Friendship and Exchange Along the North Coast of New Guinea

Until the 1990s, there was little anthropological focus on the exchange of important commodities between multi-lingual communities in Papua New Guinea. This book explores how more than 100 communities who speak nearly fifty languages from five unrelated language phyla interact by developing persistent relations known as “hereditary friendship.” Unlike elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, these different groups use friendship rather than marriage to bring harmony, peace, and basic commodities to their communities.