Universalism in Context

Summary

Using the neurological syndrome kuru as a frame, Warwick Anderson examines the social dynamics and material culture of its medical investigation among the Fore people conducted by D. Carleton Gajdusek beginning at midcentury. The Collectors of Lost Souls: Turning Kuru Scientists into White Men uses a postcolonial framework to complicate dominant/subordinate binaries and diffusionist accounts of indigenous contacts with medical science. Anderson proposes that colonies are specific sites of production of medical knowledge. He draws a distinction between traditional and advanced economies in regard to individual rights to make an argument in support of context-specific ethical regulation for medical research and suggests a role for historians of science in interrogating the process of globalisation.

Notes

¹Pawel P. Liberski and Paul Brown, ‘Kuru: Its Ramifications after Fifty Years’, Experimental Gerontology, 44 (2009), 63–9.

²Friedrich W. Nietzsche, Human, all too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, trans. by Marion Faber with Stephen Lehmann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), p. 224.

³Warwick Anderson, ‘Essay Review: Where Is the Postcolonial History of Medicine?’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 72 (1998), 522–30.

⁴Lyle B. Steadman and Charles F. Merbs, ‘Review: Kuru and Cannibalism?’, American Anthropologist, 84 (1982), 611–27.

⁵Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. by Ian Cunnison (New York: Norton, 1967).

⁶Warwick Anderson, ‘Introduction: Postcolonial Technoscience’, Social Studies of Science, 32 (2002), 643–58.

⁷Warwick Anderson, ‘Indigenous Health in a Global Frame: From Community Development to Human Rights’, Health and History, 10 (2008), 94–108.