Resumen de Nails, necklaces and curiosities: scenes of exchange in Bougainville's Tahiti
This essay analyses scenes of exchange between the French ans the Tahitians as represented in the accounts of Louis Antoine de Bougainville's voyage around the world (1766-69). It argues that such representations suggest how in the contact zone human relations are organized around and through objects as they are exchanged in barter, gift-giving, theft and restitution. In representations of hand to hand exchanges, objects also have a type of agency: they move the emotions of those directly involved in the encounter. Representations of exchange operated similarly on those who read the voyage accounts especially when rendered as "tableaux", vivid textual images calculated to arouse the reader's response.
