Community Liaison Officer. I am also the community leader of Waisa Village. In our kuru studies, I work closely with Jerome Whitfield and Michael Alpers. In the early 1960s, when I first saw Michael Alpers in Waisa, I was 7 years old. Michael has always been a good friend of our family. The kuru research work went ahead successfully. Later Michael became the Director of the Papua New Guinea Ins...

Abstract The belief in witchcraft and sorcery is a significant cause of intentional homicide Kenya. Moreover, those who kill people suspected being witches often employ as defense for their actions the so-called provocation by argument: was purportedly committed under influence sorcery. One major legal difficulty that Kenyan courts have frequently been invited to resolve thus question whether a...

This paper explores the meanings of ‘Body’ and ‘Spirit’ in relation to one of the most important personages in Hohodene cosmology, the spirit “Keeper of Sickness and Sorcery”, named Kuwai. [“Yurupary” in lingua geral] This Great Spirit is an extraordinarily complex synthesis of the Hohodene (and other Baniwa, northern Arawak-speaking peoples) worldview. His ‘Body’ was full of holes from which t...

Today, I am so happy to see some of the colleagues whom I once worked with in Okapa. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the medical scientists who came to work on kuru. Back in my village of Waisa, I was newly married when Michael Alpers arrived in our village to carry out his field research. The kuru epidemic was frightening and taking the lives of many women and children and a...