Broca's Brain (14 page)

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. To accommodate their visitors, the men and boys gleefully tore out the interior structure of half of the ceremonial men’s house, and during two days and nights of pouring rain Gajdusek and his companions were housebound on a high, windswept, cloud-covered ridge. The young Fore initiates wore bark strands braided into their hair, which was covered with pig grease. They wore huge nose pieces, the penises of pigs as armbands, and the genitalia of opossums and tree-climbing kangaroos as pendants around their necks.

The hosts sang their traditional songs all through the first night and on through the following rainy day. In return, “to enhance our rapport with them,” as Gajdusek says, “we began to sing songs in exchange—among them such Russian songs as ‘Otchi chornye,’ and ‘Moi kostyor v tumane svetit’ …” This was received very well, and the Agakamatasa villagers requested many dozens of repetitions in the smoky South Fore longhouse to the accompaniment of the driving rainstorm.

Some years later Gajdusek was engaged in the collection of indigenous music in another part of the South Fore region and asked a group of young men to run through their repertoire of traditional songs. To Gajdusek’s amazement and amusement, they produced a somewhat altered but still clearly recognizable version of “Otchi chornye.” Many of the singers apparently thought the song traditional, and later still Gajdusek
found the song imported even farther afield, with none of the singers having any idea of its source.

We can easily imagine some sort of world ethnomusicology survey coming to an exceptionally obscure part of New Guinea and discovering that the natives had a traditional song which sounded in rhythm, music and words remarkably like “Otchi chornye.” If they were to believe that no previous contact of Westerners with these people had occurred, a great mystery could be posited.

Later that same year Gajdusek was visited by several Australian physicians, eager to understand the remarkable findings about the transmission of kuru from patient to patient by cannibalism. Gajdusek described the theories of the origin of many diseases held by the Fore people, who did
not
believe that illnesses were caused by the spirits of the dead or that malicious deceased relatives, jealous of the living, inflicted disease on those of their surviving kinsmen who offended them, as the pioneering anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski had recounted for the coastal peoples of Melanesia. Instead, the Fore attributed most diseases to malicious sorcery, which any offended and avenging male, young or old, could execute without the aid of specially trained sorcerers. There was a special sorcery explanation for kuru, but also for chronic lung disease, leprosy, yaws, and so on. These beliefs had been long-established and firmly held, but as the Fore people witnessed yaws yielding entirely to the penicillin injections of Gajdusek and his group, they quickly agreed that the sorcery explanation of yaws was in error and abandoned it; it has never resurfaced in subsequent years. (I wish Westerners would be as quick to abandon obsolete or erroneous social ideas as the Fore of New Guinea.) Modern treatment of leprosy caused its sorcery explanation to disappear as well, although more slowly, and the Fore people today laugh at these backward early opinions on yaws and leprosy. But the traditional views on the origin of kuru have maintained themselves, since the Westerners have been unable to cure or explain, in a manner satisfactory to them, the origin and nature of
this disease. Thus, the Fore people remain intensely skeptical of Western explanations for kuru and retain firmly their view that malicious sorcery is the cause.

One of the Australian physicians, visiting an adjacent village with one of Gajdusek’s native informants as translator, spent the day examining kuru patients and independently acquiring information. He returned the same evening to inform Gajdusek that he was mistaken about people not believing in the spirits of the dead as the cause of disease, and that he was further in error in holding that they had abandoned the idea of sorcery as the cause of yaws. The people held, he continued, that a dead body could become invisible and that the unseen spirit of the dead person could enter the skin of a patient at night through an imperceptible break, and induce yaws. The Australian’s informant had even sketched with a stick in the sand the appearance of these ghostly beings. They carefully drew a circle and a few squiggly lines within. Outside the circle, they explained, it was black; inside the circle, bright—a sand portrait of malevolent and pathogenic spirits.

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 it back to the visiting French anthropologist. Is this not more likely than a visit by extraterrestrial spacefarers to ancient Egypt, with one cluster of hard scientific knowledge, in striking contradiction to common sense, preserved by oral tradition, over the millennia, and only in West Africa?

There are too many loopholes, too many alternative explanations for such a myth to provide reliable evidence of past extraterrestrial contact. If there are extraterrestrials, I think it much more likely that unmanned planetary spacecraft and large radiotelescopes will prove to be the means of their detection.