Baining life centers around two complementary activities, gardening and hunting/gathering. These activities provide sustenance and the materials for shelter. Traditionally, gardening is the province of women, and hunting/gathering, the province of men. Both activities are given symbolic expression in ritual art during the daytime and nighttime ceremonies in the Chachet, Kairak, and Uramot Baining.

The elaborate ceremonial presentation of their display pieces, headdresses, masks, and body decorations is in` dramatic contrast to the everyday life activities of the people. The making of the art and its presentation serves as a cultural unifying force among the Baining, who are by tradition dispersed in small family-gardening groups throughout the Gazelle Peninsula, These ceremonies celebrate the harvest and the birth of new children commemorate the dead, and are an integral part of the initiation of male and female youth into full productive adult status within each dialect group.

The Baining are unusual among Melanesian cultures in that they create "perishable" art forms in bark cloth, wood, and leaves, which are used only once for a single day or nighttime ceremony, then discarded or destroyed. This artistic tradition serves to articulate, in visible form, the entire sphere of existence of the Baining people. Their art is presented in dramatic ceremonies representing the complementary daytime/nighttime, male/female, and village/bush aspects of Baining life.

At the time of early contact with Europeans in the late 19th century, the Baining were loosely organized acephalous (without chief or other stratified leaders) groups that spoke related but distinct dialects. In some cases these groups exhibited mutual hostility toward each other and neighboring non-Baining groups. The three groups represented by the art forms on exhibit here are the northwest Chachet and central Kairak and Uramot Baining (see map, Figure 1). At the time of contact in the late 19th century, it is estimated that there were about 6,000 Tolai living on the northeast coast of the Gazelle Peninsula and about 10,000 Baining spread out over the rest of the Gazelle Peninsula. Today there are over 100,000 Tolai and about 8,000 Baining living in approximately the same territories as they had at the time of colonization by the Germans before the turn of the century. Obviously, the Tolai have prospered during the post colonial period while the Baining have lost, or at best maintained, a level of population equal to the precolonial period, referred to as the "traditional" period.

The Baining throughout-the Gazelle peninsula refer to themselves as "the people" or "people" and see themselves as the original inhabitants in the area. While there has been no archaeological research conducted in the Baining areas, a long period of residence in the Gazelle Peninsula is suggested by the lack of migration myths and preponderance of creation myths about Baining ancestors originating in the territories they inhabit. Unlike the Tolai, who appear to have migrated from the Duke of York Islands and Southern New Ireland in the past century or two, the Baining may have resided in East New Britain for thousands of years. They have no tradition of using canoes, either simple dugouts or more complex outrigger types, as do the Tolai, and would have had to arrive at their present location by walking the entire length of the island of New Britain in an early non-Austronesian migration into the area several thousand years before the Christian era.

The name "Baining" refers to all the people who live in the Baining mountains and speak a dialect of Baining. The word Baining comes from the Austronesian-speaking Tolai people, neighbors to the northeast. It is a compound of bad, to go inland into the bush, and nig, a wild uncultivated area, thereby referring to the Baining as wild uncultivated people who live in the bush.

The Baining live on the northeastern tip of New Britain in the country of Papua New Guinea. They are confined to the Gazelle Peninsula (see map, Figure 1) in a mountainous tropical forest. Their environment is hot and humid with constant equatorial rains throughout the year.

In all areas, only initiated Baining men create the various display pieces, headdresses, decorated body spears, and masks used for ceremonies. These art forms are constructed in temporary shelters and houses away from the village in the surrounding bush. The various paths to these shelters are marked with taboo signs scaring away men, children, and uninitiated males. In former times, to violate these markers and to walk into a a secret art-making shelter or house was punishable by sickness and eventual death. Even today, nearly a hundred years after first contact with European culture, religion, education, and economic systems, the Baining women and children hold to sacred and secret nature of the male art-making activity and avoid these areas at all costs.

In contrast, the art of the night-dance ceremony depicts the products of male activities: the active, chaotic world of the bush. The headdresses, helmet masks, and composite helmet masks made for the night dance incorporate a loosely age-graded series of specialized artistic symbols expressing the fruits of of male-oriented existence in the form of hunted-and-gathered flora and fauna.