The purpose of a Malangan is to provide a ‘body’, or more precisely, a ‘skin’ for a recently deceased person of importance. On death, the agency of such a person is in a dispersed state. In our terms, indexes of their agency abound, but are not concentrated anywhere in particular. The gardens and plantations of the deceased, scattered here and there, are still in production, their wealth is held by various of exchange-partners, their houses are still standing, their wives or husbands are still married to them, and so on. The process of making the carving coincides with the process of reorganization and adjustment through which local society adjusts to the substraction of the deceased from active participation in political and productive life. The gardens are harvested, the houses decay and become, in turn, particularly productive fields, and so on. That is to say, all the dispersed ‘social effectiveness’ of the deceased, the difference they made to how things were, gradually becomes an objectifiable quantity, something to which a single material index may be attached, and from which this accumulated effectiveness may be abducted. This is what the Malangan is; a kind of body which accumulates, like a charged battery, the potential energy of the deceased dispersed in the life-world.  (Gell 1998: 225)