The Fore () people live in the Okapa District of the Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. There are approximately 20,000 Fore who are separated by the Wanevinti Mountains into the North Fore and South Fore regions. Their main form of subsistence is slash-and-burn farming. The Fore language has three distinct dialects and is the southernmost member of the East Central Family, East New Guinea Highlands Stock, Trans–New Guinea phylum of Papuan languages.
In the 1950s the neurological disease kuru was discovered in the South Fore. The local tradition of ritual cannibalism of their dead had led to an epidemic, with approximately 2,700 deaths from 1957 to 2005.
History
Until the 1950s, the Fore people had minimal direct contact with outsiders who were at the time colonizing Papua New Guinea. A small number of prospectors crossed through their territory in the 1930s and at least one plane crashed there during World War II. New diseases such as influenza reached them before significant contact with colonial people occurred.
In the late 1940s, colonial government patrols reached further and further into Fore territory. The patrol officers, called kiaps by the Fore, tried to conduct a census in each village they passed through and lectured the villagers on the importance of hygiene and road construction. They encouraged the people to give up village warfare, traditional beliefs and cannibalism as well. These officers attempted to recruit local 'big men' to represent the colonial authorities as headmen (luluais) or as deputies (tultuls). In this mountainous region, there is an average of over 90 inches of rainfall per year, much of which falls in the "rainy season", lasting from December to March. It is part of the East New Guinea Highlands Stock, and the Trans-New Guinea Phylum. It is spoken in three dialects: Northern (which is the prestige dialect), Central, and Southern.
Diet
The Fore diet consists of pigs, small animals, insects, wild plants, and root vegetables such as taro. Root vegetables are cultivated on land cleared by slash-and-burn farming. In addition to growing sweet potato, ebia, sugarcane, and pitpit in their large and productive gardens, the Fore supplement their diet with pigs, rodents, and adult insects. The quality of their diet is so high that, in the 1957 study, no evidence of clinical malnutrition was found in the general population despite lacking access to any modern nutritional or medical services. A kinship group is made up of a male lineage, but may include other members, such as refugees or distant relatives, that migrated from other Fore kinship groups and became fully integrated into the group, taking on the same privileges and responsibilities as the biologically related members. Men from the same patriarchal lineage are not accorded any benefits over other non-related men in the group; in fact, it is considered beneficial and a strength to the village to bring in men from other kinship groups by offering them land to integrate them.
Generally, each kinship group lives in a village with several small offshoots, each consisting of a single house for the men and boys and several small surrounding houses for the women and children. These hamlets are established when gardening land surrounding the current settlement is exhausted and it is necessary to move outwards and clear more areas of woodland for growing crops. Battles and migrations among the Fore have often been caused by accusations of sorcery. Problems within a kinship group may be blamed on sorcery, although there is a dichotomy between the North and South Fore in this belief. The North Fore tend to fear attacks from other villages or kinship groups, while among the South Fore the fear is more of sorcery attacks from within family groups, possibly due to bribes given to sorcerers by enemy groups. A nokoti is portrayed as a tall masculine man carrying a small axe or small bag that contains his magical power. Often, tribes created alliances with other tribes and were expected to aid their allies in the war effort with food, prayer, and troops.
Despite being consistently engaged in warfare, the Fore were characterized by their tempered disdain for warfare and preference for peace. The Fore predominantly viewed warfare as an undesirable last resort, so they often resolved conflicts peacefully or ended wars at the earliest feasible opportunity.
Causes of warfare
Warfare amongst the Fore people was almost exclusively initiated by the larger, more powerful Fore clans, such as the Mugayamuti and Ketabe clans. War was predominantly a means of retaliation over perceived slights or a preemptive measure to ensure dominance in the region. Even wars that began under the guise of retaliation were sometimes strategic in nature; larger clans would call for warfare against smaller groups if they were in desirable trade locations, or in order to increase their might and military numbers. Physical markings of a sorcery attack included skin-damage, swelling, psychotic behavior, and fainting. If a member of a tribe fell ill and displayed these symptoms, then sorcery was typically suspected. These raids were normally performed by a small group of skilled warriors, targeting enemy homes, civilians, and gardens. By the 1930s it had spread to the South Fore. It was around this time that Ted Eubank, a European gold prospector, first noticed the neurodegenerative disease, but it was not documented until 1957, by anthropologists Berndt and Berndt, and reported to Western medicine until 1957 by D.C. Gadjusek and Vincent Zigas. According to Gajdusek, who also observed kuru in the 1950s, the hypothesis that the disease was spread via the endocannibalistic rituals of the Fore people was extremely apparent. However, Shirley Lindenbaum and Robert Glasse were the first to formally publish the hypothesis that kuru spread through cannibalism.
Women and children would most often consume the brains of the deceased, which were the most likely body part to contain the infectious prion agent, while the men preferentially consumed muscle tissue. As a result, the vast majority of victims among the South Fore were women. In fact, eight times more women than men contracted the disease. It later affected small children and the elderly at a high rate as well.
The incidence of kuru increased in the 1940s and 1950s and mortality rate began to approach close to 35/1,000 in a population of 12,000 Fore people. The mortality rate distorted the female:male ratio, which reached 1:2, or even 1:3 among South Fore.
Though the Fore people also dispose of their dead in other ways, the most common method up to the 1960s was transumption, or consumption of their dead. Transumption not only expressed love and grief, but also recycled the deceased's abilities within the family and quarantined the kwela, which was dangerous if not disposed of properly. It was believed that women's wombs were best for containing the kwela.
When an individual died, after grieving for two to three days, the Fore women cut up, divided, shared, and consumed the body. The men rarely partook in the dismemberment and consumption of the corpse. They took great care to consume all parts, even drying and crushing the bones and all used cooking utensils and mixing it in with vegetables so that nothing was missed. A series of purification rituals meant to cleanse the body of kwela then took place over several weeks. Finally, there were feasts and rituals that simultaneously compensated the women for housing the kwela, acted as the final step in cleansing the body of kwela, and sent all remaining parts of the soul to the land of the dead.
Fore women consumed the brain more than men and children did. Because of this and their primary role in transumption, they had a much higher mortality rate of kuru than men, which spurred a demographic emergency. Men took on the roles and duties of the mother in addition to that of the father, healers were consulted and pilgrimages organized, bride prices were withheld until the bride produced a child, and many feared extinction. The Fore people believe that ailments and misfortunes stem from sorcery and witchcraft, so naturally they scrambled to find the sorcerers responsible for kuru. Today, they no longer attribute kuru to witchcraft. However, they have not adopted modern medicine nor abandoned their belief in sorcery.
See also
- Kuru
- Papua New Guinea
- Cannibalism