This book is an explicitly comparative, anthropological analysis of the societies of the eastern and western highlands of Papua New Guinea. Particular societies have been documented by anthropologists since the 1950s yet until this book's publication in 1987, there had been relatively few attempts at rigourous comparison of the findings. This book argues that the highlands cannot be treated as a homogeneous region, socially, culturally, historically or environmentally. Rather, societies of the eastern highlands have followed markedly different paths of development in the past to those of the western highlands, and it is upon this divergence that a comparative treatment of the twentieth century should be mounted.