In the 1980s, a commercially viable amount of oil was discovered near Lake Kutubu in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Following the completion of a pipeline from the oil field to a marine terminal in the Gulf of Papua south of Kikori in 1992, the Kutubu Petroleum Development Project became the country's first oil producer.

The activity accompanying the oil project has dramatically affected life in the Project area, but social change did not begin with the discovery of oil. By the time the pipeline was completed, people living in the Lake Kutubu and Kikori areas had experienced decades of government influence and Christian mission activity.

This book offers a picture of daily life in the Project area during 1991 and 1992. Settlement and residence patterns, subsistence, material culture, and exchange, all show a mixture of old and new. A consideration of the changing meanings that objects and customs have for the local people give a sense of contemporary life not only in the Project area but in rural Papua New Guinea in general.