ABSTRACT
Shirley Lindenbaum, in her ethnographic study of kuru, once made a point: in eliciting Fore people's responses to their plague, she was inevitably tracing an "epidemiology of social relations", uncovering social configurations of the disease. While the sufferers of Guam amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and Parkinsonism-dementia complex, and Viliuisk encephalomyelitis experienced them intimately as plague, D. Carleton Gajdusek and fellow outsiders attempted literally to re-count the plague of others in terms of contamination and configuration, to reframe or specify it as controllable epidemic disease. These late-twentieth-century sentinel investigations—all of them hard cases—show us the rewards and pitfalls of seeking through various means to turn unbridled plagues into calculable epidemics. Meanwhile, Shirley Glasse was carefully observing the response of the Fore to this devastating plague, compiling her "epidemiology of social relations". She therefore focused on the proliferation of sorcery accusations and the social functions of divination, recrimination, and censure.
