Broca's Brain - Carl Sagan [45]
Upon inquiry of the young translator, Gajdusek discovered that the Australian physician had conversed with some of the older men of the village who were well known to Gajdusek and who were often his house and laboratory guests. They had attempted to explain that the shape of the “germ” producing yaws was spiral—the spirochete form they had seen many times through Gajdusek’s dark-field microscope. They had to admit it was invisible—it could be seen only through the microscope—and when pressed by the Australian physician on whether this “represented” the dead person, they had to admit that Gajdusek had stressed that it could be caught from close contact with yaws lesions, as, for example, by sleeping with a person with yaws.
I can well remember the first time I looked through a microscope. After focusing my eyes up near the ocular only to examine my eyelashes, and then peering further into the pitch-black interior of the barrel, I finally managed to look straight down the microscope tube to be dazzled by an illuminated disc of light. It takes a little while for the eye to train itself to examine what is in the disc. Gajdusek’s demonstration to the Fore people was so powerful—after all, the alternatives entirely lacked so concrete a reality—that many accepted his story, even apart from his ability to cure the disease with penicillin. Perhaps some considered the spirochetes in the microscope an amusing example of white-man myth and minor magic, and when another white man arrived querying the origin of disease, they politely returned to him the idea they believed he would be comfortable with. Had Western contact with the Fore people ceased for fifty years, it seems to me entirely possible that a future visitor would discover to his astonishment that the Fore people somehow had knowledge of medical microbiology, despite their largely pretechnological culture.
All three of these stories underline the almost inevitable problems encountered in trying to extract from a “primitive” people their ancient legends. Can you be sure that others have not come before you and destroyed the pristine state of the native myth? Can you be sure that the natives are not humoring you or pulling your leg? Bronislaw Malinowski thought he had discovered a people in the Trobriand Islands who had not worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth. When asked how children were conceived, they supplied him with an elaborate mythic structure prominently featuring celestial intervention. Amazed, Malinowski objected that was not how it was done at all, and supplied them instead with the version so popular in the West today—including a nine-month gestation period. “Impossible,” replied the Melanesians. “Do you not see that woman over there with her six-month-old child? Her husband has been on an extended voyage to another island for two years.” Is it more likely that the Melanesians were ignorant of the begetting of children or that they were gently chiding Malinowski? If some peculiar-looking stranger came into my town and asked me where babies came from, I’d certainly be tempted to tell him about storks and cabbages. Pre-scientific people are people. Individually they are as clever as we are. Field interrogation of informants from a different culture is not always easy.
I wonder if the Dogon, having heard from a Westerner an extraordinarily inventive myth about the star Sirius—a star already important in their own mythology—did not carefully play