Whitehouse's ethnography

In October of 1987 Harvey Whitehouse entered the village of Dadul in the Eastern Province of New Britain Island in Papua New Guinea to begin his fieldwork among the Mali Baining. Unbeknownst to him then, his arrival was one of the catalysts for a series of events that made not only for considerable excitement in the area over the next eighteen months but also for an ethnography (Whitehouse, 1995) that is as theoretically fertile as it is dramatic. Inevitably, the short summary which follows will capture little, if any, of the drama, but it will point to some of these materials' theoretically suggestive aspects.

New Britain Island lies off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea. The Mali are one of five subgroups of the Baining people, who occupy the rural regions of the Gazelle Peninsula, which constitutes the northern half of the island's Eastern Province. A different ethnic group, the Tolai, occupies the more developed northeastern corner of the Gazelle Peninsula. A third ethnic group, the Pomio, inhabit most of the southern half of the province. Comparatively speaking, the Tolai, unlike the Baining and the Pomio, have prospered from contacts with the industrialized world.

From the late nineteenth century until the end of World War I the area was under German administration. Exclusive of the traumatic Japanese occupation during World War II, from 1919 until independence in 1975, Australia administered the region.