ABSTRACT
‘Made as skin’, malanggan were shown to capture visually the workings of a body politic that seeks to replace the mortal body with an immortal soul whose legislative powers are embedded in generative and reproductive images. The notion of ‘skin’ emerged as the pivotal agent in the fashioning of this resource, which is capable of self-renewal as well as of accumulation. Malanggan are a poignant example of Alfred Gell’s theory of the cognitive stickiness of artworks, which allows objects to be the vehicle of a technology of enchantment. It is tempting to treat the ethnography of malanggan as the story of an art found in some place else, as a kind of microscopic tool from which to re-envision our own future. Malanggan also engages questions of exchange, in that it forces to reconsider the relation between persons and property forms.
