potlatch - Overview, Traditional historical, "Potlatch" and "potluck", Sources, Further reading (Tlingit)

A feast celebrating an important event, or following personal humiliation, at which the host gives away his wealth (slaves, blankets, canoes, etc). People receiving wealth in this way would later give their own potlatches, ensuring circulation of some of the property. It was a common practice among North American Indians of the Northwest Pacific coast, becoming increasingly competitive under pressure from colonial trade goods and disease, and culminating in dramatic destruction of property. The potlatch was outlawed in the late 19th-c, but made legal again in the 1950s.

For the French independent record label, see Potlatch Records.

A potlatch was a ceremony among certain Native American tribes, including tribes on the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States and the Canadian province of British Columbia. The potlatch took the form of a ceremonial feast traditionally featuring seal meat or salmon. The host family demonstrated their wealth and prominence through giving away their possessions and thus prompting prominent participants to reciprocate when they hold their own potlatches.

Overview

The name is derived from Chinook Jargon; Coast Salish Lushootseed potlatching is x, from x The casting or throwing of suitable gifts is a part of a potlatch ceremony.

n. [Chinook potlatch, pahtlatch, fr.Nootka pahchilt, pachalt, a gift.] 1. [Colloq., Northwestern America] [Webster 1913 Suppl.]

Also the Sioux tribe had Potlatchs.

Traditional historical

Originally the potlatch was held to commemorate an important event such as the death of a high-status person, expanded to celebrate events in the life cycle of the host family such as the birth of a child. The influx of manufactured trade goods such as blankets and sheet copper into the Pacific Northwest caused inflation in the potlatch in the late eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries.Some groups, such as the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw), used the potlatch as an arena in which highly competitive contests of status took place. The catastrophic mortalities due to introduced diseases laid many inherited ranks vacant or open to remote or dubious claim—providing they could be validated—with a suitable potlatch.

Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 and the United States in the late nineteenth century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful, unproductive and injurious to the practitioners. Despite the ban, potlatching continued clandestinely for decades. As the potlatch became less of an issue in the twentieth century, the ban was dropped from the books, in the United States in 1934 and in Canada in 1951.

The potlatch is a cultural practice much studied by ethnographers. "Potlatch is a festive event within a regional exchange system among tribes of the North pacific Coast of North America, including the Salish and Kwakiutl of Washington and British Columbia." Sponsors of a potlatch give away many useful items such as food, blankets, worked ornamental mediums of exchange called "coppers", and many other various items. To give a potlatch enhanced one’s reputation and validated social rank, the rank and requisite potlatch being proportional, both for the host and for the recipients by the gifts exchanged. Prestige increased with the lavishness of the potlatch, the value of the goods given away in it.

The potlatch has fascinated and perhaps been misunderstood by Westerners for many years. Thorstein Veblen's use of the ceremony in his book Theory of the Leisure Class made potlatching a symbol of "conspicuous consumption". Other authors such as Georges Bataille were struck by what they saw as the anarchic, communal nature of the potlatch's operation—it is for this reason that the organization Lettrist International named their review after the potlatch in the 1950s. Potlatching in this situation became essentially the equivalent of ripping someone off in a standard economy, and seen as unfair to the recipient.

"Potlatch" and "potluck"

The English term "potluck" is erroneously said to derive from "potlatch" due to its use in the American term "potluck dinner";

Potlatch has also developed into slang noun for "ridiculous". For example: "My exam schedule is a giant potlatch." ^ (1) The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48
(2) "[O]ften, formerly, to his own impoverishment": At the time of writing the 1913 Webster, the economics of the potlatch in context were widely misunderstood in non-Native society. Chaikin ^ The Collaborative International Dictionary of English v.0.48 ^ WordNet (r) 2.0

Sources

Bates, Dawn, Hess, Thom; Retrieved on 2006-06-06.
Completely reformatted, greatly revised and expanded update of Hess, Thom, Dictionary of Puget Salish (University of Washington Press, 1976). Seattle and Vancouver: University of Washington Press and University of British Columbia Press. (1938) "The Nature of the Potlatch." Bracken, Christopher (1997) The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cole, Douglas, and Ira Chaikin (1990) An Iron Hand upon the People: The Law against the Potlatch on the Northwest Coast. Vancouver: Douglas & ISBN 0295970502

Further reading (Tlingit)

Emmons, George Thornton (1991) The Tlingit Indians. Ed. Kan, Sergei (1989) Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century. Washington: Smithsonian Books. (1973) The Gitksan Potlatch: Population Flux, Resource Ownership and Reciprocity. Toronto: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston of Canada. Vancouver: UBC Press "Fur Trader, A" (Peter Skene Ogden) (1933) Traits of American Indian Life and Character. San Francisco: Grabhorn Press. 4 is the earliest known description of a Nisga'a potlatch.)

Further reading (Kwakwaka'wakw)

Masco, Joseph (1995) "'It Is a Strict Law That Bids Us Dance': Cosmologies, Colonialism, Death and Ritual Authority in the Kwakwaka'wakw Potlatch, 1849-1922."