In the book Kuru Sorcery: Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands, Shirley Lindenbaum give an ethnography of the south Fore people focusing on the kuru disease, their belief and practices concerning the disease, and how it has affected their culture. "My aim in this book is to document and consider the effects of both the new sociopolitical order and epidemic disease on the Fore during this earlier period [1950's and early 1960's] (p. viii).".
The South Fore people live in the Eastern Highlands of Papua new Guinea between the Kratke Mountains and the Lamari and Yani Rivers. They live in hamlets with populations ranging from seventy to 120 people in twelve to twenty houses. They practice slash-and-burn horticulture (swidden) which most commonly sustains sweet potatoes, taro, yam, corn, and other vegetables. The men hunt for birds, mammals, reptiles, and cassowaries and raise pigs, which are considered to be equal to humans, while the women spend most of their time harvesting and planting crops. .
Among the South Fore (particularly among the women), a rare disease reached debilitating proportions in the middle of the twentieth century. "Since record-keeping began in 1957, three years after the Australian administration established a patrol post at Okapa, some 2,500 people in this region have died from kuru, a subacute degenerative disorder of the central nervous system (p.6)." The South Fore attribute the disease to sorcery and treat it just as they do the other diseases they encounter, however, kuru proved to be the most detrimental, with a depopulation rate of 80%. .
Lindenbaum discusses the evolution of medical theories pertaining to the origin of the kuru disease in chapter two. The first medical study of kuru was of a woman sent to the Australian government hospital at Kainantu in 1955 whose diagnosis was "acute hysteria in an otherwise healthy woman (p. 14)." This diagnosis prompted an intensive study of kuru by Dr.
