David R. Counts

The Good Death in Kaliai: Preparation for Death in Western New Britain:

Examination of the preparation for death among the Kaliai, an isolated Melanesian people, offers the basis for instructive comparisons with the institutionalization of death and the dehumanization of the dying in North America. The Kaliai see death not as an end to life, but a transition between different life states. This is a gradual separation process, not a sudden cleavage of the dead from the living. The good death comes with the acquiescence of the dying person and after sufficient time for the severance of social relationships.

Complementarity in Medical Treatment in a West New Britain Society

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.

Aspects of Dying in Northwest New Britain

Three detailed case studies and more general discussion of aspects of death in northwest New Britain, Papua New Guinea, demonstrate Kaliai concepts of good and bad death. The consequences of both kinds of death for the dying person and for survivors are noted, and we explore why a person might choose a bad death.

The Cultural Construction of Aging and Dying in a Melanesian Community.

Contrasts that have been drawn between premodern and modern societies with respect to aging and dying suggest that modern medical technology has introduced profound changes into these processes. Drawing on the anthropological literature and their own research in Papua, New Guinea, the authors argue that in most respects the contrast is spurious. As both the processes of aging and of dying are cultural constructs, they are as likely to be complex phenomena in simple societies as they are in our own.