Malangan: objects, sacrifice and the production of memory

Certain museum collections are not the result of “salvage anthropology” alone, but of the operation of “gift to god systems,” as sale became an alternative means of removing gifts from circulation. Objects that are made to be dismantled in a process of sacrifice confound time not through permanence, but through renewal, and create time not as history, but as memory. The production of memory, and the difference it creates in society and culture, is discussed with the example of Malangan art in northern New Ireland, Papua New Guinea.