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1. Introduction -- 2. Kuru and sorcery -- 3. Other medical disorders -- 4. Extensions of self -- 5. Etiology and world view -- 6. Ideology in transition -- 7. The crisis years -- 8. The Kibungs -- 9. Status and the sorcerer -- 10. Polluters, witches, and sorcerers -- 11. Conclusion 1979 -- 12. Telling history -- 13. The end of Kuru.

RESUME Les anthropologues qui étudient les effets de la « modernité » en Mélanésie ont donné un souffle nouveau à la question de la personne relationnelle. On observe l'apparition de personnes plus individualisées, plus autonomes dans le contexte de la conversion au christianisme, de la consommation de biens et du travail salarié. Comportements sexuels et sensibilités des jeunes se transforment à la faveur de leur expérience d'idées nouvelles sur les rapports amoureux et de formes inédites d'érotisme, bien que toujours soumis à de fortes contraintes structurelles. Savoir comment les autres expérimentent le monde est une vaste question examinée à partir de deux sources : les récits des jeunes sur eux-mêmes, et des histoires d'esprits (substituts du soi), qui gagnent en autonomie mais conservent leur appartenance à des communautés façonnées par les réseaux de parenté et d'échange.

The Sweet Potato in Oceania:. Reappraisal. Chris Ballard, Paula Brown, Michael Bourke, and Tracy Harwood, eds. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005. 227 pp.

The discourse of cannibalism, which began in the encounter between Europe and the Americas, became a defining feature of the colonial experience in the New World, especially in the Pacific. The idea of exoticism, like that of the primitive, is also a Western construct linked to the exploring/conquering/cataloguing impulse of colonialism. We now live in a world where those we once called exotic live among us, defining their own identities, precluding our ability to define ourselves in opposition to "others" and to represent our own culture as universal. This chapter reviews anthropological approaches to cannibalism and suggests that we may now be in a position to exorcise the stigma associated with the notion of the primitive. If we reflect on the reality of cannibal practices among ourselves as well as others, we can contribute to dislodging the savage/civilized opposition that was once essential to the formation of the modern Western self and Western forms of knowledge.

▪ Abstract  The study of epidemics provides a unique point of entry for examining the relationships among cultural assumptions, institutional forms, and states of mind. The Black Death is said to have contributed to the emergence of nation states, the rise of mercantile economies, and the religious movements that led to the Reformation. It may also have brought about new ways of understanding God, the meaning of death, and the role of authority in religious and social life. Cholera induced a public health approach that stressed quarantine, and venereal diseases led to contact tracing. Western medicine, however, failed to cure the epidemics that resulted from imperial expansion into the Americas, Asia, Africa, and Europe. The focus of this essay is on the impact of two contemporary epidemics considered to be caused by prions, a newly recognized infectious agent: kuru in Papua New Guinea and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (associated with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease) in Europe. A close look at epidemics constitutes a sampling device for illuminating relationships among illness, social forms, and social thought. Theories of disease causation provide ways of thinking about the world and sets of directions for acting in it.

Mangrove Man: Dialogics of Culture in the Sepik Estuary. David Lipset. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. 335 pp.Emerging Class in Papua New Guinea: The Telling of Difference. Deborah B. Gewertz and Frederick K. Errington. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. 179 pp.

Sexual Cultures and Migration in the Era of AIDS: Anthropological and Demographic Perspectives. Gilbert Herdt. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.256 pp.