Fore

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The Fore are an ethnic group in Papua New Guinea .

The Fore people live in the Okapa District of Eastern Highlands Province , Papua New Guinea, and number an estimated 20,000 members. Their settlement area of ​​about 950 square kilometers borders in the north on the Kraetkegebirge and in the west and southwest on the rivers Yani and Lamari. The ethnic group is divided into the North Fore and South Fore by the Wanevinti Mountains. They live in hamlets with a population of 70 to 120 people. The Anga , Awa and Gimi live in the immediate vicinity . The Fore have a reputation among their neighbors for being powerful magicians.

The Fore are mainly engaged in agriculture by slash and burn ( sweet potatoes , yams , taro , bananas and sugar cane) and pigs. Fore-women are completely excluded from the consumption of pork and are directed to cover the household budget from animal proteins to frogs, insects and small animals.

Socially, they live exogamously . Their language knows three dialects and is one of the East New Guinea highland languages .

The Fore are known worldwide primarily through the prion disease Kuru , which broke out in the middle of the 20th century and decimated the people between the 1950s and 1970s. The women of the people were particularly affected. Today it is assumed that the ritual consumption of meat of deceased tribesmen practiced by the Fore ( endocannibalism ) was the cause of the transmission of the pathogen and the regionally limited spread of the disease. Men, who claimed most of the animal food, were not dependent on such sources of protein and were therefore better spared. With the ban on cannibalism from 1954, the disease also practically died out.

The ethnologist Shirley S. Lindenbaum carried out in-depth studies on the social status of the Fore and the Kuru epidemic from the early 1970s, as recorded in her book Kuru sorcery , published in 1979 .

literature

  • Susanne Schröter : Witches, warriors, cannibals , fantasy, domination and gender in New Guinea; Muenster; Hamburg: Lit. 1994 (women's cultures - men's cultures; 3.); ISBN 3-8258-2092-0

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Susanne Schröter: Hexen, Krieger, Kannibalinnen , p. 286 ff. (See lit.)
  2. ↑ Page 54 (marginal note)
    Susanne Schröter : Witches, warriors, cannibals, fantasy, domination and gender in New Guinea (women's cultures - men's cultures; 3.) . In: Women's cultures - Men's cultures - Volumes 1-3) . tape 3 , no. 1 . LIT Verlag, Münster, Hamburg, Germany 1994, ISBN 3-8258-2092-0 , p. 372 (German; IT book version (accessed on March 9, 2016)).
  3. ↑ Papua New Guinea: Gene Protected Cannibals From Brain Disease
  4. ↑ Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease: cannibalism leads to death after decades
  5. ↑ See details on Kuru disease among the Fore in: Shirley S. Lindenbaum: Kuru sorcery. Desease and danger in the New Guinea Highlands. In: Ethnology . Second Edition (on the Internet). Routledge, New York, USA, USA 1979, ISBN 978-1-61205-275-5 (English; excerpts from the book ).

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