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Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 17, No. 1, 33-50 (2005)
DOI: 10.1177/0921374005057599

A Gift of Whale Meat

On the Flesh of the No-Thing

Anita Lundberg

a.lundberg{at}unsw.edu.au

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.

Key Words: excess • exchange • gift • Mauss • mimicry • no-thing


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