![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brdgt
D. Carleton Gajdusek, Who Won Nobel for Work on Brain Disease, Is Dead at 85
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, December 15, 2008
D. Carleton Gajdusek, a virologist who won the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the mysterious epidemics now known as prion diseases, died last week in Tromso, Norway.
The cause of death is unknown, but Dr. Gajdusek (pronounced GUY-dah-shek) was 85 and had long had congestive heart failure, said Dr. Robert Klitzman, his biographer, who said he had spoken to him about a week ago. He was found in his Tromso hotel room on Friday morning about 24 hours after a manager saw him at breakfast.
In later life, Dr. Gajdusek became notorious when he was charged with molesting the many young boys he had adopted in New Guinea and Micronesia and brought to live with him in Maryland. He pleaded guilty to one charge, served a year in prison and left the United States in 1998, dividing his time between Paris, Amsterdam and Tromso.
Dr. Gajdusek won the Nobel for his work on kuru, which was slowly wiping out the Fore tribe of New Guinea. Victims descended into trembling and madness before death and, after an autopsy, were found to have brains shot through with spongy holes.
In 1957, Dr. Gajdusek — who had searched the Hindu Kush, the Amazon jungle and finally the mountain valleys of New Guinea hoping to find remote tribes with unique diseases to study — realized that the victims had all participated in “mortuary feasts” in the decades before the custom was suppressed in the 1940s by missionaries and the Australian police.
The Fore, who lived as they had in the Stone Age, cooked and ate the bodies of tribe members who had died, and smeared themselves with the brains as a sign of respect for the dead.
The disease confounded explanation because the mashed brains of the victims, injected into chimpanzees’ brains, produced no symptoms. All known disease-causing bacteria, viruses and parasites produced symptoms within days or weeks. But when the chimps developed kuru two years later, Dr. Gajdusek theorized that a slow-acting virus was at work, somehow not producing the expected immune reactions.
One of his assistants found “scrapie-affiliated particles” — fibrils resembling those in the brains of sheep with scrapie. But it was Stanley B. Prusiner who identified them as tangles of normal proteins that had misfolded and clumped, “teaching” other proteins to follow; he named them prions. They are now recognized as the cause of kuru, scrapie, human Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. Dr. Prusiner won his own Nobel in medicine for that work in 1997.
The idea that disease could be transmitted by a mere twisted protein — something that lacks DNA and RNA and therefore cannot be said to be alive, is not killed by boiling and is not recognized as foreign by the immune system — turned the scientific world on its ear. Such proteins are now suspected as the causes of dementias and possibly as triggers for cancer.
There has been a struggle even to find metaphors to elucidate the concept. Dr. Gajdusek once described the amyloid plaques of Alzheimer’s as a wrecked cassette, spinning out tangles of protein faster than the brain can reel in the tape and chop it up. Kurt Vonnegut told Dr. Klitzman that he got his idea for Ice-9, a crystal that “teaches” water to harden into ice, freezing the world to death, from kuru.
Dr. Gajdusek also helped other researchers find small, long-intermarried populations with diseases to study, including work that helped establish the genetic basis of Huntington’s disease and causes of hermaphroditism.
Dr. Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, wrote “The Trembling Mountain,” an account of his time as a graduate student under Dr. Gajdusek in New Guinea. His brain “worked faster and at a higher level than anyone’s I’ve ever met,” he said, and the researcher was friends with Buckminster Fuller, Linus Pauling and Oliver Sacks, whom Dr. Klitzman said suggested the biography.
Dr. Gajdusek was born on Sept. 9, 1923. He grew up in Yonkers and went to the University of Rochester and Harvard Medical School. From 1970 until his arrest in 1997, he headed the brain studies laboratory at the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Gajdusek was difficult and eccentric. In exile, he spent the winters in Tromso, which is above the Arctic Circle and dark 24 hours a day, because it was isolated and he got more work done.
He also remained unrepentant about the sexual relationships with his adopted sons, Dr. Klitzman said. He considered American law prudish and pointed out that sex with young men was normal in the cultures he studied and in the classic Greek societies at the foundation of Western civilization.
His legal assistant, Dorrie Runman, who was previously married to one of his sons, John Runman, said Dr. Gajdusek’s survivors included “his adopted sons and daughters, including Yavine Borimaand Jesse Mororui-Gajdusek in the United States, and two nephews, Karl Lawrence Gajdusek and Mark Terry.”
His children were legally adopted, Ms. Runman said. He put several through college and graduate or medical school. Some of them, now in their 50s, supported him during his legal troubles, while one sibling testified against him.
Findings: Tips From the Potlatch, Where Giving Knows No Slump
By JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times, December 16, 2008
Now that hard times have arrived, now that we’re being punished for our great credit binge, what are we supposed to do for the holidays? The logical answer is to cut out the useless and the lavish, but I have it on the highest authority that it’s just not that simple.
The authority is Bill Cranmer, whom I consulted for holiday tips because he is a hereditary chief and elected leader of the Kwakwaka’wakw Indians, the world’s most experienced gift-givers. They’ve learned that exchanging presents is too important to be discontinued in any kind of economy.
These Indians on the Pacific coast of British Columbia are famous for their potlatches, which are feasts and gift-giving ceremonies that serve a variety of functions: creating alliances, promoting altruism, redistributing wealth, vanquishing rivals and, not least, showing off. The events, particularly at their most extreme in the 19th century, became a staple of anthropology textbooks (which referred to the Indians as the Kwakiutl) and helped inspire Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption.
When Chief Cranmer’s ancestors hosted a potlatch, they displayed stacks of blankets and mountains of flour to be handed out to the masses, and singled out important guests for expensive silver bracelets and boats. A chief sometimes flaunted his affluence by tossing his own canoes into the fire or cutting up pieces of copper currency worth thousands of dollars.
Missionaries denounced the potlatch as “wasteful” and “heathen.” Canadian authorities outlawed the ceremonies and sent Indians to prison after raiding a potlatch in 1921 hosted by Chief Cranmer’s father. (For details, see TierneyLab.) But nothing, not even the Great Depression, could stop the potlatchers.
They went on holding underground ceremonies, sometimes in remote villages, sometimes by exchanging gifts under the guise of giving Christmas presents. In the 1950s, when the authorities finally gave up and lifted the ban, it was clear that the missionaries’ hopes of reforming the Indians were futile. Instead, the rest of society was assimilating the Indians’ ways by turning the holidays into a gift-giving extravaganza. Shoppers may try to restrain themselves this year, but gift-giving serves too many purposes for it to be abandoned, as Chief Cranmer understands.
“Even in hard economic times, the potlatch has always been the structure that enables people in our society to work together,” he says. Although the Indians’ traditional fishing industry has been devastated in recent decades, they’re still holding potlatches that typically cost the host chief and his extended family at least $30,000, sometimes $100,000.
What can the Kwakwaka’wakw teach us in our hard times? Here, courtesy of some of their elders and the anthropologists who have studied the potlatch, are some lessons for dealing with the holiday crunch:
Simplify and economize. For his next potlatch, Chief Cranmer will be shopping for 1,000 guests, but he makes it sound easy. He buys in bulk (“They look at you funny at the department store when you order 500 blankets”) and goes for a lot of basic items like glassware, dishes and towels. And he’s not afraid to regift.
“In my basement I have a room pretty near full of stuff that I’ve gotten at potlatches,” he says. “We’ll give some of it away again.” He plans to give cash and special gifts to some fellow chiefs, like the one who gave him a stereo system at a recent potlatch, but he doesn’t plan to go into debt. “The thing is not to go overboard and buy really expensive gifts. But enough to show people that you care for them and are thinking about them.”
Control your animosity. If your family’s holiday exchanges have turned into warfare, don’t give up hope. Although one-upmanship is inherent in gift-giving, the history of the potlatch suggests that viciousness is not inevitable.
In the 19th-century potlatches, chiefs one-upped each other by cutting off a piece of an engraved copper shield and either throwing it into the fire or giving it to the other chief. Because these “coppers” were a form of currency, it was a bit like cutting up $100 bills, except the coppers could be worth far more. A 1934 textbook, “Patterns of Culture,” quotes a chief talking about a prized copper named Dandalayu:
“Furthermore such is my pride that I will kill on this fire my copper Dandalayu, which is groaning in my house. You all know how much I paid for it. I bought it for 4,000 blankets. Now I will break it in order to vanquish my rival. I will make my house a fighting place for you, my tribe.” Today, though, potlatch scholars say that those extravagant copper fights were a historical anomaly caused by the arrival of white fur traders, which upended the Indians’ social structure and created a class of nouveau riche leaders vying for prestige.
After that 19th-century economic boom passed, the potlatches became less ostentatious, and today the chiefs play up the cooperative aspects of the ceremonies. Chief Cranmer and the other leaders in Alert Bay, his home on an island northwest of Vancouver, have toned down the hostility by agreeing not to break up coppers anymore. Now that the bubble has burst on Wall Street’s nouveau riche, maybe they will become less competitive. Maybe.
But a little showing off is still fine. Today’s potlatchers still engage in some conspicuous destruction. After the dancing was finished at a potlatch several years ago, the chief impressed the crowd by tossing the dancers’ masks into the fire. The tradition of pouring fish oil into the fire continues, although there are no longer carved figures called “vomiters” that spew a continuous flow. Now that this eulachon oil costs $500 per gallon, potlatchers show more restraint.
Could this destructive tradition work elsewhere? The gratuitous burning of oil would be an environmental faux pas — I can’t see many people proudly letting their SUVs idle during holiday feasts — but there’s something to be said for this form of display: it lets you demonstrate your wealth without going shopping or inflicting more clutter on someone’s else closets. The ceremonial burning of a Santa Claus tie or “World’s Greatest Mom” apron would send the same message — and would acquire even more meaning if the donor of the gift were present.
Turnabout is fair play. There’s no reason to spend precious time and money shopping for the aunt who surprised you last year with the programmable breadmaker. It’s still in the box. Rewrap it and give it back to her.
Returning a gift was done routinely in the old potlatches; the donors didn’t object as long as it was accompanied by an interest payment that might be 100 percent per year.
“In the old days, if a chief gave away 200 blankets to another chief, the next year or when the other chief next held his potlatch it was likely he’d get back 400 blankets or more,” says Andrea Sanborn, the director of the U’mista Cultural Center in Alert Bay, which houses the collection of potlatch regalia seized in the 1921 raid. “But today it is not expected that it be double anymore.”
So there’s certainly no need to buy Auntie a second breadmaker. A book of Amish bread recipes would do fine.
Don’t forget your enemies. “A lot of attention has been paid to the competitive side of the old potlatches, but they also helped people avoid conflicts,” says Aldona Jonaitis, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska. “Besides strengthening the bonds within a family, potlatching enabled people to establish bonds and obligations with potential enemies outside the family.” Today, with families becoming smaller and more dispersed, giving gifts to outsiders — even ones you don’t like — is a better self-preservation strategy than ever.
Share the wealth. The missionaries who railed against the potlatch didn’t understand its larger social function. In return for recognizing the greatness of the host chief, the low-status guests were given food and gifts without any expectation of repayment. It might be seen as a successful example of “trickle-down economics,” says Aaron Glass, a potlatch scholar at the American Museum of Natural History.
“Even though the elite chiefs controlled the fishing grounds and the trade networks,” Dr. Glass says, “the potlatch functioned to make sure everyone had enough fish and that the excess trading wealth was redistributed to the entire community.” In hard times that function is especially important, so remember the neediest this year.
Ignore the Scrooges. For more than a century, the potlatchers in Chief Cranmer’s family have been rebuffing their critics with a simple explanation. “Outsiders may think we’re dumb for giving away our money when everyone else is trying to save, but we do it because we feel good,” Chief Cranmer says. “After you give away everything and are pretty broke, you’re supposed to be happy.” And he swears that’s just how he felt after his last potlatch.
Get Along Without a Pinkie? It’s Tougher Than You Might Think
By DANA SCARTON, The New York Times, December 16, 2008
The pinkie, the humble fifth finger, has long been viewed as a decorative accessory, something to extend daintily from a wine glass. So what would you lose if you didn’t have one?
“You’d lose 50 percent of your hand strength, easily,” said Laurie Rogers, an occupational therapist who is a certified hand therapist at National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington. She explained that while the index and middle fingers function, with the thumb, in pinching and grabbing — zipping zippers, buttoning buttons — the pinkie teams up with the ring finger to provide power.
I learned this for myself last April, when I tripped while jogging and my 132-pound frame crashed onto the bone at the base of my right pinkie, a bone the width of a pencil. It snapped at the metacarpophalangeal, or MCP, joint, where the finger links with the hand.
Five months later, my finger would not bend unassisted. I could not make a fist, swing a tennis racket with control, or securely grasp a dumbbell or the handle of a vacuum cleaner. Because the injury occurred in my dominant hand, writing was cumbersome.
My situation was hardly unique. Fractures of the small finger and its metacarpal — the bone that extends from the base of the finger into the hand — occur about twice as often as fractures to any other unit of finger and metacarpal, including the thumb. There is little reliable data tracking finger injuries in the United States; the statistics are from a 2003 study in The Journal of Hand Surgery (British and European Volume) that analyzed a year’s worth of data from an Amsterdam emergency room.
This high incidence of fractures may be attributable to the pinkie’s status, along with the index finger, as a “border digit,” or a bookend to the middle and ring fingers, said Dr. Steven Z. Glickel, director of the C. V. Starr Hand Surgery Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan and president of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand.
And while the index finger “is at least somewhat protected by being adjacent to the thumb,” he went on, “the little finger has virtually no protection.”
Bones of the little finger — the distal, middle and proximal phalanges — are typically broken by falls or by the finger’s being struck by something, like a basketball. Though stiffness and swelling may result, many people do not realize the finger is broken, so they do not seek treatment.
“People think if they’re not in pain and they can move their finger, it’s not broken,” said Dr. Scott G. Edwards, chief of hand and elbow surgery at Georgetown University Hospital. “That’s simply not true.”
Repairs to a broken small finger can involve pins, screws and plates. Eight days after my fall, two pins were inserted through the MCP joint. The procedure, performed by Dr. Edwards as outpatient surgery, reattached my proximal phalanx and straightened my middle knuckle, known as the proximal interphalangeal, or PIP, joint. A cast was applied from fingertips to elbow.
Twelve days later, the cast was removed and rehabilitation began. I had never heard of finger therapy, but it exists — and it is painful.
“Hand therapists are the ones who make us look good,” said Dr. Leon S. Benson, chief of hand surgery at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare in Illinois. “I’m in the office acting happy and upbeat, then I say to the patient, ‘Now you will go down and see Mary Beth, the therapist, who will hurt you.’ ”
Treatments include heat, ultrasound, neuromuscular stimulation, splinting and manual exercise. Getting to rehab quickly — within days or weeks of surgery — is of paramount importance; otherwise, scar tissue can proliferate and stiffness can worsen.
I got to therapy quickly but was assigned a therapist who was too timid to manipulate my finger. By the time I located a competent replacement, my finger was rigid, and scarring appeared to be well under way.
Scar tissue, a fibrous connective tissue that forms at the wound, is more prominent and problematic in fingers because there is virtually no muscle, and tendons sit directly on the bone. Accumulating scar tissue in the smallest finger is akin to “getting glue inside a watch,” Dr. Benson said. “It binds everything down.”
Swelling can impede recovery, as well. “It’s like taking a big sausage and trying to bend it,” Dr. Edwards said.
An M.R.I. scan of my finger, taken after the pins were removed, confirmed that scar tissue had immobilized the flexor tendons, which are palm-side tendons that enable fingers to fold into a fist. Besides not receiving effective therapy soon enough, genetics may have contributed, since some people form scar tissue more easily than others. Either way, my finger was stuck.
In October, I underwent flexor tenolysis, during which Dr. Edwards meticulously freed the tendons. The day after surgery, I started therapy with Mrs. Rogers. Earlier this month, I completed my treatment; my finger now bends with ease and my hand strength has returned.
And the humble pinkie has earned my respect.
By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr., The New York Times, December 15, 2008
D. Carleton Gajdusek, a virologist who won the 1976 Nobel Prize in medicine for his work on the mysterious epidemics now known as prion diseases, died last week in Tromso, Norway.
The cause of death is unknown, but Dr. Gajdusek (pronounced GUY-dah-shek) was 85 and had long had congestive heart failure, said Dr. Robert Klitzman, his biographer, who said he had spoken to him about a week ago. He was found in his Tromso hotel room on Friday morning about 24 hours after a manager saw him at breakfast.
In later life, Dr. Gajdusek became notorious when he was charged with molesting the many young boys he had adopted in New Guinea and Micronesia and brought to live with him in Maryland. He pleaded guilty to one charge, served a year in prison and left the United States in 1998, dividing his time between Paris, Amsterdam and Tromso.
Dr. Gajdusek won the Nobel for his work on kuru, which was slowly wiping out the Fore tribe of New Guinea. Victims descended into trembling and madness before death and, after an autopsy, were found to have brains shot through with spongy holes.
In 1957, Dr. Gajdusek — who had searched the Hindu Kush, the Amazon jungle and finally the mountain valleys of New Guinea hoping to find remote tribes with unique diseases to study — realized that the victims had all participated in “mortuary feasts” in the decades before the custom was suppressed in the 1940s by missionaries and the Australian police.
The Fore, who lived as they had in the Stone Age, cooked and ate the bodies of tribe members who had died, and smeared themselves with the brains as a sign of respect for the dead.
The disease confounded explanation because the mashed brains of the victims, injected into chimpanzees’ brains, produced no symptoms. All known disease-causing bacteria, viruses and parasites produced symptoms within days or weeks. But when the chimps developed kuru two years later, Dr. Gajdusek theorized that a slow-acting virus was at work, somehow not producing the expected immune reactions.
One of his assistants found “scrapie-affiliated particles” — fibrils resembling those in the brains of sheep with scrapie. But it was Stanley B. Prusiner who identified them as tangles of normal proteins that had misfolded and clumped, “teaching” other proteins to follow; he named them prions. They are now recognized as the cause of kuru, scrapie, human Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease and bovine spongiform encephalopathy, better known as mad cow disease. Dr. Prusiner won his own Nobel in medicine for that work in 1997.
The idea that disease could be transmitted by a mere twisted protein — something that lacks DNA and RNA and therefore cannot be said to be alive, is not killed by boiling and is not recognized as foreign by the immune system — turned the scientific world on its ear. Such proteins are now suspected as the causes of dementias and possibly as triggers for cancer.
There has been a struggle even to find metaphors to elucidate the concept. Dr. Gajdusek once described the amyloid plaques of Alzheimer’s as a wrecked cassette, spinning out tangles of protein faster than the brain can reel in the tape and chop it up. Kurt Vonnegut told Dr. Klitzman that he got his idea for Ice-9, a crystal that “teaches” water to harden into ice, freezing the world to death, from kuru.
Dr. Gajdusek also helped other researchers find small, long-intermarried populations with diseases to study, including work that helped establish the genetic basis of Huntington’s disease and causes of hermaphroditism.
Dr. Klitzman, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, wrote “The Trembling Mountain,” an account of his time as a graduate student under Dr. Gajdusek in New Guinea. His brain “worked faster and at a higher level than anyone’s I’ve ever met,” he said, and the researcher was friends with Buckminster Fuller, Linus Pauling and Oliver Sacks, whom Dr. Klitzman said suggested the biography.
Dr. Gajdusek was born on Sept. 9, 1923. He grew up in Yonkers and went to the University of Rochester and Harvard Medical School. From 1970 until his arrest in 1997, he headed the brain studies laboratory at the National Institute of Neurological Disease and Stroke, which is part of the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Gajdusek was difficult and eccentric. In exile, he spent the winters in Tromso, which is above the Arctic Circle and dark 24 hours a day, because it was isolated and he got more work done.
He also remained unrepentant about the sexual relationships with his adopted sons, Dr. Klitzman said. He considered American law prudish and pointed out that sex with young men was normal in the cultures he studied and in the classic Greek societies at the foundation of Western civilization.
His legal assistant, Dorrie Runman, who was previously married to one of his sons, John Runman, said Dr. Gajdusek’s survivors included “his adopted sons and daughters, including Yavine Borimaand Jesse Mororui-Gajdusek in the United States, and two nephews, Karl Lawrence Gajdusek and Mark Terry.”
His children were legally adopted, Ms. Runman said. He put several through college and graduate or medical school. Some of them, now in their 50s, supported him during his legal troubles, while one sibling testified against him.
Findings: Tips From the Potlatch, Where Giving Knows No Slump
By JOHN TIERNEY, The New York Times, December 16, 2008
Now that hard times have arrived, now that we’re being punished for our great credit binge, what are we supposed to do for the holidays? The logical answer is to cut out the useless and the lavish, but I have it on the highest authority that it’s just not that simple.
The authority is Bill Cranmer, whom I consulted for holiday tips because he is a hereditary chief and elected leader of the Kwakwaka’wakw Indians, the world’s most experienced gift-givers. They’ve learned that exchanging presents is too important to be discontinued in any kind of economy.
These Indians on the Pacific coast of British Columbia are famous for their potlatches, which are feasts and gift-giving ceremonies that serve a variety of functions: creating alliances, promoting altruism, redistributing wealth, vanquishing rivals and, not least, showing off. The events, particularly at their most extreme in the 19th century, became a staple of anthropology textbooks (which referred to the Indians as the Kwakiutl) and helped inspire Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption.
When Chief Cranmer’s ancestors hosted a potlatch, they displayed stacks of blankets and mountains of flour to be handed out to the masses, and singled out important guests for expensive silver bracelets and boats. A chief sometimes flaunted his affluence by tossing his own canoes into the fire or cutting up pieces of copper currency worth thousands of dollars.
Missionaries denounced the potlatch as “wasteful” and “heathen.” Canadian authorities outlawed the ceremonies and sent Indians to prison after raiding a potlatch in 1921 hosted by Chief Cranmer’s father. (For details, see TierneyLab.) But nothing, not even the Great Depression, could stop the potlatchers.
They went on holding underground ceremonies, sometimes in remote villages, sometimes by exchanging gifts under the guise of giving Christmas presents. In the 1950s, when the authorities finally gave up and lifted the ban, it was clear that the missionaries’ hopes of reforming the Indians were futile. Instead, the rest of society was assimilating the Indians’ ways by turning the holidays into a gift-giving extravaganza. Shoppers may try to restrain themselves this year, but gift-giving serves too many purposes for it to be abandoned, as Chief Cranmer understands.
“Even in hard economic times, the potlatch has always been the structure that enables people in our society to work together,” he says. Although the Indians’ traditional fishing industry has been devastated in recent decades, they’re still holding potlatches that typically cost the host chief and his extended family at least $30,000, sometimes $100,000.
What can the Kwakwaka’wakw teach us in our hard times? Here, courtesy of some of their elders and the anthropologists who have studied the potlatch, are some lessons for dealing with the holiday crunch:
Simplify and economize. For his next potlatch, Chief Cranmer will be shopping for 1,000 guests, but he makes it sound easy. He buys in bulk (“They look at you funny at the department store when you order 500 blankets”) and goes for a lot of basic items like glassware, dishes and towels. And he’s not afraid to regift.
“In my basement I have a room pretty near full of stuff that I’ve gotten at potlatches,” he says. “We’ll give some of it away again.” He plans to give cash and special gifts to some fellow chiefs, like the one who gave him a stereo system at a recent potlatch, but he doesn’t plan to go into debt. “The thing is not to go overboard and buy really expensive gifts. But enough to show people that you care for them and are thinking about them.”
Control your animosity. If your family’s holiday exchanges have turned into warfare, don’t give up hope. Although one-upmanship is inherent in gift-giving, the history of the potlatch suggests that viciousness is not inevitable.
In the 19th-century potlatches, chiefs one-upped each other by cutting off a piece of an engraved copper shield and either throwing it into the fire or giving it to the other chief. Because these “coppers” were a form of currency, it was a bit like cutting up $100 bills, except the coppers could be worth far more. A 1934 textbook, “Patterns of Culture,” quotes a chief talking about a prized copper named Dandalayu:
“Furthermore such is my pride that I will kill on this fire my copper Dandalayu, which is groaning in my house. You all know how much I paid for it. I bought it for 4,000 blankets. Now I will break it in order to vanquish my rival. I will make my house a fighting place for you, my tribe.” Today, though, potlatch scholars say that those extravagant copper fights were a historical anomaly caused by the arrival of white fur traders, which upended the Indians’ social structure and created a class of nouveau riche leaders vying for prestige.
After that 19th-century economic boom passed, the potlatches became less ostentatious, and today the chiefs play up the cooperative aspects of the ceremonies. Chief Cranmer and the other leaders in Alert Bay, his home on an island northwest of Vancouver, have toned down the hostility by agreeing not to break up coppers anymore. Now that the bubble has burst on Wall Street’s nouveau riche, maybe they will become less competitive. Maybe.
But a little showing off is still fine. Today’s potlatchers still engage in some conspicuous destruction. After the dancing was finished at a potlatch several years ago, the chief impressed the crowd by tossing the dancers’ masks into the fire. The tradition of pouring fish oil into the fire continues, although there are no longer carved figures called “vomiters” that spew a continuous flow. Now that this eulachon oil costs $500 per gallon, potlatchers show more restraint.
Could this destructive tradition work elsewhere? The gratuitous burning of oil would be an environmental faux pas — I can’t see many people proudly letting their SUVs idle during holiday feasts — but there’s something to be said for this form of display: it lets you demonstrate your wealth without going shopping or inflicting more clutter on someone’s else closets. The ceremonial burning of a Santa Claus tie or “World’s Greatest Mom” apron would send the same message — and would acquire even more meaning if the donor of the gift were present.
Turnabout is fair play. There’s no reason to spend precious time and money shopping for the aunt who surprised you last year with the programmable breadmaker. It’s still in the box. Rewrap it and give it back to her.
Returning a gift was done routinely in the old potlatches; the donors didn’t object as long as it was accompanied by an interest payment that might be 100 percent per year.
“In the old days, if a chief gave away 200 blankets to another chief, the next year or when the other chief next held his potlatch it was likely he’d get back 400 blankets or more,” says Andrea Sanborn, the director of the U’mista Cultural Center in Alert Bay, which houses the collection of potlatch regalia seized in the 1921 raid. “But today it is not expected that it be double anymore.”
So there’s certainly no need to buy Auntie a second breadmaker. A book of Amish bread recipes would do fine.
Don’t forget your enemies. “A lot of attention has been paid to the competitive side of the old potlatches, but they also helped people avoid conflicts,” says Aldona Jonaitis, an anthropologist at the University of Alaska. “Besides strengthening the bonds within a family, potlatching enabled people to establish bonds and obligations with potential enemies outside the family.” Today, with families becoming smaller and more dispersed, giving gifts to outsiders — even ones you don’t like — is a better self-preservation strategy than ever.
Share the wealth. The missionaries who railed against the potlatch didn’t understand its larger social function. In return for recognizing the greatness of the host chief, the low-status guests were given food and gifts without any expectation of repayment. It might be seen as a successful example of “trickle-down economics,” says Aaron Glass, a potlatch scholar at the American Museum of Natural History.
“Even though the elite chiefs controlled the fishing grounds and the trade networks,” Dr. Glass says, “the potlatch functioned to make sure everyone had enough fish and that the excess trading wealth was redistributed to the entire community.” In hard times that function is especially important, so remember the neediest this year.
Ignore the Scrooges. For more than a century, the potlatchers in Chief Cranmer’s family have been rebuffing their critics with a simple explanation. “Outsiders may think we’re dumb for giving away our money when everyone else is trying to save, but we do it because we feel good,” Chief Cranmer says. “After you give away everything and are pretty broke, you’re supposed to be happy.” And he swears that’s just how he felt after his last potlatch.
Get Along Without a Pinkie? It’s Tougher Than You Might Think
By DANA SCARTON, The New York Times, December 16, 2008
The pinkie, the humble fifth finger, has long been viewed as a decorative accessory, something to extend daintily from a wine glass. So what would you lose if you didn’t have one?
“You’d lose 50 percent of your hand strength, easily,” said Laurie Rogers, an occupational therapist who is a certified hand therapist at National Rehabilitation Hospital in Washington. She explained that while the index and middle fingers function, with the thumb, in pinching and grabbing — zipping zippers, buttoning buttons — the pinkie teams up with the ring finger to provide power.
I learned this for myself last April, when I tripped while jogging and my 132-pound frame crashed onto the bone at the base of my right pinkie, a bone the width of a pencil. It snapped at the metacarpophalangeal, or MCP, joint, where the finger links with the hand.
Five months later, my finger would not bend unassisted. I could not make a fist, swing a tennis racket with control, or securely grasp a dumbbell or the handle of a vacuum cleaner. Because the injury occurred in my dominant hand, writing was cumbersome.
My situation was hardly unique. Fractures of the small finger and its metacarpal — the bone that extends from the base of the finger into the hand — occur about twice as often as fractures to any other unit of finger and metacarpal, including the thumb. There is little reliable data tracking finger injuries in the United States; the statistics are from a 2003 study in The Journal of Hand Surgery (British and European Volume) that analyzed a year’s worth of data from an Amsterdam emergency room.
This high incidence of fractures may be attributable to the pinkie’s status, along with the index finger, as a “border digit,” or a bookend to the middle and ring fingers, said Dr. Steven Z. Glickel, director of the C. V. Starr Hand Surgery Center at St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan and president of the American Society for Surgery of the Hand.
And while the index finger “is at least somewhat protected by being adjacent to the thumb,” he went on, “the little finger has virtually no protection.”
Bones of the little finger — the distal, middle and proximal phalanges — are typically broken by falls or by the finger’s being struck by something, like a basketball. Though stiffness and swelling may result, many people do not realize the finger is broken, so they do not seek treatment.
“People think if they’re not in pain and they can move their finger, it’s not broken,” said Dr. Scott G. Edwards, chief of hand and elbow surgery at Georgetown University Hospital. “That’s simply not true.”
Repairs to a broken small finger can involve pins, screws and plates. Eight days after my fall, two pins were inserted through the MCP joint. The procedure, performed by Dr. Edwards as outpatient surgery, reattached my proximal phalanx and straightened my middle knuckle, known as the proximal interphalangeal, or PIP, joint. A cast was applied from fingertips to elbow.
Twelve days later, the cast was removed and rehabilitation began. I had never heard of finger therapy, but it exists — and it is painful.
“Hand therapists are the ones who make us look good,” said Dr. Leon S. Benson, chief of hand surgery at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare in Illinois. “I’m in the office acting happy and upbeat, then I say to the patient, ‘Now you will go down and see Mary Beth, the therapist, who will hurt you.’ ”
Treatments include heat, ultrasound, neuromuscular stimulation, splinting and manual exercise. Getting to rehab quickly — within days or weeks of surgery — is of paramount importance; otherwise, scar tissue can proliferate and stiffness can worsen.
I got to therapy quickly but was assigned a therapist who was too timid to manipulate my finger. By the time I located a competent replacement, my finger was rigid, and scarring appeared to be well under way.
Scar tissue, a fibrous connective tissue that forms at the wound, is more prominent and problematic in fingers because there is virtually no muscle, and tendons sit directly on the bone. Accumulating scar tissue in the smallest finger is akin to “getting glue inside a watch,” Dr. Benson said. “It binds everything down.”
Swelling can impede recovery, as well. “It’s like taking a big sausage and trying to bend it,” Dr. Edwards said.
An M.R.I. scan of my finger, taken after the pins were removed, confirmed that scar tissue had immobilized the flexor tendons, which are palm-side tendons that enable fingers to fold into a fist. Besides not receiving effective therapy soon enough, genetics may have contributed, since some people form scar tissue more easily than others. Either way, my finger was stuck.
In October, I underwent flexor tenolysis, during which Dr. Edwards meticulously freed the tendons. The day after surgery, I started therapy with Mrs. Rogers. Earlier this month, I completed my treatment; my finger now bends with ease and my hand strength has returned.
And the humble pinkie has earned my respect.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 05:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 05:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 05:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 05:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 06:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 06:26 pm (UTC)http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=2581657&blobtype=pdf
no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 06:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 06:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 08:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-12-16 09:42 pm (UTC)It seemed from the conversation that Gajdusek was refusing to be interviewed by anyone.