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In 1962, a local leader in the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea asks Fore men to stop the sorcery that he believes is killing women and children.
Courtesy Shirley Lindenbaum
Most of the world didn't know anyone lived in the highlands of Papua New Guinea until the 1930s, when Australian gold prospectors surveying the area realized there were about a million people there.
When researchers made their way to those villages in the 1950s, they found something disturbing. Among a tribe of about 11,000 people called the Fore, up to 200 people a year had been dying of an inexplicable illness. They called the disease kuru, which means "shivering" or "trembling."
Once symptoms set in, it was a swift demise. First, they'd have trouble walking, a sign that they were about to lose control over their limbs. They'd also lose control over their emotions, which is why people called it the "laughing death." Within a year, they couldn't get up off the floor, feed themselves or control their bodily functions.
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Many locals were convinced it was the result of sorcery. The disease primarily hit adult women and children younger than 8 years old. In some villages, there were almost no young women left.
"They were obsessed with trying to save themselves because they knew demographically that they were on the brink of extinction," says Shirley Lindenbaum, a medical anthropologist with the City University of New York.
But what was causing it? That answer eluded researchers for years. After ruling out an exhaustive list of contaminants, they thought it must be genetic. So in 1961, Lindenbaum traveled from village to village mapping family trees so researchers could settle the issue.
But Lindenbaum, who continues to write about the epidemic, knew it couldn't be genetic, because it affected women and children in the same social groups, but not in the same genetic groups. She also knew that it had started in villages in the north around the turn of the century, and then moved south over the decades.
Lindenbaum had a hunch about what was going on, and she turned out to be right. It had to do with funerals. Specifically, it had to do with eating dead bodies at funerals.
In many villages, when a person died, they would be cooked and consumed. It was an act of love and grief.
As one medical researcher described, "If the body was buried it was eaten by worms; if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots; the Fore believed it was much better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased than by worms and insects."
Women removed the brain, mixed it with ferns, and cooked it in tubes of bamboo. They fire-roasted and ate everything except the gall bladder. It was primarily adult women who did so, says Lindenbaum, because their bodies were thought to be capable of housing and taming the dangerous spirit that would accompany a dead body.
"So, the women took on the role of consuming the dead body and giving it a safe place inside their own body — taming it, for a period of time, during this dangerous period of mortuary ceremonies," says Lindenbaum.
But women would occasionally pass pieces of the feast to children. "Snacks," says Lindenbaum. "They ate what their mothers gave them," she says, until the boys hit a certain age and went off to live with the men. "Then, they were told not to touch that stuff."
Finally, after urging from researchers like Lindenbaum, biologists came around to the idea that the strange disease stemmed from eating dead people. The case was closed after a group at the U.S. National Institutes of Health injected infected human brain into chimpanzees, and watched symptoms of kuru develop in the animals months later. The group, which won a Nobel Prize for the findings, dubbed it a "slow virus."
But it wasn't a virus — or a bacterium, fungus, or parasite. It was an entirely new infectious agent, one that had no genetic material, could survive being boiled, and wasn't even alive.
As another group would find years later, it was just a twisted protein, capable of performing the microscopic equivalent of a Jedi mind trick, compelling normal proteins on the surface of nerve cells in the brain to contort just like them. The so-called "prions," or "proteinaceous infectious particles," would eventually misfold enough proteins to kill pockets of nerve cells in the brain, leaving the cerebellum riddled with holes, like a sponge.
The process was so odd that some compared it to Dr. Jekyll's transformation to Mr. Hyde: "the same entity but in two manifestations — a 'kind', innocuous one and a 'vicious', lethal one."
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The epidemic likely started when one person in a Fore village developed sporadic Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease, a degenerative neurological disorder similar to kuru. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one in a million people in the U.S. develop CJD -- the difference is that others rarely come into contact with infected human tissue.
Though the Fore stopped the practice of mortuary feasts more than 50 years ago, cases of kuru continued to surface over the years, because the prions could take decades to show their effects.
According to Michael Alpers, a medical researcher at Curtin University in Australia who tracked kuru cases for decades, the last person with kuru died in 2009. His team continued surveillance until 2012, when the epidemic was officially declared over. "I have followed up a few rumoured cases since then but they were not kuru," he wrote in an email.
When Shirley Lindenbaum visited a South Fore village in 2008, one man said excitedly, "See how many children we have now?"
Courtesy Shirley Lindenbaum
But while they remain rare, transmissible prion diseases did not die out with the last kuru case, as people have found repeatedly in recent decades. People have developed variant CJD after eating the meat of cattle infected with mad cow disease. Dr. Ermias Belay, a prion disease researcher with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says that's the only scenario in which there is "definitive evidence" that humans can develop a prion disease after eating the infected meat of another species.
But, he says, there are still a lot of open questions about how and why humans get prion diseases.
For one, it's still a mystery why animals, including humans, have those proteins in the first place — the Jekylls that can be so easily turned into Hydes. One leading hypothesis, described recently in the journal Nature, is that they play an important role in the protective coating around nerves.
But here's the bigger question, says Belay: "How many of these diseases actually jump species and affect humans?"
Kuru showed that people could get a prion disease from eating infected people. Mad cow disease showed that people can get a prion disease from eating infected cow. But what about other prion diseases in other animals? Could, say, hunters get sick from eating infected deer? That's what researchers in North America, including Belay, are trying to find out right now.
"Chronic wasting disease in North America is spreading fast," says Belay. The disease causes infected wild deer and elk to starve to death. "In early 2000, we had about three states that reported CWD in the wild in deer and elk. Today, that number is 21."
Belay says the disease is "a little bit concerning" because, unlike mad cow disease and kuru, where infectious prions were concentrated in the brain and nervous system tissue, in an animal with chronic wasting disease, the misfolded prions show up all over the body. They can even be found in saliva, feces and urine, which could explain how the disease is spreading so quickly among wild deer and elk.
The CDC is working with public health authorities in Wyoming and Colorado to monitor hunters for signs of prion disease.
"Unfortunately, because these diseases have long incubation periods, it's not easy to monitor transmission," says Belay. He says he and his colleagues have yet to find any evidence that hunters have picked up chronic wasting disease from the meat of infected wild animals.
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"And that, in itself, is good news for us," he says.
But, as with kuru, it will take years — maybe even decades — before he can know for sure.
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A Symposium on the interaction between Egypt and the rest of the Mediterranean world from the 8th to 6th centuries BCE (with Herodotus seen as a main written source on this subject)
“Aegyptiaca Symposium
Rhodes, 15-17 December 2016
11 Nov 2016 by Archaeology Newsroom
This symposium is the second international colloquium in the Ex Oriente Lux series and it was born out of the interdisciplinary research project Aegyptiaca: Ecumene and Economy in the Horizon of Religion, which is coordinated by the University of the Aegean and the University of Bonn. It focuses on the Egyptian and Near Eastern material from the archaic Greek sanctuaries and on the re-evaluation of the Egyptian cross-cultural interactivity with the Aegean world in the sphere of economy and religion. It will take place on Rhodes, 15-17 December 2016.
The broader Mediterranean region, which includes twenty-five nations today, witnessed the development of some of the most important cultures of the past one of the reasons being the facilitation of trade and cross-cultural exchanges afforded by the Mediterranean Sea. Exchanges were made on the level of goods as well as modes of thought. Foreign affairs could be solved through diplomatic exchanges whereas wars between monarchs necessitated the use of foreign mercenary armies. Braudel characterised the Mediterranean as the “sum of its routes in which the essence of the region is the product of intellectual and commercial intercourse”. The concentration of port-cities around its coast reveals the ease with which cultures have been spread by this medium.
In the absence of adequate written evidence the history of contacts in the eastern Mediterranean during the Geometric and Archaic periods is largely based on our knowledge and evaluation of imports and their archaeologically visible influence in indigenous material horizons. An exception to the dearth of sources is Herodotus. These imports are often examined alongside patterns of transmission of technology and craftsmanship, in an attempt to understand the gradual orientalising awakening of the Aegean that reached its apogee in the 7th and 6th centuries BC. Egyptian and near eastern iconography reached the Greeks and western Mediterranean via two main channels of communication or cultural networks. There was direct contact between Greeks from Asia Minor and islands with Egypt. The Greek colony at Naukratis, in the Egyptian Delta, facilitated to a great extent an undeniably great impact on one civilization to the other, which went both ways, as it is revealed in a variety of artistic and literary modes. Moreover, contacts between Greece, the East, Italy and Sicily occurred via the intermediary Phoenician cities. This may be inferred because Phoenician artifacts are found all over the Mediterranean during the Orientalising and Archaic periods.
The great majority of the Symposium’s objects are somewhat related to the sacral field, but not exclusively restricted to it. Right from the start we can notice a complex interplay between the sacral, the political and economic field. The functionality and contextualization of these objects within the broader nexus of the international relations of the seventh and sixth centuries BC must be seen as an epitome of the continuous attempts by the Saite kings of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty to re-establish a political and social link with major cultic centers in the Aegean and the Levant. Although no information on the ideological component of these votive offerings survives, the locally manufactured egyptianising objects clearly exemplify that Greeks had gained insight into Egyptian religious beliefs. Thus, they were probably familiar with the significance of at least some of these objects and the magical connotations they carried. Even if these objects were not used in the precise manner that they should have been back in Egypt, they were regarded as highly precious and venerated objects, having been assigned a whole new function and identity within a different cultural environment.
The objects themselves have not been changed; only the nature of its reception —to Egypt they were exports, while to Greece they were imports— and possibly its status and worth. They were adapted to the international syncretistic religious background of the receptive culture. The importance of these objects within the development of the Greek culture is obvious from the fact that they generated an enormous cultural wave of egyptianisation and orientalisation in the Mediterranean world. The islands of Rhodes and Samos, especially, are the places of the strongest Egyptian impact on the Greek material culture and thus probably the mentality too.
Organizers
-University of the Aegean, Department of Mediterranean Studies (University of the Aegean Egyptological Research Group and The Laboratory for the Ancient World of the Eastern Mediterranean)
-University of Bonn, Institute of Egyptology
-University of Thessaly, Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology
Local organizing committee
-University of the Aegean Egyptological Research Group (Hlektra Apostola, Anna Kalaitzaki, Grigoris Kontopoulos)
-Laboratory for the Ancient World of the Eastern Mediterranean (George Mavroudis)
Proceedings
The organising committee intends to publish the proceedings of the symposium in a separate volume of the Journal of Ancient Egyptian Interconnections (University of Arizona, URL:https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/jaei/). All papers will be reviewed before they are accepted for publication. More detailed information will be provided at the end of the venue.”
The programme of the Symposium and the abstacts of the papers presented to it can be found on https://www.academia.edu/29825921/Aegyptiaca_Project_the_Symposium_University_of_the_Aegean_Rhodes_15_17_12_16_ On the contrary, I was not able to find on the net the volume of the Journal of Ancient Egyptian interconnections with the proceedings of the Symposium.
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という歌詞が登場し、これはラブサマちゃんが音楽を自分の人生における特別な存在であると確信した原体験(詳しくはアルバム 「THE THIRD SUMMER OF LOVE」 初回限定版特典のセルフライナーノーツを参照。購入者特典をオープンソースで話すのは良くないと思うので、これ以上の言及は差し控える。初回限定版CDにはコード譜、歌詞カード、セルフライナーノーツ、収録曲 「I Told You A Lie」 の下敷きにもなったUK旅行記 「Lovely In The U.K.」 が同梱されており、パッケージも非常にオシャレでグーなので購入を勧めたい。元々セルフライナーノーツってかなり好きなのだが、旅行記が単純に読み物として面白くてとても良かった)について書いたフレーズだが、この 「僕らなら」 のイントロは、まさに誰かにとって音楽が素晴らしいものだと感じる原体験になるような、非常にかっこいいサウンドである。
構成としては、イントロ→1A→サビ→2A→ソロ→C→サビ→アウトロとテンポよく進んでいくところも筆者の好みにハマるポイントだ。1Aからサビに入る前のギターの音がめちゃくちゃに気持ちいい。「人間の土地」 のEP全体に言えることだが、「今いる場所からの逃避」 が歌われている中で、曲調としてはアッパーで爽快感があるアンバランスさがとても好きだ。その流れで最後にくるHigh and Dry(Radioheadのカバー)がアクセントになっており、4曲でたまらないカタルシスを味わえる作品になっている。
この 「人間の土地」 から3年後、現行最新アルバムである 「THE THIRD SUMMER OF LOVE」 がリリースされる。各種SNSやライブなどでの発言によれば、今もニューアルバムのリリ���スに向け、レコーディング等をおこなっているとのこと。ライブ、そしてTwitterやInstagramで時折アップされるデモなどで幾つかの新曲を聴いているが、どれもめちゃくちゃ良い曲で、新譜への期待は高まるばかりだ。無理のないペースで制作してもらい、音源を手に取れるその時を楽しみに待ちたい。
🟧LSC2000
続いて、「THIRD SUMMER OF LOVE」 収録の 「LSC2000」 を紹介する。書き始める前は、本楽曲がシングルとしてリリースされた時の同時収録曲である 「サンタクロースにお願い」 について書こうと思っていたのだが、この流れで書くならこっちかな…ということで急遽変更してお送りする。
#287: Tove Lo ocupa as 7 principais posições com ‘Lady Wood’ no topo; ‘True Disaster’, ‘Vibes’, ‘Keep It Simple’ e ‘Imaginary Friend’ completam o top 5
Veja mais informações da 287ª semana da Ton Charts, com detalhes sobre o chart principal de músicas e atos, a evolução das cinco primeiras posições e as músicas mais ouvidas por dia no período.
5 nov 2016
11 nov 2016
287
Tove Lo ocupa as 7 principais posições com ‘Lady Wood’ no topo; ‘True Disaster’, ‘Vibes’, ‘Keep It Simple’ e ‘Imaginary Friend’ completam o top 5