ABSTRACT
Colonial culture in the Arawe area was just of many different types of colonialism found throughout New Guinea. Colonial cultures on the coast, in contrast to those in the Highlands, might have retained a greater wariness, certainly on the part of local people, due to their history colouring various forms of transaction and encounter. The real efflorescence of the system may only have occurred within the colonial period. The exchange networks have been preserved and expanded, becoming the means through which objects and people have flowed, which have supplied the community-based forms of ritual vital to working through the puzzles about community posed by colonial culture. Faced with the shock of the new when colonial regimes were set up, each area drew on its own stock of traditions in creating guidelines for new forms of sociability with whites.
