Sacrificial economy and its objects - Rethinking colonial collecting in Oceania

Journal/Book: J Mat Cult. 1997; 2: 6 Bonhill Street, London, England EC2A 4PU. Sage Publications Ltd. 39-60.

Abstract: This paper examines the deposition and destruction of ritual artefacts in Oceania and positions the act of riddance in the ritual economy of sacrifice. A popular alternative to object destruction involves the sale of the object as a way to render it absent, and turning it into intellectual and image-based property, while at the same time eliciting the possibility for unspecified returns within an exchange of which we have become a part quite unknowingly. Large ethnographic or archaeological collections of single cultural areas may thus not just reflect the degree of western interest in artefacts represented in such collections, but is symptomatic of ritual work which results in the fashioning of alienable objects, inalienable images and a form of property whose intellectual, generative and reproductive nature is known to have formed the basis for independence across the Pacific.

Note: Article Kuchler S, Univ London Univ Coll, Dept Anthropol, Gower St, London WC1E 6BT, ENGLAND

Keyword(s): collecting; consumption; image; melanesia; ritual; sacrifice; sacrificial economy; MELANESIA; MALANGAN; MEMORY; FIJI

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