West looks at the process from which coffee is grown, gathered, sorted, shipped, and served from the highlands of Papua New Guinea to coffee shops in far away places. She shows how coffee becomes a commodity, the different forms of labor involved, and the way that coffee shapes the lives and understandings of those who grow, process, export, sell and consume coffee.

From Cannibals to Christ-Followers--A True Story In 1962, Don and Carol Richardson risked their lives to share the gospel with the Sawi people of New Guinea. Peace Child tells their unforgettable story of living among these headhunters and cannibals, who valued treachery through fattening victims with friendship before the slaughter. God gave Don and Carol the key to the Sawi hearts via a redemptive analogy from their own mythology. The "peace child" became the secret to unlocking a value system that had existed through generations. This analogy became a stepping-stone by which the gospel came into the Sawi culture and started both a spiritual and a social revolution from within. With an epilogue updating how the gospel has impacted the Sawi people, this missionary classic will inspire a new generation of readers who need to hear this remarkable story and the lessons it teaches us about communicating Christ in a meaningful way to those around us.

A prominent scholar surveys the special place of Melanesia in our understanding of human cultural variation

When journalists, developers, surf tourists, and conservation NGOs cast Papua New Guineans as living in a prior nature and prior culture, they devalue their knowledge and practice, facilitating their dispossession. Paige West's searing study reveals how a range of actors produce and reinforce inequalities in today's globalized world. She shows how racist rhetorics of representation underlie all uneven patterns of development and seeks a more robust understanding of the ideological work that capital requires for constant regeneration.

When Leopold Pospíšil first arrived in New Guinea in 1954 to investigate the legal systems of the local tribes, he was warned about the Kapauku who reputedly had no laws. Dubious that any society could exist without laws, Pospíšil immediately decided to live among and study the Kapauku. Learning the language and living as a participant-observer among the Kapauku, Pospíšil discovers that the supposedly primitive society possesses laws, rules, and social structures that are as sophisticated as they are logical. Having survived the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and fled the Communist regime, Pospíšil has little patience for the notion that so-called advanced civilizations are superior to the ‘stone age’ society in which he now lives. On the basis of his research and experiences among the Kapauku – he would stay with them five times between 1954 and 1979 – Pospíšil pioneered in the field of legal anthropology, holding a professorship at Yale, serving as the anthropology curator of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, and publishing three books of scholarship on the Kapauku law. As Jaroslav Jiřík and Martin Soukup write in their afterword, however, “His three previously published works are about the Kapauku; this one is about the anthropologist among the Kapauku.” The memoir is filled with charming anecdotes and thrilling stories of trials, travels, and war – told with humor and humility—and accompanied by a wealth of the author’s personal photos from the time.

The communities of south coast New Guinea were the subject of classic ethnographies, and fresh studies in recent decades have put these rich and complex cultures at the centre of anthropological debates. Flamboyant sexual practices, such as ritual homosexuality, have attracted particular interest. In the first general book on the region, Dr Knauft reaches striking new comparative conclusions through a careful ethnographic analysis of sexuality, the status of women, ritual and cosmology, political economy, and violence among the region's seven major language-culture areas. The findings suggest new Melanesian regional contrasts and provide for a general critique of the way regional comparisons are constructed in anthropology. Theories of practice and political economy as well as post-modern insights are drawn upon to provide a generative theory of indigenous social and symbolic development.