The Aesthetic of the Sublime

An examination of shell objects and their presentation, exchange, and roles in ritual self-decoration among Papua New Guinea Rawa speakers relates them to a sublime aesthetic combination of pleasure and pain involving an indigenous ethos of pathos and sorrow and a sense of the inadequacy of symbolic shell images to convey the ideal concepts they embody. This sense is exacerbated in a colonial context, and the analysis of the sublime shows shells to be simultaneously repositories of indigenous meaning and influenced by colonial processes. In Melanesia the sublime is thus a colonially situated, corporeally located phenomenon of present absence. [shells, Melanesia, aesthetics, self-decoration, exchange, colonialism, change

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · Colonialism · Context (archaeology · Epistemology · Ethos · Identity (music · Indigenous · Interpretation (philosophy · Linguistics · Literature · Meaning (existential · Pathos · Pleasure · Sorrow · Sublime · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Culinary Culture and Tourism · History · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies · Philosophy · Psychology

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