The Enlivenments and Killings of Transpacific Objects

My paper proposes that cross-cultural artifacts which circulated in the maritime Pacific can disrupt dominant narratives about Euro-American and indigenous encounters. To make my case, I will focus on one artifact type, the... [ view full abstract ]

My paper proposes that cross-cultural artifacts which circulated in the maritime Pacific can disrupt dominant narratives about Euro-American and indigenous encounters. To make my case, I will focus on one artifact type, the sperm whale tooth—an object of transnational desire situated at the juncture of indigenous gift economies and Western capitalist expansion. The circulation of whale teeth speaks to the nineteenth century’s commodity networks, intercultural negotiations, and environmental depletions. Whales’ teeth mediated trade between Western seafarers, who deemed them a primitive currency, and indigenous Fijians, who honored them as ritual objects. For both parties, they were subject to both fetishization and demystification. In the hands of American whalers, the teeth were an industrial waste product transformed with etching and inking into a new art form, scrimshaw. Though whalers borrowed their techniques and compositions from mass media, they also celebrated ivory as living matter and inscribed teeth with first-person tales of being torn from the mouths of monstrous creatures. In parsing out the whale tooth’s various enlivenments and “killings” in the hands of American and indigenous owners, I argue that such objects negotiated distinctions between human and animal, being and thing, value and waste in the maritime world. By sharing this research in a seminar context, I hope to spark conversation about the intersections of material culture methodologies with indigenous studies and anthropological approaches to transpacific artifacts.