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What does a culture look like when recreation is forbidden? The Baining, an indigenous group in Papua New Guinea, values work as the highest human ideal, and views play as domain of animals. This has led some anthropologists to deem them "unstudiable" because of their failure to do anything interesting. But a successful study of the Baining reveals some fascinating details about this unusual culture.
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Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, is being sued by two Papua, New Guinea, men who claim the award-winning science writer lied about their lives to prove that tribal culture is violent. Diamond's article in the New Yor... Read Post

Meet the Baining, an indigenous tribe in Papua New Guinea who has the unusual claim of being the most boring people on Earth: According to [anthropologist Jane Fajans], the Baining eschew everything that they see as “natural” and va... Read Post

A Papua New Guinea group known to anthropologists as "the dullest people on Earth" do everything they can to discourage children from playing, writes Peter Gray at Psychology Today. The Baining—who have caused at least one frustrate... Read Post