Sacrificial Economy and Its Objects

Rethinking Colonial Collecting in Oceania

Bibliographic Data

ID2391333
AuthorsSusanne Küchler (0000-0002-8114-3593, Department of Anthropology, University College London, corresponding author)
Year1997
Volume2
Issue1
Pages39-60
Publication date1997-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Material Culture (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1359-1835 • E-ISSN: 1460-3586
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/135918359700200102
OpenAlexW2143461595
LanguageEN
Citations received33
References cited33

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 unknow ingly. 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

Aesthetics · Alienation · Archaeology · Art · Epistemology · Ethnography · Generative grammar · Independence (probability theory · Linguistics · Object (grammar · Political science · Property (philosophy · Sacrifice · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · History · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs · Law · Pacific and Southeast Asian Studies · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub