Carlton, Victoria: Melbourne University Press, 2022. xi, 260 pp. (Maps, B&W photos, coloured photos.) US$40.00, paper. ISBN 9780522878141.
When I first read the jacket blurb and opened this book, I couldn’t help but think of similar studies like Shirley Lindenbaum’s, Kuru Sorcery; Disease and Danger in the New Guinea Highlands (Palo Alto: Mayfield, 1979) about an incurable prion disease among the Fore in Eastern Highland Province, which is a well-known and widely acclaimed work that carefully examines the cultural and social embeddedness of a disease beyond its purely medical aspects. The book discussed here points in the same direction. The title, Tik Merauke, means “the disease from Merauke” (a Dutch settlement founded in 1902 in the south of Dutch New Guinea) and it is an account of an exceptional epidemic of a rare sexually transmitted infection that affected the Marind people of New Guinea in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The disease is called donovanosis, also known as granuloma inguinale. Donovanosis is a bacterial disease characterized by genital ulcers named after its discoverer, the tropical physician Charles Donovan, who described the bacterial disease for the first time in 1905. The book, however, is not a medical work per se, but focuses primarily on the historical developments and external influences that were responsible for the rapid and catastrophic spread of this disease among Marind.
Tik Merauke is an account of historical events which, although written from the perspective of a medical doctor, address the culture-changing and disease-generating influences from outside, and thus becomes a critique of colonialism. The book is divided into 15 chapters that follow the introduction and a timeline of historical events from 1848 to 2013 in the Marind area. Richens explains in the first chapter his own time which he spent doing medical research in Goroka, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, from 1984 to 1990. It must be emphasized here that Richens has never been to the Marind region himself, which he mentions explicitly, and his remarks are therefore based exclusively on the material of others. These others are missionaries, ethnologists, physicians, and historians who have documented and analyzed the time and region. Richens points in the introductory chapter, in particular, to those individuals whose statements and reports about the Marind people have found their way into his own interpretations, including the missionaries Petrus Vertenten and Joannis Verschueren, the ethnologists Jan van Baal and Paul Wirz, and the physicians Max Thierfelder and Marie Thierfelder-Thillot. The author describes in detail the life cycle of Marind men and women and the social structure of Marind society at the beginning of the twentieth century. For example, how Marind were known to adorn their bodies with complex costumes and headdresses representing their numerous spiritual ancestors, called “Dema,” each of whom had an easily recognizable attribute. Dema totems included a variety of animate and inanimate objects in the Marind’s reality of life.
The main part of the book from the second chapter onwards deals with the question of why donovanosis was able to spread so rapidly. Richens cites several reasons for this. One is the dramatic drop in fertility due to diseases brought by settlers, traders, and adventurers, against which Marind had insufficient resistance. They tried to counteract their resulting decreased fertility by increasingly stealing children from neighbouring groups in the course of traditional headhunting in order to defuse their own demographic situation. Such abductions were the only way for Marind to compensate for their infertility. However, this practice was abruptly ended by the suppression of headhunting by missionaries and colonial administrators. The Marind’s risky ritual sperm practices—Richens describes them in detail on several pages—which were considered to increase fertility, thus inevitably increased. The strategy of the Dutch administration and mission was to remove Marind from their traditional ways of life and place them in new settlements in a way that would prevent the further spread of the disease and guarantee their controlled medical care. The fact that the social, cultural, and ritual practices of the Marind underwent drastic changes and destruction in the process is obvious and was consciously accepted by the colonial administration. Ethnologist Paul Wirz already lamented the massive cultural change triggered by this, which led to a loss of culture and identity among Marind. Richens sides with the Marind by depicting these fatal developments as he tries to fathom the consequences up to the present.
The author dedicates separate chapters to each of the information providers mentioned here at the beginning. By bringing a Marind activist into to the scene, Yul bole Gebze, Richens addresses the current problems of this group within the Indonesian state federation. A circle closes for the author, in that he evaluates the present as being just as existence-threatening for the Marind as the historical donovanosis triggering epoch. Here the text becomes political and thus takes a direction that differs from the rest of the book. One of the advantages of this book is that it provides a compact and largely complete overview of historical developments in the Marind area, especially in the era of Dutch colonialism. In the process, the influence, achievements, and views of the European protagonists in mission, colonial administration, and ethnological exploration are well presented.
Additionally, the book is characterized by numerous illustrations, which are presented as black and white photographs throughout the text. There are also colour photographs in the middle section, which have references to their corresponding chapters, as well as chapter-by-chapter endnotes. An extensive bibliography and a detailed index round off the work, which has been prudently designed by the publisher.
Hermann Mückler
University of Vienna, Vienna