Euphoric object

An object holds anima put into it by the people who made or owned it, and having held it, it can connect a self across distance and across generations. That is the capacitor function, and it is what makes the category more than sentiment. An heirloom is not valuable because it reminds somebody of a person but because it contains something of that person and can deliver it. Marsh treats this as widespread rather than exotic. Presents, heirlooms, rewards and earnings are all euphoric objects intended to carry personal esteem, and many animals besides humans collect them. The condition on transfer is strict. Earnings given without gratitude and respect impart no primary anima, since they were not offered through a balanced connection, so what is stored depends on how the object changed hands rather than on what it is. The mechanism runs in both directions, which is the uncomfortable part of the account. Energy extracted from others is stored in euphoric objects too, whether amulets, icons or coins, and Marsh's example is stark: a person who took the life energy of many children becomes an anima bank containing life that can be obtained for other children. Animists performing the same abstraction torture and murder for gain in secondary anima and store it the same way. The object does not distinguish between what was given and what was taken, which is why capacitors, anima banks, relics and currency all belong to one family.

Anthropology has studied objects carrying something of persons for a century. Marcel Mauss argued that a part of the giver remains in the gift, Annette Weiner described inalienable possessions that cannot be given away without loss, and Alfred Gell treated artworks as distributed agency. Material culture studies and the psychology of endowment and contagion have documented the same intuitions experimentally, with Paul Rozin's work showing that people treat objects as carrying essences of those who touched them. Marsh's version reads all of this literally rather than symbolically. Where Mauss describes an obligation and Rozin a cognitive bias, she treats the object as actually holding a quantity, which makes the relic, the heirloom and the coin instances of one mechanism rather than three separate phenomena.