Complementarity in Medical Treatment in a West New Britain Society

Abstract

The Lusi are an Austronesian-speaking, horticultural people living in the Kaliai area of the northwest coast of West New Britain province in Papua New Guinea. Kaliai was contacted and pacified around the turn of this century by German colonial representatives. Despite the fact that small parcels of land were alienated in the early 1900s for a mission station and for a private plantation, the peoples of the northwest coast of New Britain have remained, until very recently, among the most isolated of coastal-dwelling societies anywhere in Papua New Guinea. There is still, in 1984, no government administered office closer than 100 kilometers by sea from the central part of the Kaliai coast. The land bought by the Roman Catholic mission was not occupied by a priest or by sisters until after World War II, and while Iboki Plantation has been in nearly continuous operation from German times until today, its effect on the local population has been small except as an occasional source of casual employment, as the location of a tradestore or, more rarely, as a market for local garden produce.