Papua New Guinea

Papua New Guinea has long served as a living laboratory for a range of scientific pursuits including anthropology, sociology, biology, and zoology. In recent times it has been a place of economic change and resource extraction. Its history is steeped in colonization and Christianity; it was a site where colonialists and missionaries saw great potential for the harvesting of natural and mineral resources and religious conversion. After colonization by the Dutch, Germans, British, and Australians, the country gained political independence on September 16, 1975.

The country’s location at the threshold between the South Pacific and Asia sees it flanked by Australia in the south, Indonesia to the west, the Philippines to the northwest, and Japan farther north. It is this geographic positioning that placed it central ...