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Potlatch

Potlach is a noun used in anthropology and other social sciences to designate a feast, ceremony, or system of gift exchange, collective consumption, and the destruction of wealth. The less common verb to potlatch signifies the activity of hosting or participating in such a feast. The term potlatch derives from the Native American Chinook words for “gift” and “giving.” Potlatches are chiefly associated with the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest coast of America, including the Tlingit, Haïda, Tsimshian, Nuxalk, Kwakiutl, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Coast Salish. Similar practices and institutions have also been studied in other parts of the world, for example, in eastern Siberia and Melanesia. Among the most influential examinations of potlatch are the works of Franz Boas, Helen Codere, Philip Drucker and Robert F. Heizer, Marcel Mauss, and Abraham Rosman and Paula G. Rubel.

Key Aspects

Although potlatch practices differ from group to group, Boas, Codere, and Mauss have identified several more widespread characteristics. Potlatch gatherings consist of elaborate ceremonial events typically accompanied by music, dance, and dramatic speeches. They revolve mainly around gift exchanges, which distribute and circulate wealth among transactors and establish social ties between them. Moreover, potlatches involve the lavish consumption of food by the group as well as acts of pure destruction of riches. Giving and accepting goods and services, reciprocating gifts with large interest, and engaging in property destruction is socially obligatory. It is imperative to respond to an invitation to a potlatch by hosting another one soon after. Many scholars emphasize competition and hostility as a defining aspect of potlatch expenditure: participants seek to outdo each other in the grandiloquence of their presents and in the amount of wealth they destroy. It is reported that combat through property has regularly led contestants to spend all they have.

Potlatches are usually conducted not only by chiefs, who act as representatives of their clans and families, but also by other individuals of social rank. Potlatching requires no special occasion, yet groups normally hold potlatches at socially significant times such as childbirth, initiations, weddings, and funerals. The offerings of the potlatch include blankets, canoes, baskets, food, jewelry, masks, dress, and copper plates, which are variously exchanged and collectively consumed or burnt, broken, and thrown into the sea. Formerly, potlatches also witnessed the exchange and killing of slaves. “Grease feasts,” where “enormous quantities of fish oil” were “consumed and burnt,” were traditionally the most expensive potlatches (Boas 1966, 93). In the nineteenth century, as Codere as well as Drucker and Heizer point out, Western consumer articles and money began to form part of the ceremonies.

Social Significance

Anthropologists agree that the potlatch is highly important to the groups that practice it. However, its exact social significance and function beyond wealth redistribution and the forging of social alliances have been debated. According to Boas and Mauss, expenditure is primarily a tool to demonstrate wealth and power to acquire honor and social rank. Giving extravagant gifts (e.g., an excessive number of blankets) or destroying greater riches than one's rival (e.g., breaking a more precious copper plate) displays superior wealth. This enables one to “flatten” one's adversary: to undermine their position, distinguish oneself, and validate one's own status or claim to promotion in the social hierarchy. Conversely, if one fails to respond to another's expenditure competitively, that is, to give or destroy an equal or larger amount, one shows one's inferiority and loses face and influence.

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