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Learning from the Locals: Gajdusek, Kuru, and Cross-Cultural Interaction in Papua New Guinea
Abstract
The everyday practice of making colonies is as 'fractured and erratic ' as the various personalities of the colonisers and colonised brought together in the process. Drawing on the journals of Dr Carleton Gajdusek, who worked as a medical researcher on kuru among the Fore people of Papua New Guinea in the 1950s and 1960s, Gajduseks approach to the Fore peoples ' response to sickness is analysed. Providing evidence of an individual western medical practitioner who valued and respected local ways of responding to the sick, it presents a critique of the idea that imperialisma s a 'macro-historica'l t heoretical model provides a sufficient explanation of localised medical practice in the tropics.
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“Reports from Carleton Gajdusek’s initial expedition into the region revealed that movement through the highlands was based both on time of travel, not ease of slope, and culturally defined markers, such as friendly and related villages to the people traveling with the research team [16,17].”
From Testing least cost path (LCP) models for travel time and kilocalorie expenditure: Implications for landscape genomics (2020) · cites this paper as [17]
In the citing paper
“Reports from Carleton Gajdusek’s initial expedition into the region revealed that movement through the highlands was based both on time of travel, not ease of slope, and culturally defined markers, such as friendly and related villages to the people traveling with the research team [16,17].”
From Testing least cost path (LCP) models for travel time and kilocalorie expenditure: Implications for landscape genomics (2020) · cites this paper as [17]
Citations
Cited by
Gowen, K. M., & de Smet, T. S. (2020) · PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0239387 · Cited by 20
Metadata
- Authors
- Spark, C.
- Venue
- Health and History
- Publisher
- JSTOR
- Published
- 2005
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 80
- ISSN
- 1442-1771
- Cited by
- 4
- References
- 0
- Language
- en
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Learning from the Locals: Gajdusek, Kuru, and Cross-Cultural Interaction in Papua New Guinea. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.2307/40111613
- The paper
- Spark, C. (2005). Learning from the Locals: Gajdusek, Kuru, and Cross-Cultural Interaction in Papua New Guinea. Health and History. https://doi.org/10.2307/40111613
