From 1974 he made a radical shift by changing the role of his Kalam informants and collaborators, allowing them to shape the purpose of ethnography and to make them authors rather than consultants.
Ralph (pronounced "Rafe") Bulmer was born in Hereford, the eldest of three children of Kenneth, who worked at the National Westminster Bank,[clarification needed] and his wife Dorothy.
His doctorate was based on field-work in the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, where he documented the social and political life of the Kyaka-Enga people in the Baiyer Valley.
[1] In 1964, Bulmer began to study the Kalam people along with Bruce Biggs, and in 1968 he moved to Port Moresby, working as a professor of anthropology at the University of Papua New Guinea.
A memorial volume was published, Man and a Half: Essays in Pacific Anthropology and Ethnobiology in Honour of Ralph Bulmer, edited by Andrew Pawley (University of Hawaii Press, 1993).