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Abstract

This article arises from a performance of the exchange of whale meat as experienced during ethnographic fieldwork in the subsistence whale hunting village of Lamalera, Eastern Indonesia. The animist-Catholic beliefs of Lamalerans serve to sustain this ancestral ritual. Underlying orthodox western analyses of gift and exchange is a notion of economics based on a principle of scarcity. The article demonstrates how this assumption is associated with the psychoanalytic fear of lack, and offers an alternative reading of gift and exchange informed by: feminist theories of an economy of excess; Confucian notions of the ceremonial; and Buddhist and Taoist philosophies of no-thing as the space of never-ending potential.

Keywords

excess exchange gift Mauss mimicry no-thing

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A Gift of Whale Meat

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