ENVIRONMENT, SOCIETY AND HEALTH: ECOLOGICAL BASES OF COMMUNITY GROWTH AND DECLINE IN THE MARING REGION OF PAPUA NEW GUINEA

Ecological transformations in traditional Maring communities are illuminated in this study by an analysis of three dimensions of human ecology: phytoecology, cultural ecology, and environmental epidemiology. The study utilizes cross-sectional geographic, ethnographic, socio-demographic, and health survey data collected throughout the 200-square-mile region inhabited by approximately 7,000 Marings, swidden cultivators.;Findings indicate an ecological dilemma challenging people who, like the Marings, inhabit mid-montane, fringe Highland areas. The presence of malaria prevents dense settlement in the otherwise favorable transition zone from a Lowland to a Highland habitat (about 3,500-4,500 feet altitude).;Settlement in the Highland zone (above 5,000 feet) is constrained by less dietary variety, slower rates of vegetative regrowth, lower levels of productivity, and greater vulnerability to environmental simplification than exist in the transition zone. Inversely related to environmental complexity, malaria is found to be as prevalent on environmentally simplified territories in the Highland zone as on ecologically complex ones in the transition zone.;These ecological problems underly the impermanence in Maring communities, an impermanence structured by warfare and social exchange. The cross-sectional data provide (1) environmental, social and demographic characteristics of periods of community growth and decline and (2) examples of phases in a postulated diachronic sequence: colonization; expansion in the transition zone; settlement in the Highland zone; reaching a limit of growth; followed by decline, defeat and resettlement at lower altitudes and community death.;Three types of territorial environment are distinguished and serve as units of analysis for socio-demographic and health survey data collected on nearly 2,000 Marings, members of six territorial groups residing on the southern slopes of the Bismarck Mountains in the Jimi Valley.;The socio-demographic data, collected between seven and ten years after the Marings were first contacted and administered, reveal a differential migration of wives and others to victorious groups which usually reside at higher altitudes than defeated groups. This traditional pattern is shown to have been reversed. Favored now are affines near centers of development, with land to spare in the more desirable, lower altitude transition zone.;The problems posed by settlement in the mid-montane zone indicate a need for integrated rural development and health programs if economic development is to proceed. It is recommended that malaria eradication programs be supplemented by malaria control through ecological control: that is, the development of processes for land use that maintain environmental complexity.