Daily life and social customs

People’s daily lives vary enormously in Papua New Guinea, with the great majority of the population living across the diverse rural landscape in villages or hamlets. Daily life usually centres on the extended family, whose primary responsibilities are producing food for subsistence and rearing children. Most people have rights to use portions of land for the growing of food and some cash crops as well as the rights to fish, hunt, and gather timber from local forests. Many of those activities are accompanied by rituals to ensure success and prosperity. Other major rituals, such as menarche ceremonies for girls and initiations for boys, are declining. The Highlands social system previously involved the strict separation of men and women, with men sleeping in men’s houses somewhat akin to military barracks and women sleeping in separate garden houses with the small children. With the incursion of newer cultural influences, that system has been modified in much of the region. Wealthy and prominent men with multiple wives retain separate households for each.

The clan forms the major unit of social organization. Almost all Melanesian societies are patrilineal, tracing descent through the male line, and even matrilineal societies, where descent is traced through the female line, remain patriarchal—i.e., male-dominated. In some areas descent and land rights can be claimed through either parent, so people can belong to both their parents’ clans. Marriage within a clan would be perceived as incest, and so marriage is only possible across clan lines and sometimes across the boundaries of a tribe. Large tribes are not the norm, but where they do exist they have a degree of political unity and can be viewed as federations of clans. They may share origin myths, and in such cases clans can be seen as being like “brothers,” sons of a founding father. These social structures form the lines of conflict expressed in the interclan warfare that persists in the Highland provinces, and in those areas they often form the lines of political competition in contemporary elections.

When people migrate from rural villages to urban areas or rural resettlement areas, they carry their languages and customs with them and re-create their existing social structures. Social bonds and obligations of the wantok system can provide support for those struggling in new locations but also create heavy demands on the more affluent people who feel obliged to support their kin. The demands of wantoks are often held to be a root cause of corruption. Increasingly there are second or third generations of townspeople who have “mixed marriages” across language lines, who while affiliated with both their parents’ relatives often display a greater sense of nationhood than their age-mates who have less multicultural backgrounds. Intergenerational tensions reflect the stresses of rapid social change in rural and urban contexts.

In both villages and cities, music and dance celebrations often mark important life-cycle events such as birth, death, initiation, menarche, economic transactions (even the opening of a roadway), peacemaking, and religious observances. Traditional expressions are now sometimes mixed with or even replaced by string band music, Christian hymns, or both, primarily reflecting modified influences from the West and from other Pacific Islands areas.

Cultural institutions

The Papua New Guinea National Museum and Art Gallery in Waigani, a suburb of Port Moresby, has a significant collection of ethnographic artifacts. The government’s National Cultural Commission, the Institute of Papua New Guinea Studies, and the National Film Institute record, document, and promote activities associated with traditional cultures, while organizations promoting tourism market aspects of those cultures to potential audiences overseas. In 2008 the Kuk Early Agricultural Site was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site. That land in the Western Highlands has been worked almost continuously for at least 7,000 years, and the site contains even earlier evidence of the beginning of organized agriculture and its subsequent development.

Sports and recreation

Competitive sports in Papua New Guinea were introduced by colonists and missionaries but have taken on a style of their own, with games often inspiring not only team but also village or district loyalty. Wealthy candidates for election often sponsor sporting teams. There are organized amateur leagues for the most popular sports, which include rugby, cricket, football (soccer), softball, basketball, and volleyball. Rugby and football are especially popular league sports among men and, to a lesser extent, women, and netball is popular among girls. Cricket is another top sport, especially in the southern region. Since 2000 traditional canoe and sailing races have been revived as an elite recreation.

The Papua New Guinea Sports Federation and Olympic Committee acts as the national umbrella organization for sports and operates with corporate and government support to aid national teams as they train for and participate in international sporting events. The country first participated in the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal but has had greater success in Pacific regional competitions and the Commonwealth Games, in which it has participated since 1962.

The country has designated a variety of national parks and protected areas. Lake Kutubu National Park, in the Southern Highlands, is a refuge for reptiles, birds, and butterflies. The small McAdam National Park, in Morobe province, is home to many diverse animals including birds-of-paradise, cuscus, and echidnas. Varirata National Park, near Port Moresby, provides opportunities for hiking, camping, bird-watching, and picnicking. The island region, with its coral reefs, highly diverse marine life, and numerous sunken wrecks of World War II-era ships and airplanes, is considered to provide some of the best diving and snorkeling in the world.

Media and publishing

Radio remains an important broadcast medium, especially to residents of isolated communities, while television service is available and watched avidly in urban areas. There are two domestic television channels that broadcast to larger urban areas. The state-owned channel provides documentary and educational programming, news, and coverage of Parliament, and the privately owned channel carries mostly Australian content, with heavy emphasis on sports.

In contrast to the wide reach of the electronic media, circulation is relatively low for both the foreign-owned English-language newspapers (which are also published on the Internet) and the Tok Pisin weekly Wantok, owned by a domestic consortium of Christian denominations. Papua New Guinea’s press has taken an active part in reporting on political life without direct government censorship, although journalists sometimes find themselves under acute pressure from politicians if they have published critical articles.

Book publishing in Papua New Guinea remains in its infancy, although since 2000 a new crop of fiction writers and academics has emerged. There are also a few publishers of religious materials.

The peopling of New Guinea

Relatively little archaeological work has been carried out on the island of New Guinea. On the basis of current evidence, it has been postulated that parts of New Guinea were occupied as early as 50,000 years ago. The presence of pollen from planted foods, starch traces on stone implements, and the remains of swamp-drainage channels and other water-management works at Kuk, near Mount Hagen, indicate the existence of intensive agricultural activity on the island for 7,000 years. The intensity and length of time of human occupation of the Highlands are evidenced by the extent of man-made landscapes in the region. Those discoveries are made even more interesting by the fact that the sweet potato, the present staple crop of the region, seems not to have arrived in the area from the Americas until 300 or 400 years ago. It is presumed that taro was the earlier staple, as it still is in some isolated Highlands basins such as that at Telefomin. The ancestors of the Polynesian peoples who migrated to the eastern Pacific passed through the Bismarck Archipelago in the past 5,000 years.