Warwick
Anderson’s
Collectors of Lost Souls:
Turning Kuru Scientists into Whitemen read, to me, as a lesson in how
not to do research about indigenous
peoples. Of course, the scientist Gajdusek’s practices of obtaining specimens
for research, and even adopting indigenous children into his own overseas home,
are ethically suspect – however, Anderson’s own work was, to me, problematic as
well. Anderson introduced the idea that, in obtaining specimens such as blood
and brains for his research, Gajdusek was, metaphorically, exocannibalistic. Exocannibalism,
eating one’s enemies, can be distinguished from endocannibalism, which is
eating one’s kin. There is no evidence that Gajdusek actually participated in
literal cannibalism alongside the community in which he researched. However, his
obsession with obtaining research specimens beyond the amount he needed, partly
to trade them with other scientists and boost his status in the scientific
community, is, frankly, creepy as fuck.
As a reader, I was almost expecting Anderson’s monograph to conclude with
Gajdusek developing kuru, which is spread through cannibalism. It did not end
this way, but the allegations of sexual abuse which resulted in Gajdusek’s
arrest in the United States was sufficiently disturbing.
In some way,
Gajdusek perhaps attempted to reframe his work as endocannibalistic, rather
than exocannibalistic. He did not, however, seem to try to get beyond the metaphor
of cannibalism by adjusting his practices, and continued in his lust for
specimens beyond a point where it would be appropriate, even to his
contemporaries in a research context with different standards than we have
today. He may have attempted to redefine his identity such that he was a member
of the Fore community he was studying. This can be seen in his adoption of a
Fore-sounding name, Kaoten, for himself, and his eventual adoption of several
Fore boys. He thus became a father in the community, rather than an outsider,
and used this trust to gain access to the specimens he desired. His reluctance
to shed an association to cannibalism is linked to how he romanticized the
practice, questioning in his journal whether he was metaphorically a cannibal, and
even dissecting the brains of Fore people on his dining table by candlelight. While
this unfortunate location for dissections may be simply due to lack of
infrastructure—he was joined in these dissections by other scientists who were
more mainstream in their views of their own research—Gajdusek was the only
member of his team to persist in gathering Fore brains and bodily fluids beyond
a point of scientific relevance.
While Gajdusek’s
research is admittedly a dramatic example of poor research practice, I have
spent the week considering whether all research that is performed without
sufficient regard to ethics is, to some extent, a sort of academic
exocannibalism. Writing about one’s own community without the proper checks and
balances might be endocannibalistic – still potentially unsettling for an
external observer, but accepted by the peoples being researched. For those of
us who do not identify as part of the communities we are researching, we risk
crossing a yet more challenging boundary, in which our work “eats” individuals
and communities who are not our kin – or, at least, consumes, digests, and
incompletely regurgitates the experiences and voices of a marginalized group.
Herein lies the importance of culturally sensitive research.
Based on this
disturbingly extended metaphor, Anderson’s writings about Gajdusek’s research,
and the presentation of his monograph were, to some extent, similarly
concerning. All of the readings this month were lacking in indigenous
perspectives; however, I found that DeJong and Ishiguro were more
self-conscious in laying out the limitations of their research, while Anderson
was less clear about whom he aimed to portray. Ultimately, he included the
voices of only very specific community members, focusing instead on members of
the scientific community. DeJong and Ishiguro carefully noted their plans to
study institutions and infrastructure affecting health, while Bocking’s work
was very theoretical and worked with discourses more than voices. Anderson,
however, examined responses to a particular disease, kuru, without undertaking
much research into how the Fore people experienced the disease and the
scientists working in their community. In Anderson’s monograph, Fore people are
seen but not heard: photographs of Fore women and children, suffering from kuru
and partially nude by Western standards of dress, can be seen on an
overwhelming number of pages. Anderson does not seem to problematize his use of
these photographs, instead using images of indigenous peoples as a sort of
artifact, repeatedly portrayed throughout the text. Rather than hearing Fore
voices, as readers, we see their exposed bodies in a perverse form of colonial
display, vulnerably positioned, and almost carnal.
