Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781612052755)

Perhaps the best-documented epidemic in the history of medicine, kuru has been studied for more than fifty years by international investigators from medicine and the human sciences. This significantly revised edition of the landmark anthropological classic Kuru Sorcery brings up to date the anthropological contribution to understanding disease, the medical research that resulted in two medical Nobel Prizes, and the views of the Fore people who endured the epidemic and who still believe that sorcerers, rather than cannibalism, caused kuru. The kuru epidemic serves as a prism through which to see how Fore notions of disease causation bring into single focus their views about the body, the world of social and spiritual relations, and changes in economic and political conditions-aspects of thought and behaviour that Western medicine keeps separate.

Author: Shirley Lindenbaum
ISBN-10: 1612052754
ISBN-13: 9781612052755
Publisher: Routledge
Language: English
Published: 06/30/2013
Pages: 240
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.00lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.00w x 0.70d