Sacrificial Economy and Its Objects

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 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.