Encyclopedia of social and cultural anthropology 670

See also: ethnography, reflexivity, symbolic anthropology

Further reading

Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and

Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Clifford, J. and G.Marcus (eds) (1986) Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Culture,
Berkeley: University of California Press
Derrida, J. (1974) Of Grammatology, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
di Leonardo, M. (ed) (1991) Gender at the Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the
Postmodern Era, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press
Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object, New York: Columbia
University Press
Hymes, D. (ed) (1969) Reinventing Anthropology, New York: Vintage
Jameson, F. (1990) Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Durham, NC: Duke
University Press
Lyotard, J.-F. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press
Marcus, G. (ed.) (1992) Rereading Cultural Anthropology, Durham, NC: Duke University Press
Marcus, G. and M.Fischer (eds) (1986) Anthropology as Cuhural Critique: An Experimental
Moment in the Human Sciences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Polier, N. and W.Roseberry (1989) ‘Tristes Tropes: Postmodern Anthropologists Encounter the
Other and Discover Themselves’, Economy and Society 18: 245–64
Sangren, S. (1988) ‘Rhetoric and the Authority of Ethography: ‘Postmodernism’ and the Social
Reproduction of Texts’, Current Anthropology 29, 3: 405–35
Spencer, J. (1989) ‘Anthropology as a Kind of Writing’, Man 24:145–64
Taussig, M. (1987) Shamanism, Cohnialism and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press

potlatch

A potlatch is a gift-giving ceremony as practised on the Northwest Coast of North

America, in societies such as Kwakiutl, Tlingit, Haida and Chinook. It was recorded by
numerous ethnographers, including *Franz Boas, and has been re-analysed by others in
more recent times. The term is also employed in a looser sense for ceremonies in other
parts of the world, such as *Melanesia, where feasting and gift-giving practices are
similar to those of the Northwest Coast Indians.
From an ecological-functional perspective, the instability of resources in the
Northwest Coast (including salmon and wild plants) made redistribution desirable—from
those with resources in any given season to those who lacked them. People who
accumulated sufficient resources to hold a feast could do so, and even barter away food
beforehand in order to acquire other goods to give. Kin would assist their kin, and
commoners their chiefs, in building up the necessary stockpile of goods to give away.
The gift-giving was ostentatious. By giving, the donor showed off his wealth and
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reaffirmed his social position. Accepting †gifts was a mark of recognizing the superior
status of the donor.
Typical occasions when potlatches were held included births and deaths, initiations
into secret societies, and weddings. They were also held at the death of a chief (when his
successor would hold one in order to assert his authority and influence), after a public
embarrassment (as a face-saving device) and simply when one kin group acquired enough
wealth to give it away. The potlatch system was highly competitive; it depended on
rivalry between powerful individuals as well as on the principle that the donor is morally
superior to the recipient.
The institution reached its most elaborate form among the Kwakiutl from 1849 to
1925. What had been gift-giving evolved into the wilful destruction of wealth. Those who
could afford to burn blankets in front of their rivals, for example, not only showed off
their higher status; they denied their rivals the potential for acquiring the goods for
themselves. Government authorities eventually banned the practice, but potlatches of a
more benign nature continue today: Northwest Coast Indians still use this Chinook word
to describe feasts held, for example, at weddings, where cash give-aways keep alive the
spirit of the potlatch system.
The potlatch is a classic example of an economic institution embedded in a wider
social structure. For this reason, it is often used by †substantivist economic
anthropologists to show the impossibility of analysing *exchange divorced from its social
context. It was important for †Marcel Mauss ([1925] 1990) for much the same reason: it
illustrates well his notions that society functions to redistribute material resources, that
there is in cases like potlatch societies a ‘totality’ made up of gift-exchange and its wider
context, and consequently that ‘gifts’ are never really free.
ALAN BARNARD
See also: Americas: Native North, economic anthropology, exchange, formalism and
substantivism

Further reading

Drucker, P. and R.Heizer (1967) To Make My Name Good: A Re-examination of the Southern
Kwakiutl Potlatch, Berkeley: University of California Press
Mauss, M. ([1925] 1990) The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (trans.
by W.D.Halls), London: Routledge
Rosman, A. and P.Rubel (1971) Feasting With Mine Enemy: Rank and Exchange among Northwest
Coast Societies, New York: Columbia University Press