Potlatch

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 13 Jan 2002 08:49:28 -0700 (MST),
ermadog@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>I consult a wide variety of sources. I find this
>is the best way to avoid dogmatism and
>sectarianim. I assess the data and critique the
>interpretation. That's how scholarly research is
>done where I come from.

This list is not dedicated to scholarly research in general. It is
designed to foster Marxist thought. Everything you write about
precapitalist societies is radically at odds with Marxist
anthropology, no matter how many times you invoke Marx or whoever.
There will come a point when I decide as moderator that your
interventions around these questions is a waste of our time, just as
it would be to try to answer somebody who was invoking Keynes as a
way of explaining how to fight unemployment. You are a purveyor of
bourgeois social science and it is starting to take us astray.

>Btw, could either you or Sahlin explain to me
>how a potlach can be given without a previous
>acquisition of wealth? Of course this would not
>be capitalist acccumulation, because it's not a
>capitalist society.

If you want to understand potlatch and its interpretive abuses by the
bourgeois social sciences you favor, I'd recommend Christopher
Bracken's "The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History". The point
of this book is to refute essentialism about class rule and private
property whose existence transcends history. Variously described as a
system of banking or a struggle for prestige, Bracken shows that the
potlatch was legislated in Canada during the 19th century in order to
destroy native institutions. The colonial administrator referred to
below was instrumental in influencing a legion of academic
anthropologists whom you have all sorts of unfathomable illusions in:

In the summer of 1885 George Dawson's work for the Geological Survey
of Canada brought him to "the northern part of Vancouver Island and
its vicinity." A self-styled ethnographer, Dawson found time among
his other duties to write his Notes and Observations on the Kwakiool
People . . . and present them to the Royal Society of Canada in May
1887. His paper repeats the simultaneous balancing of contrary
assertions that organizes Macdonald's (or Vankoughnet's) 1882 account
of the "Totlache"': the pot-latch is once again-and at once-an act of
gift giving and a circular economy of expenditure and return.

Like Macdonald (or Vankoughnet), Dawson locates the people he calls
the "Kwakiool" beyond the outermost limit of Europe and its
civilizing influence. "The difficulties attendant on any effort
toward the improvement of the condition and mode of life of the coast
tribes of British Columbia, are very grave," he writes, emphasizing
that "the actual results of missionary labours, such as those carried
on by Mr. Hall among the Kwakiool, and other self-sacrificing persons
elsewhere, are in most cases, to all appearance, small." He offers
two reasons why the "Kwakiool" have not raised themselves into the
hierarchy of Euro-Canadian civilization. The first-which echoes
Blenkinsop's 1874 report from Barkley Sound-is that their traditions
are like stones holding them down in a state of near bestiality.
Weighed down by a culture that is sheer nature, they "herd" together
like animals. "It is difficult to induce individuals to abandon their
old customs and bad habits," he says, "and nearly impossible to
prevent them from relapsing from time to time, owing to the fact that
they still live promiscuously among and herd together with the mass
of the tribe" (87, emphasis added).

Yet the main reason why the "Kwakiool" have failed to become
white-and for Dawson this is the second obstacle to their progress-is
whiteness itself. Like the Sproat of the 1860s, Dawson maintains that
in recent years "the Kwakiool, equally with other tribes, have became
[sic] in a word 'demoralised.' " Though they have given up their
traditions-the same ones that hold them down-shedding this weight has
not lifted them any higher. Instead ithas stripped them of "their
spirit and self-respect ... replacing it by nothing." They find work
on farms at harvest time, he says, but do little more than eat for
the rest of the year. What has brought about this crisis? The process
of "demoralisation" has been under way only "[sjince the arrival of
the whites". The "Kwakiool" were not uncivilized until the lack of
civilization arrived on their shores from Europe, and the greatest
obstacle to their upward movement into civilization is nothing less
than civilization itself. For Dawson, as for Sproat, Europe-in-Canada
is at once a force that draws people to the height of human
achievement and a weight pulling them down to the level of animals
who can barely feed themselves-although eating is almost all they do.

Among the "old customs and bad habits" that weigh heaviest on the
"Kwakiool," though not so heavy a restraint as progress itself, is
the "pernicious effect of the extension and frequent recurrence of
the potlatch" which, in a further proliferation of names, is also
known "as pus-a andya-hooit, these terms probably denoting special
forms of the ceremony appropriate to certain occasions. In speaking
of the custom," adds Dawson, "I will, however, use the commonly
recognised word potlatch as being the most convenient." He warns that
the custom is spreading: "Mr. George Blenkinsop" and "the Rev. A. J.
Hall" have observed its growth firsthand. It appears, therefore, that
as the "Kwakiool" approach absolute "demoralisation," they are at
once abandoning their traditions and pursuing them with increased
intensity, as if their long descent into death were actually
enriching their cultural life.

The potlatch, as Dawson describes it, is "a struggle for social
pre-eminence" that takes the form of a ceremonial distribution of
blankets: whoever can accumulate and then give away the most blankets
gains enhanced prestige within a social hierarchy. To lose is a
public humiliation: "should the aspirant [to a position of eminence]
be beaten," says Dawson, "[he or she] would feel mortified and
ashamed." Determined to prevail at any cost, "wives even rob their
husbands to assist a brother, or some other relative, in amassing
blankets" and competing for social status. This is a theme that will
become typical, indeed stereotypical, in the ethnography of the
Kwakwa-ka'wakw for years to come: the potlatch is a war fought with
property.

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 01/13/2002

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