Susanne Küchler

Sacrificial Economy and Its Objects Rethinking Colonial Collecting in Oceania

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.

The Art of Clothing: A Pacific Experience

Art Innovation: A Pacific Perspective Translating things: barkcloth displays in Fiji London Framing the ahu fara: clothing, gift-giving and painting in Tahiti Uniforms for all: dressing modern in Papua Translations: Textiles and texts in modernising PNG Dressing for Transition marriage, clothing and change in Vanuatu. Material Translation: A Comparative Perspective on the Logic of Clothing Materiality and the social analysis of things Dress-sense cultural logic in Maori performance dress Niuean Hiapo, 1860-1890 The Land has eyes: reel performance real performance in Rotuma Clothing and contemporary Pacific Art. Dress and Address: comparative perspectives on the art of clothing

The prototype in 20th-century art

This article examines the complex relation between science, technology and art at the close of the 19th century, which provoked a critical engagement with the notion of the prototype among modernist artists such as Duchamp, Klee, Kandinsky and Vasareli, among many others. Little attention has been given so far to the extent to which the prototype featured both as physical model and as conceptual strategy, and the way it traverses the artistic landscape of Europe in the first half of the 20th century. By drawing attention to the conscious investment of the prototypical in the art of the early 20th century, this article reflects on the concept of the prototype, whose emergent beauty signalled its impending irrelevance.

Rethinking Textile: The Advent of the “Smart” Fiber Surface

Abstract The advent of the “intelligent object” has happened almost unnoticed. A new sensing, networking, and automating technology has been created with the sole purpose of vivifying “dead” objects by making them responsive to human need and emotion. This article examines the appearance of wireless technology in “smart” clothing and discusses its implications for our understanding of personhood.

Differential Geometry, the Informational Surface and Oceanic Art: The Role of Pattern in Knowledge Economies:

Graphic pattern (e.g. geometric design) and number-based code (e.g. digital sequencing) can store and transmit complex information more efficiently than referential modes of representation. The analysis of the two genres and their relation to one another has not advanced significantly beyond a general classification based on motion-centred geometries of symmetry. This article examines an intriguing example of patchwork coverlets from the maritime societies of Oceania, where information referencing a complex genealogical system is lodged in geometric designs. By drawing attention to the interplay of graphic pattern and number-based code and its role in the knowledge economies of maritime societies, the article offers new insight into possible ways of designing a digital informational surface that captures the behaviour of an operational system, allowing both for differentiation and integration.

Twenty Years On

the investigation of the relationship between people and things irrespective of time and space. The perspective adopted may be global or local, concerned with the past or the present, or the mediation between the two. Defined in this manner, the potential range of contemporary disciplines involved in some way or other in studying material culture is effectively as wide as the human and cultural sciences themselves. (Editorial Board, 1996: 5)

Additive technology and material cognition: A view from anthropology

The paper reflects on the theory of material cognition the advent of 3-D printing arguably calls for, pointing to the topology implicit in additive fabrication that invites a vision of the world in which the environment is no longer outside, but inside material structures that envelop in a self-referential manner and that work by aggregating and assembling, much like the layers of an onion. The questions that additive technology invites are not just technical and material in nature but chiefly concern the question of how the mind will inhabit this material technology that calls for and creates structures of internally held, manifold relations. The challenge additive technology poses to us is examined in this paper by turning to the maritime cultures of Oceania, where the wrapping of objects and of physical bodies in composite, iterative shapes, internally held and additive in fabrication is a chief way to secure the distinctiveness of the social body in the face of pervasive connectivity in a world in which perpetual movement and a conception of relation at a distance is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. The paper uses ethnographic data from Oceania to question the difference additive fabrication will make to the conceptualization of connectivity by directing us away from a network oriented approach informed by communication systems to a localised and immanent system which replicates internally relational elements in a simultaneously enfolding and expansive manner.

Empathie avec la matière. Comment repenser la nature de l’action technique

Empathie avec la matiere : comment repenser la nature de l’action technique.L’importance des materiaux est souvent minimisee dans l’analyse des systemes sociaux et techniques alors qu’ils faconnent les bases memes du monde dans lequel nous vivons. Cet article se propose de questionner cette omission en attirant l’attention sur la nature des materiaux et des actions calculees qu’ils occasionnent. Nous soutenons que le potentiel transformatif des materiaux joue un role essentiel quant a leur choix et leur utilisation, lequel potentiel va de pair avec une certaine empathie, une « intersubjectivite », dont la nature est determinante pour comprendre comment les individus interpretent leur monde social de maniere abstraite, generalisable et souvent immuable. Nous examinons la nature de l’empathie avec les materiaux a travers une serie d’etudes de cas ramenes du Pacifique, ou le role du concret dans l’imagination sociale occupe une place importante dans les etudes ethnographiques, contrairement aux collections d’artefacts qui, curieusement, demeurent en marge, un simple temoignage de la description du monde social.

The string in art and science: Rediscovering the material mind

Abstract String has played a formidable, though largely unacknowledged role in twentieth-century art and science. Its rise as a material technology was made possible by the fact that string embraces a material way of thinking, one that is uniquely capable of binding together what is invisible with what is phenomenal to experience. String today thus signals the resurgence of a chemical revolution, which, in parallel to a modernity fashioned by a mechanical revolution, has created a material world that is capable of provoking attachments in ways once attributed to the mind. We are now readily inclined to think in terms of relations of affinity that pertain between materials; yet this material thinking has remained largely confined to the creative centers of art and science where it continues to provoke innovations at a material level. This article argues that social and historical disciplines and institutions that serve the transmission of much of socially efficacious knowledge have remained ignorant of this development of a new technological materiality, by continuing to reduce the material to a mechanical aide for ideas that alone are believed capable of drawing things together.

Relational Maps in the Cook Islands Transnational Communities

Small island communities such as those in the Pacific have always been prone to explore life and establish trading posts someplace else. Famous illustrations of large scale pre-historic migration movements across wider Oceania are Lapita pottery and the Maori WhareWanuga traditions whose large-scale distribution in space and time has led scholars to hypothesize the existence of “voyaging corridors” sustaining vast networks of trade and exchange (Pearce and Pearce 2011). Conducting fieldwork today in the Pacific islands, the unpredictable presence of key informants who are regularly on tour to relatives living in the metropolises of the Pacific Rim, Asia, America or even Europe, confronts one directly with the dominance in peoples’ lives of new kinds of voyaging corridors made possible by air travel. What emerges from ethnographic research conducted among the thriving transnational communities of Eastern Polynesia as described in this chapter is the importance of maps charting biographical relations that enable people to establish and maintain relations of affinity at a distance. The Cook Islands, an archipelago of fifteen tiny islands, eight of them inhabited, are a prime example of the heightened state of mobility among a population that has always accepted inter-islandmigration as away of life. The total land area of the country is only 240 square kilometers, while its exclusive economic zone covers a maritime region of nearly 2 million square kilometers in Eastern Polynesia, stretching between Tonga and Samoa, on the one hand, and French Polynesia on the other. Since 1901 the group has been included within the boundaries of New Zealand, and its people, who are culturally close relatives of the Maoris of New Zealand, are citizens of that country. With the building of an airport in 1992 there has been a net outflow of Cook Islanders. In 2006, the number leaving for overseas was 969; the highest annual exodus was that of 2000, when 1,429 people left the islands, prompted by the economic reform program of 1995–1996, when large numbers of Cook Islanders took permanent residency in New Zealand, Australia, and the US. Today,more than 50,000 Cook Islanders reside in New Zealand and an estimated 15,000 in Australia. Cook Island migrants have strong and lasting socio-economic ties to the homelands, and most want to return there after retirement to die and be buried on the islands. The nurturing of socio-spatial ties through a two-wayflowof remit-