Premium
the body in the gift: memory and forgetting in Sabarl mortuary exchange
Author(s) -
BATTAGLIA DEBBORA
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
american ethnologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.875
H-Index - 78
eISSN - 1548-1425
pISSN - 0094-0496
DOI - 10.1525/ae.1992.19.1.02a00010
Subject(s) - forgetting , inscribed figure , indigenous , opposition (politics) , sociology , valuation (finance) , collective memory , embodied cognition , anthropology , psychology , politics , political science , epistemology , law , cognitive psychology , philosophy , ecology , geometry , mathematics , finance , economics , biology
In casting gift exchange as an inscriptive performance of embodied gender relations, the Sabarl of Papua New Guinea reveal an indigenous valuation of forgetting as a willed transformation of memory and resist the opposition between inscribed and enacted cultural traditions that is so pervasive in the anthropological literature on social memory. Sabarl mortuary exchanges that feature “corpses” of gendered wealth serve here as a case in point. [exchange theory, gender performances, embodiment, memory and forgetting, Melanesia, mortuary rituals]