PJ Vogt
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Appearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
It didn't seem to be contagious.
You could sit with a person dying of kuru and not catch it yourself.
But when the foray moved in with other groups living near them, sometimes kuru came with them.
In the 50s, Westerners were guessing that kuru might be genetic.
If so, it was a recent mutation, because the foray told them this phenomenon was relatively new.
It may have only been happening since the 1910s.
There'd been one explanation that had been sort of a rumor that no one seemed to want to commit to writing.
In the late 60s, two papers are published hypothesizing that the Foray may be contracting Kuru through cannibalism.
The Foray ate their dead.
Not always, not all the time, but in the same way that you tell your partner whether you want to be buried or cremated, in Foray society, you would tell your partner if you wanted to be buried, left out in the forest, or consumed by your family.
This is from a paper by an anthropologist named Jerome T. Whitfield about what happened to a foray person who chose to be consumed.
Quote, the head of the deceased was placed over a fire to burn off the hair, and then it was defleshed with a bamboo knife.
A hole was made in the top of the skull using a stone, and the brain was gradually removed by one of the older women, whose hand would be wrapped in ferns.
The tissue was then mixed with ferns and placed in bamboo tubes, normally two or three, and cooked.
For the foray who were eaten, the head and the brains were typically reserved for women, but women would sometimes bring their children to the funerary rite and share food with them.
My assumption is that any society that's practicing cannibalism, it's because of a lack of respect for the body.
But this seems like it comes from a place of utmost respect for a body.
And from the 4A's perspective, if you love someone, first of all, it would be better to be consumed by the people who love you than by worms and maggots, which is like what's going to happen if you're in the ground or left out.