the body in the gift: memory and forgetting in Sabarl mortuary exchange

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]