Wars and wonders: the inter-island information networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius

How did one man living on an island come to acquire information about the rest of the vast archipelago? This article traces the inter-island information networks of Georg Everhard Rumphius (1627–1702), an employee of the Dutch East India Company, who was able to explore the natural world of the wider archipelago without ever leaving the Moluccan island of Ambon. This article demonstrates the complexities of Rumphius's inter-island networks, as he collected information about plants and objects from islands near and far. Using his administrative, commercial and household networks, Rumphius was able to interact with local actors from across the social spectrum, whose own active collection, mediation and circulation of objects and information overlapped with imperial activities in the archipelago. This article examines Rumphius as both a collector and a mediator, who negotiated between multiple economies of exchange and translated information from different islands for his distant European readership. Such practices of localized translation demonstrate how knowledge produced on one island was the product of criss-crossing inter-island networks, as the information concerned underwent its own complicated processes of transmission and transformation within the archipelago before reaching its intended audience in Europe.

Theories of Sacrifice

Most theories of sacrifice regard the practice as contributing in some way to social formation. This chapter examines examples of functional theories offered by Durkheim, Mauss, Robertson Smith, Girard, Jay. Unlike most reviews of theory, this one devotes considerable space to the view of Bataille that sacrifice seeks to restore individuals to a “lost intimacy” with the sacred realm of immanence by releasing both what is offered and the one making the offering from economies of exchange in which their value is determined by productivity. The offering is the “accursed share” of excess goods that must be abandoned (but not necessarily destroyed) in a gesture of liberation from humanly constructed systems of meaning, whether social, political, or religious. For Bataille, sacrifice enacts the mystical “way of negation” (via negativa) taken to the extreme of denying the enduring reality of either God or the self as defined by conventional theology or ethics.