Friendship and Exchange Along the North Coast of New Guinea

• Anthropologists working in Papua New Guinea have typically focused on a single ethnic community and what goes on within that community. This study considers how people in more than one hundred villages interact with people in other communities up and down the coast.
• These communities speak more than 50 different languages from 5 or 6 families or phyla.
• Documents how people in a linguistically diverse region interact over hundreds of kilometers along the coast.

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).