THE AESTHETIC OF THE SUBLIME - AN INTERPRETATION OF RAWA SHELL VALUABLE SYMBOLISM

An examination of shell objects and their presentation, exchange, and roles in ritual self-decoration among Papua New Guinea Ka wa speakers relates them to a sublime aesthetic combination of pleasure and pain i nvolving an indigenous ethos of pathos and sorrow and a sense of the i nadequacy of symbolic shell images to convey the ideal concepts they e mbody. This sense is exacerbated in a colonial context, and the analys is of the sublime shows shells to be simultaneously repositories of in digenous meaning and influenced by colonial processes. In Melanesia th e sublime is thus a colonially situated corporeally located phenomenon of present absence.