whom they consult, medical technologies, physicians and scientists). He shows how the labeling of kuru by diverse actors was an intensely political act, involving the allocation of blame and culpability. It constituted persons and networks in particular ways, bringing certain modes of relationality into view and, at the same time, occluding others. The allocation of blame involved the construction of boundaries, the ‘cutting of networks’ (Strathern 1996), and also the strengthening of existing configurations.

Anderson (2000, 2008) documents how the biomedical and scientific fraternity first interacted closely with the South Fore in labeling kuru and searching for a responsible agent, but then, in its readiness to connect kuru to the cannibalistic consumption of dead humans, set the South Fore apart on the basis of a disreputable alterity. By attributing kuru to the sorcery of affines and neighbors, the South Fore countered victim blaming and reconfigured culpability. Through his analysis of this complex series of transactions, Anderson enables us to transcend the conventional view that sorcery is simply a matter of attachment to local belief. His research is particularly pertinent to Bushbuckridge, where health workers and educators played a central role in labeling AIDS as an incurable condition that resulted from sexual promiscuity. Such framing stigmatized villagers and contributed to the exclusion of people living with AIDS from networks of social intercourse. In a bid to shift culpability onto different sets of networks, and in order to reinforce the relations that AIDS threatened to disrupt, accusations of witchcraft followed in the wake of this victim blaming.

Kuru in the New Guinea Highlands

As Anderson (2000, 2008) shows, the labeling of kuru arose from a complex series of interactions within a broad network, comprising Australian patrol officers, medical scientists, anthropologists, and the South Fore. These interactions involved the global circulation of scientific valuables, including biomedical technologies, pathogens, and corpses.

Operating from a post at Okapa, Australian patrol officers made contact with the South Fore in the eastern highlands of New Guinea during the late 1940s. A group of about 14,000 slash-and-burn horticulturalists, the South Fore cultivated sweet potato, taro, yam, corn, sugar cane, and bananas. They kept pigs and hunted small mammals, cassowaries, other birds, and reptiles. South Fore men accompanied the patrol officers to witness the operations of government in Port Moresby, learning how to build roads and to cultivate new crops such as potato, tomato, and coffee (Anderson 2000: 718).

In 1953, a patrol officer noticed a South Fore girl sitting by a fire. She shivered violently, her head jerking from side to side. Unable to eat, she died within a few weeks. This was the first recorded case of kuru (lit., ‘trembling’ or ‘fear’) in medical literature. With the discovery of new cases, medical orderlies discovered that the symptoms of kuru were remarkably uniform. As a ‘slow infection’, it could remain invisible for incubation periods of up to several decades. The disease began with a failure of muscle coordination and a tremor involving the extremities and the head. After a few months, speech became unintelligible, and the afflicted person could no longer walk or stand. The victim then became progressively incapacitated, being unable to eat, urinate, or defecate. Death was inevitable and followed the first clinical signs by about three to five months (Lindenbaum 1979: 10).

Medical scientists in Port Moresby initially described kuru as ‘acute hysteria’ in otherwise healthy adults. The anthropologists Ronald and Catherine Berndt elaborated upon this perception. They observed that the Fore attributed kuru to sorcery and hypothesized that the disease was a manifestation of stress and emotional insecurity, occasioned by European contact. Following Cannon’s (1942) well-known essay on ‘voodoo death’, the Berndts reasoned that fears provoked by the threat of sorcery could have far-reaching psychosomatic effects (see Berndt 1954). This suggestion influenced colonial practice. A patrol officer called together the villagers, made a great bonfire, and asked them to burn all of the items that they might use in sorcery. Sorcery accusations declined, but kuru deaths did not abate (Anderson 2008: 14).

A careful review of ethnographic evidence suggests that while the South Fore did attribute kuru to sorcery, they also explored alternative mystical explanations for the onset of the disease. They believed that sorcerers harmed their intended victims by burying items of their clothing, along with sorcery bundles, in swampy land. Diviners cooked food in a number of bamboo containers, each representing a particular village. Food that did not cook properly showed which village housed the responsible sorcerers. Should diviners be able to retrieve the buried clothing, they believed, the victim would recover (Beasley 2006: 187). But the South Fore also identified kuru as ‘cassowary disease’ (i.e., foolishness resulting from assaults by anthropomorphic spirits) and as a manifestation of ‘ghost winds’. They fed the sufferers bark from casuarinas trees, whose swaying resembled tremors of the body. The South Fore saw ghost winds as a sign that the arrival of cargo was imminent. On these occasions, they placed human skulls in villages and filled newly built home with stones, wood, and leaves. After anointing the items with pig blood, they awaited their transformation into paper, knives, and rifles (Berndt 1954: 226).

Henceforth, scientific discourses increasingly medicalized kuru and also the South Fore themselves. After spending 20 days among the South Fore in 1956, Vin Zigas, a medical officer, began to suspect that kuru might well be an example of encephalitis. Zigas collaborated with Carleton Gajdusek, an American specialist in biophysical chemistry and child development working at the Hall Institute in Melbourne who was often described as an erratic and irritating colleague, but one who worked with great enthusiasm. In 1957, Gajdusek began to study kuru from a base camp at Okapa, and he, too, became convinced that kuru would turn out to have a biological cause. But he viewed the disease in the broadest possible perspective, considering the interactions of biochemistry, culture and society, and the lived realities of people’s lives. He actively sought the collaboration of other biomedical scientists, anthropologists, and the South Fore, participating in exchanges, building networks, and negotiating relations.

Gajdusek first compiled a census of the entire Fore region, mapping out the distribution of kuru. He determined that the epidemic was concentrated among the South Fore, noting fatalities of up to 10 percent in some hamlets. He also reported that kuru entered the South Fore area during the late 1920s and reached a peak between 1957 and 1960, when it claimed about 200 deaths per annum. Although the vast majority of adult victims were women, kuru affected boys and girls with about equal frequency. At the height of the epidemic, life expectancy for a South Fore woman was little more than 20 years, leaving men without wives and infants without mothers. However, in subsequent years, the age at which the first clinical signs appeared increased.

In search of the infectious agent, Gajdusek urged the South Fore to donate samples of their blood, spinal fluid, and urine for chemical analysis and the corpses of their loved ones for medical autopsies. He dissected the bodies on his dining room table, preparing them for scientific examination, and then airfreighted them to metropolitan laboratories for microbiological analysis (Anderson 2000: 725). Gajdusek plied kuru sufferers with virtually every drug that biomedicine had to offer, including vitamins, anti-convulsants, tranquilizers, anabolic steroids, and corticosteroids. He treated mundane infections, tended to wounds, and distributed soap, blankets, and clothing. Microbiological analysis showed pathological changes to the central nervous system and neurological deterioration of brain tissue. But it failed to identify the toxic element.

Bennett et al. (1958) theorized that kuru might be a hereditary disorder, determined by a single autosomal gene, dominant in females but recessive in males. Scientists cautiously accepted this suggestion as the best available hypothesis. To prevent the spread of the genetic trait, some even urged the government to create a kuru reserve from which no emigration would be allowed. However, this eugenics policy was not practically enforceable (Anderson 2008: 128).

In 1959, the veterinary pathologist William Hadlow provided Gajdusek with a new model for the transmission of kuru. Hadlow observed that the brain tissue of kuru victims resembled sheep brains with scrapie, a degenerative infectious disease. There were characteristic vacuoles between the cells, giving the tissue a spongy appearance. Veterinary scientists had successfully transferred the disease to healthy sheep and goats, suggesting that a ‘slow virus’ was responsible. In 1963, Gajdusek and his co-workers inoculated chimpanzees intracerebrally with diseased material from deceased kuru victims. Two years later, the primates began to develop neurological disorders akin to kuru.

If a rare slow virus was indeed responsible for kuru, how then was it transmitted among the South Fore? To answer this question, attention shifted from laboratories back to the field. During 1961 and 1962, the anthropologists Robert Glasse and Shirley Lindenbaum studied the social aspects of kuru. By gathering information on kinship, they were able to reject a purely hereditary interpretation of transmission. They noted that many kuru victims were kin in a social, non-biological sense. The recentness of kuru also made a hereditary explanation hard to defend. Glasse and Lindenbaum began to suspect that the unidentified agent for kuru might be transmitted by endo-cannibalism: “When a body was considered for human consumption, none of it was discarded except the bitter gall bladder … [M]aternal kin dismembered the corpse with a bamboo knife and stone axe. They first removed the hands and feet, then cut open the arms and legs to strip the muscles … After severing the head, they fractured the skull to remove the brain. Meat, viscera and brain were all eaten. Marrow was sucked from cracked bones, and sometimes the pulverized bones themselves were cooked and eaten with green vegetables” (Lindenbaum 1979: 20).

The consumption of the flesh of deceased relatives explained the concentration of kuru among certain families and also its sex and age distribution. Glasse and Lindenbaum wrote that men claimed prior rights to pork to compensate for the depletion of wild game. Women supplemented their lesser allotment of pork with small game, insects, and dead humans, and young children ate whatever their mothers gave them. A woman’s brain (the most significant body matter in the transmission of the disease) was given to the wives of her brothers and sons. According to Glasse and Lindenbaum, children who grew up after the suppression of cannibalism by missionaries did not succumb to the disease. The epidemic slowly abated, and by the 1990s there were hardly any deaths (Lindenbaum 2001: 368).

Anderson (2008) and Beasley (2009) describe the growing anger and bitterness expressed by the South Fore toward health workers and scientists, whom they saw as taking without giving. Grief stricken by the loss of kin, South Fore men desperately desired a cure. They had already been exposed to the successes of medical treatment in the case of yaws, and initially saw it as their responsibility to accompany the Australian medical orderlies on their dangerous missions. The men assisted in providing basic treatment for dying relatives, translated conversations for the orderlies, helped collect biological specimens, and witnessed medical examinations and autopsies. But the South Fore gradually lost confidence in medical explanations for kuru.

Existing histories do not make this clear, but the change in attitude of the South Fore seems to have been a response to the manner in which scientists and health workers pathologized local culture by blaming the kuru epidemic on sorcery beliefs and cannibalism. Although outsiders almost universally accepted the thesis of the cannibalistic transmission of kuru, critics found little evidence to support it. They contended that the Fore might plausibly have spread kuru through the handling of decomposing corpses in pre-Chr...