ABSTRACT
The most important, most frequently used Tikana ritual is sacrifice. As elsewhere in island Melanesia, ritual actions that include the consecration of an ‘offering’ induce the realm of spirits to hamarere for them. The vehicle that facilitates a transaction between the visible and the invisible is olfaction (ngusung), which is released by leaving the sacrificial object to decompose, so that within it odour comes to be re-encompassed as life-giving force or heat. The contemporary analysis of sacrifice is founded, however, almost exclusively on the comparatively short, yet path-breaking, study by Hubert and Mauss. The ‘new’ element contributed by Hubert and Mauss’s essay is derived from the development of a ‘syntactic’ study of sacrifice that entailed viewing it as a global ritual process. The imagery of containment and release that pervades every aspect of ritual work among the Tikana points to the confounding of time by space as its operational logic.
