The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen (review)

Warwick Anderson, The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008. 328 pp. $16.47. Pauline Kusiak Received: 6 August 2009 /Accepted: 6 August 2009 /Published online: 24 September 2009 # National Science Council, Taiwan 2009 Warwick Anderson has written an admirably readable book that weaves together bio-prospecting, cannibalism, colonialism, and globalization and remarkably manages to put the complexity of human relationships at the very center of the story. The Collectors of Lost Souls recounts the transformation of kuru from a psychosomatic disorder caused by sorcery and studied by anthropologists into a degenerative neurological disease caused by infectious prions and studied by microbiologists and biochemists. This transformation largely comes into focus through the community of medical field workers, scientists, and Fore informants who ultimately formed a network of kuru research that extended from the New Guinea highlands to the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, MD, USA. The coproduction of kuru and this global research network is fleshed out through the very personal intrigues and foibles of the main protagonists of the historical drama: district medical officers, anthropologists, and adventurist biomedical researchers, of whom Carleton Gajdusek takes center stage. Anderson’s description of the colonial encounter as a transformative experience renders this book a unique contribution to the colonial studies literature. Anderson attends to the changes the ostensible colonizers are undergoing as much as the changes experienced by the colonized. For example, he describes the transformation of “Carlti,” the lonely young man writing letters to his mother, into “Kaoten,” the individualist adventurer scientist braving the rugged highlands of New Guinea. As Anderson characterizes it: The passage from Carlti to Kaoten, through the avatars of Carl and Carleton, was almost complete. Similar transformations of names and identities and East Asian Science, Technology and Society: an International Journal (2009) 3:397–400 DOI 10.1007/s12280-009-9096-3 P. Kusiak (*) 7445 Digby Grn, Alexandria, VA 22315-5219, USA e-mail: Pauline.Kusiak@gmail.com places were occurring rapidly around him, drawing him into the future.... Soon sorcery poison would be refigured and condensed into putative genes, toxins, and infectious agents. Nothing was stable anymore; everything was shifting form and density, altering its meaning (58). Anderson wants us to understand that the transformations that occurred through the colonial encounter occurred less as a uniform imposition of the state over existing ways of life than through the idiosyncratic activities of adventurers and thrill seekers. Again, to use Anderson’s own words: Like the beginnings of most colonial ventures, this research project was improvised and chancy, prompted more by enthusiasm and persistence of the man on the ground than by any administrative design.... Medical science and colonialism came together at Okapa, but their arrival in the field was messy and contentious, and it was by no means structured or hegemonic (88). Most interesting is the way that Anderson attempts to capture technoscientific practice from the perspective of the local participants as an elaborate and negotiated system of exchange that included autopsied bodies, blood and brain specimens, money, and storytelling, as well as moral negotiations of scientists who voraciously collected specimens and samples but also understood that they needed to maintain relations with local inhabitants in order to continue to carry out their studies. As Anderson characterizes it, the tropical research field is a trading and contact zone, “a place where persons previously separated geographically and historically come together and elaborate a means of communicating” (112). Through these mixes and creoles, that trading zone was likewise a “confusion of relations in which Gajdusek became entangled—a confusion allowing no simple assertion of dominance and control” (112–113). The characters in this story are ethnographic in their sensibilities— understanding the need for rapport and good social relations to collect their data—as much as they are bio-pirates who carry away body parts from the family members of their informants in vials and tubes in a way that could not be more dehumanizing. It is the contradictions of practices that are at once humanizing and dehumanizing that Anderson has worked hard to capture here. In doing so, he has masterfully succeeded in complicating simplistic notions about power and domination...