The Entailments of Exchange

1 Takings and Givings

"I write at the moment to let you know that we have had a kuru death and a complete autopsy." He was relieved and triumphant. "I did it at 2am, during a howling storm, in a native hut, by lantern light, and sectioned the brain without a brain knife."

Carleton Gajdusek to a colleague at the National Institutes of Health, 1957 (Anderson 2008: 100).

"We have a long and bizarre history of this sort of thing."

Australian colonial administrator Hornabrook, 1975 (Anderson 2008: 182)

For several years now, Warwick Anderson has been my guide to thinking about the "unequal and disordered" reciprocities that lie at the very foundation of biomedical research, colonial and otherwise. The phrase "collected" me when I read some of Anderson's earlier work on kuru (2000: 715), and it proves a perfect key to the brilliantly rendered, often jarring, dynamics of taking and giving that await readers in The Collectors of Lost Souls. In this provocative book, Anderson refuses the temptation to simply cry "thief" where biomedical extraction is concerned. Instead, he walks readers through what has to be one of the more complex narrative threads in twentieth-century biomedical history, which might properly be called the story of a colonial twentieth century and of a postcolonial twentieth century. In fact, we use such temporal markers at our own peril here, as the story of kuru research enacts a kind of looping temporality (Murphy 2010); it is a story that constantly cannibalizes and renews itself. In Anderson's hands—and one could imagine what it might look like in a different pair of hands—the story of kuru is complicated both because of the (post) colonial twentieth century it presents to us, and because of the way it thwarts any temptation to take a high-handed ethical stance on matters of biomedical takings. The risk Anderson takes here works in large part because of his writerly virtuosity, his distinctively mischievous wry humor, and his sharp eye for poignant ironies and not a few injustices.

A few notes on the book overall are in order before I turn to what I think are its complicated generative tensions. For simplicity's sake, let us say that The Collectors of Lost Souls revolves around three narrative threads. First, the book is in part about the Fore, a group of people living in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, who were under Australian colonial authority until the mid-1970s (hence the long colonial twentieth century). In the 1950s, the Fore were found by colonial officials, social anthropologists, and medics to be suffering from an epidemic of a rapidly degenerative, deadly disease, which the Fore attributed to sorcery. The disease came to be called kuru, and with its "discovery" among the Fore (a "stone-age people," as more than one enthusiast would put it), kuru quickly came to redefine the Fore in a strong sense: "Soon the Fore region became for many the kuru region. The bodies of the Fore and their social lives were reframed in relation to kuru; the census of the Fore became a kuru census; the map of the Fore delineated a Kuru map" (Anderson 2008: 32). Simultaneously, kuru became a popular and often exotic preoccupation for several generations of Australian, American, and English researchers, who were determined to puzzle out a biological understanding of the disease, whether through anthropological attention to ritual cannibalism and kinship networks or through the idioms of "slow viruses" and the mechanisms of degenerative neurological disease. This preoccupation borders, Anderson leads us to surmise, on macabre obsession, as generations of researchers became drawn into the pursuit of blood from the kuru living and of brains from the kuru dead. This pursuit is, to a large extent, what we are to understand as the disease white men catch from kuru.

Second, the book is about these researchers—anthropologists, biologists, public health officers, lab chemists, pathologists, neurologists—and their relationships with the Fore, and also with each other through the Fore. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's crucial opening salvo for queer theory, Between Men (1985), is not irrelevant here, and I will...