ABSTRACT
The authors analyze the adaptation strategy of the first and second generation of migrants from the Sepik River to Rabaul, New Britain, by means of a case study. The conditions of Iatmul village life be it the economy with its specific co-operation and exchange relationships or the kin system as a means of communication and as an aspect of political organization, or ritual and mythology have been studied already for some sixty years. In the effort to describe the social and cultural change in Papua New Guinea represented by the case of the big man and entrepreneur Landu the author proceed in two different interdisciplinary directions: the ethno-sociological and the ethno-psychological. The women of Papua New Guinea had to overcome these disadvantages and it was only in the 1970s that they were successful at obtaining better positions and opening their own businesses. Langalagwi has had a strange illness for many years.
