this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2023
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the_dunk_tank
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unfortunately Kuru being documented and researched is a result of the establishment of australian colonial authority over those people, and the subsequent promulgation of missions to them. so it's hard to know to what extent which influence affected it most, or how the epidemic might have amplified the efforts of missionaries. surely there's a lot at play and it could indicate a way a cannibalistic social structure could have selective pressures against it, but it's not nearly as neat as i'd like to make firm judgements.
also to consider is the mutation in some of the people of the region to resist prion disease, which offers an alternate path out of a prion-disease problem, without behavioral-cultural modification. and identifying the cannibalism as the source of the problem is probably unintuitive enough that i'd consider it pretty unlikely for even an urban, literate, recordkeeping society to figure out. because most people that participated in the cannibalism didn't get sick, and those who did would at different timescales. without our detailed knowledge of the biological processes, it'd be kind of insane to assert that two people that munched on a brain and died 20 years apart both died from the same cause.
oops my bad
Yeah, I don't know enough about the historical or medical aspects of Kuru so I'm hesitant to speak like I know anything about it.
I suppose my main point is that there's sometimes this unspoken assumption that the forces of "civilization" (i.e. colonialism) are the only factors keeping indigenous people from backsliding into "barbarism" (i.e. their traditions at the time of colonization, and as documented by the incredibly racist race science of that era). I detected an undercurrent of that in the original post that we're all dunking on, and I thought that what you said about the tradition ending because of Kuru to be a really good example of how the unspoken colonial assumption is bullshit.
To me, the foremost struggles for indigenous peoples are sovereignty and development. I think that reviving medically sketchy traditions would be pretty low on the list of priorities of most indigenous peoples and 99% of the time when it's brought up in an internet argument it's in bad faith.
i mean it absolutely is bullshit, specific circumstances are always just annoyingly complicated. developments under a colonial system are real, and though inseparable from those pressures, it doesn't make the result ungenuine or something. i'll decry the missionaries up and down all day, but they create earnest believers, a people won't just jump back to the old ways after being coerced to abandon them.
100%, cannibalism discussion is just about overturning the excuses the europeans made for colonizing