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The Papuans of New Guinea are among the last Neolithic people to be influenced by Western culture. They live in the Eastern part of the island of New Guinea in small, relatively isolated agricultural communities, comprising 700 distinct language groups. The Papuans were unknown to the Europeans until 1930, when they were discovered accidentally by two Australians. In 1935 Australian Administrators moved in to put an end to the continuous wars among the clans and the practice of cannibalism. Cannibalism in the form of ritualized necrophagia of relatives was, according to Poole, not uncommon as late as 1980.
Theodore and Ruth Lidz spent 15 years in the study of these societies, directly in field trips but mostly through the review of a voluminous literature by anthropologists from Malinowski in the twenties to Mead, Bateson and Read in the following decades and psychoanalytically informed ethnologists, Poole, Herdt and Turzin. 'Our interest', they state in their Apologia, 'lies in how the field studies of a number of social anthropologists may clarify, verify or alter psychoanalytic theory and developmental psychology.' They believe that the study of societies markedly different from our own will enable us to 'set