Strathern's illuminating study of the inequalities amongst the Highland societies of Papua New Guinea is now reissued with a new preface. The five papers in this volume seek to set these inequalities into a context of long-term and recent social changes that aim to develop schemes of analysis which will permit discussion of the societies over extended periods of time.

D. K. Feil's study focuses on the divergent regions of the eastern and western highland of Papua New Guinea.

That large-scale capital drives inequality in states like Papua New Guinea is clear enough; how it does so is less clear. This edited collection presents studies of the local contexts of capital-intensive projects in the mining, oil and gas, and agro-industry sectors in rural and semi-rural parts of Papua New Guinea; it asks what is involved when large-scale capital and its agents begin to become significant nodes in hitherto more local social networks. Its contributors describe the processes initiated by the (planned) presence of extractive industries that tend to reinforce already existing inequalities, or to create and socially entrench novel inequalities. The studies largely focus on the beginnings of such transformations, when hopes for social improvement are highest and economic inequalities still incipient. They show how those hopes, and the encompassing socio-political transformations characteristic of this phase, act to produce far-reaching impacts on ways of life, setting precedents for and embedding the social distribution of gains and losses. The chapters address a range of settings: the PNG Liquid Natural Gas pipeline; newly established eucalyptus and oil palm plantations; a planned copper-gold mine; and one in which rumours of development diffuse through a rural social network as yet unaffected by any actual or planned capital investments. The analyses all demonstrate that questions around land, leadership and information are central to the current and future social profile of local inequality in all its facets.

Wives and Wanderers in a New Guinea Highlands Society brings to the reader anthropologist Marie Reay’s field research from the 1950s and 1960s on women’s lives in the Wahgi Valley, Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Dramatically written, each chapter adds to the main story that Reay wanted to tell, contrasting young girls’ freedom to court and choose partners, with the constraints (and violence) they were to experience as married women. This volume provides readable ethnographic material for undergraduate courses, in whole or in part. It will be of interest to students and scholars of gender relations, anthropology and feminism, Melanesia and the Pacific. The material in this book, which Reay had written by 1965 but never published, remains startlingly contemporary and relevant. Marie Olive Reay was a social anthropologist who did research in Australian indigenous communities and in the Wahgi Valley in the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Employed at The Australian National University from 1959 to 1988 when she retired, Reay passed away in 2004. In 2011 this manuscript was found in her personal papers, reconstructed, and edited by Francesca Merlan, augmented here by an additional introduction by eminent anthropologist of the Highlands, and of gender, Marilyn Strathern. Had this manuscript appeared when Reay apparently completed it in its present form – around 1965 – it would have been the first published ethnography of women’s lives in the Central Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Its retrieval from Reay’s papers, and availability now, adds a new dimension to works on gender relations in Melanesian societies, and to the history of Australian and Pacific anthropology.

This volume brings together a number of papers written by the author between 1971 and 2001 which address issues of political and economic development and social change in Papua New Guinea.

The question addressed in this Element is: What happens to a society when, in the absence of influence from foreign populations, constraints are released by a new crop making possible significant surplus production? We will draw on the historical traditions of 110 tribes of the Enga of Papua New Guinea recorded over a decade to document the changes that occurred in response to the potential for surplus production after the arrival of the sweet potato some 350 years prior to contact with Europeans. Economic change alone does not restructure a society nor build the social and political scaffolding for new institutions. In response to rapid change, the Enga drew on rituals that altered norms and values and resolved cultural contradictions that inhibited cooperation to bring about complexity rather than chaos. The end result was the development of one of the largest known ceremonial exchange systems prior to state formation.

Papua New Guinea is the first book to explore the economic development of this socially complex, rapidly changing nation. Subjects discussed include: * rapid economic growth and political conflict * civil war on the island of Bougainville * population growth and urbanisation * mining: gold, copper and environmental conflicts * uneven development and social divisions.