Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [43]
THIS FULL-CYCLE RETURN of a myth to its culture of origin through an unwary anthropologist might sound unlikely if there were not so many examples of it in anthropological lore. I here recount a few cases:
In the first decade of the twentieth century a neophyte anthropologist was collecting accounts of ancient traditions from Native American populations in the Southwest. His concern was to write down the traditions, almost exclusively oral, before they vanished altogether. The young Native Americans had already lost appreciable contact with their heritage, and the anthropologist concentrated on elderly members of the tribe. One day he found himself sitting outside a hogan with an aged but lively and cooperative informant.
“Tell me about the ceremonies of your ancestors at the birth of a child.”
“Just one moment.”
The old Indian slowly shuffled into the darkened depths of the hogan. After a fifteen-minute interval he reappeared with a remarkably useful and detailed description of postpartum ceremonials, including rituals connected with breach presentation, afterbirth, umbilical cord, first breath and first cry. Encouraged and writing feverishly, the anthropologist systematically went through the full list of rites of passage, including puberty, marriage, childbearing and death. In each case the informant disappeared into the hogan only to emerge a quarter of an hour later with a rich set of answers. The anthropologist was astonished. Could, he wondered, there be a yet older informant, perhaps infirm and bedriden, within the hogan? Eventually he could resist no longer and summoned the courage to ask his informant what he did at each retreat into the hogan. The old man smiled, withdrew for the last time, and returned clutching a well-thumbed volume of the Dictionary of American Ethnography, which had been compiled by anthropologists in the previous decade. The poor white man, he must have thought, is eager, well-meaning and ignorant. He does not have a copy of this marvelous book which contains the traditions of my people. I shall tell him what it says.
My other two stories recount the adventures of an extraordinary physician, Dr. D. Carleton Gajdusek, who for many years has studied kuru, a rare viral disease, among the inhabitants of New Guinea. For this work he was the recipient of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Medicine. I am grateful to Dr. Gajdusek for taking the trouble to check my memory of his stories, which I first heard from him many years ago. New Guinea is an island on which mountainous terrain separates—in a manner similar to but more completely than the mountains of ancient Greece—one valley people from another. As a result there is a great profusion and variety of cultural traditions.
In the spring of 1957 Gajdusek and Dr. Vincent Zigas, a medical officer with the Public Health Service of what was then called the Territory of Papua and New Guinea, traveled with an Australian administrative patrol officer from the Purosa Valley through the ranges of the South Fore cultural and linguistic-group region to the village of Agakamatasa on an exploratory visit into “uncontrolled territory.” Stone implements were still in use, and there remained a tradition of cannibalism within one’s own living group. Gajdusek and his party found cases of kuru, which is spread by cannibalism (but most often not through the digestive tract), in this most remote of the South Fore villages. They decided to spend a few days, moving into one of the large and traditional wa’e, or men’s houses (the music from one of which, incidentally, was sent to the stars on the Voyager phonograph record). The windowless, low-doored, smoky thatched house was partitioned so that the visitors could neither stand erect nor stretch out. It was divided into many sleeping compartments, each with its own small fire, around which men and boys would huddle in groups to sleep and keep warm during the cold nights at an elevation of more than 6,000 feet, an altitude higher than Denver.