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Friendship and Exchange Along the North Coast of New Guinea
Robert L. Welsch
224 pages, 25 illls., bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-83695-421-7 $135.00/£104.00 / Hb / Published (March 2026)
eISBN 978-1-83695-420-0 eBook
Reviews
“This book is a strong contribution to the literature. Very few studies of “friendship,” in a region of great linguistic diversity, have ever been undertaken.” • Richard Scaglion, University of Pittsburgh
Description
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.
Robert L. Welsch is now retired from teaching anthropology at Franklin Pierce University and Dartmouth College and was formerly affiliated with The Field Museum in Chicago. In addition to conducting extensive field research in Papua New Guinea, he is co-author of a series of textbooks with Oxford University Press. His most recent publication is Anthropology: Asking Questions About Human Origins, Diversity, and Culture (OUP, 2024).
Subject: Anthropology (General)Cultural Studies (General)Sociology
Area: Asia-Pacific
Contents
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