Rituals in the Pacific region have been a sustained source of interest for Europeans. Anthropologists have regularly analysed life-cycle rituals, focussing on transformations of persons, as when young boys are transformed into adults and warriors in male initiation (e.g. Godelier 1982 [1986]), or on relations, as when the relations between the living and the dead are transformed in mortuary ceremonies (e.g. Weiner 1976). Both propositions: that rituals effect transformations of the person, or that rituals deal with relations, remain somewhat vague. Here, the emphasis that Pacific people place on specific engagements to bring about transformation, and to give the desired shape to relations, gives us a lead. In this panel, we would like to focus on how transformations are occurring. That is, to look for the modalities and devices, material or otherwise, used to enact, operate, stage, etc. the relations, and give them their form. Within the overall frame of considering Pacific rituals that accompany the course of life as moments when relational transformations occur, we invite contributions that engage with two further suggestions. Firstly, as Bonnemère has argued (2014), a relationship cannot be transformed if the terms that compose it are not present, either directly, as in initiations, or mediated through objects that materialise it, as in mortuary rituals (e.g. Revolon 2007). Secondly, that the respective and shifting positions of subject, object, and/or agent are crucial to the outcomes of the rites. Careful consideration should be given to the positions of things and persons as transformative of relations, and in the process, as transformed and mutable in themselves. Contributors are further invited to consider the idea (emerging from the study of Melanesian life cycle rites) that the course of life is conceptualised as an ordered series of relational transformations. Such an idea implies viewing rituals that mark out life as a coherent set, and not as moments that can be analysed independently of each other. We hope these ideas will serve as stimulations or provocation for contributors.
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