[citation needed] This community is located near Chambri Lake in Papua New Guinea, in the middle region of the Sepik River.
When the Chambri first came together, though isolated, they located communities nearby that made it possible for cultural interaction and growth.
[1] A neighboring society, the Iatmul people, and the Chambri began trading goods so that each could progress and aid one another.
Historically known as headhunters and a volatile group, the Chambri abandoned these tendencies once Papua New Guinea came under independent government.
Culturally their society had changed due to European influences, however the personal interactions and customs within the Chambri had not.
New neighboring societies were formed, trade and growth continued throughout the years as anthropologists such as Margaret Mead, Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington visited this tribal location and reported on their findings.
[5][6] In Margaret Mead’s field study research in 1933 in Papua New Guinea, she outlined a position of women in the Chambri community that was unusual to what had been thought to be the norm across cultures.
Through further observation Mead found that women also took the fish they caught and not only supplied it as food for their families but traveled to trade the surplus.
It was the women's job to take the extra fish caught and travel into the surrounding hills to barter for sago for their families.
However, as later anthropologists Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington discovered, these actions do not control the relationships between men and women of the Chambri.
This lack of a dominant individual within a relationship allows for speculation that the role of women in a civilization can drastically be determined by its customs.
Women have a say in who they marry as they work with male family members to choose a man with decent ancestral power.
This is because men obtain secret names within the male sorcery facet of the civilization and are forbidden to voice them.
Their view is that if their secret names are worth stealing by their wife, then they must be important and powerful enough for this kind of deceitfulness to have taken place.
[9] Women and men's dependence becomes almost completely equal when examining the roles of brothers and sisters within a traditional Chambri family.