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A potlatch was a ceremony among certain American Indian tribes, including tribes on the Pacific Northwest coast of the United States and the Canadian province of British Columbia. Such tribes included the Haida, Nuxalk, Tlingit, Tsimshian, Salish, Nuu-chah-nulth, and Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka'wakw). The potlatch took the form of a ceremonial feast traditionally featuring seal meat or salmon. In it, hierarchical relations within and between groups were observed and reinforced through the exchange of gifts, dance performances, and other ceremonies. 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; every practicing Pacific Northwest language group has a variation. The Chinook Jargon word is a homonym having nothing to do with "pot" or "latch". Coast Salish Lushootseed potlatching is xwsalikw, from xw& n. Chinook potlatch, pahtlatch, fr.Nootka ''pahchilt'', ''pachalt'', a gift. 1. Among the Kwakiutl, Chimmesyan, and other Indians of the northwestern coast of North America, a ceremonial distribution by a man of gifts to his own and neighboring tribesmen, often, formerly, to his own impoverishment. Feasting, dancing, and public ceremonies accompany it. 2. Hence, a feast given to a large number of persons, often accompanied by gifts. 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. Social rank was hierarchical, ranks were limited, and acquistion of a rank had to be publicly witnessed for validation. Before the arrival of the Europeans, gifts included storable food (oolichan candle fish oil or dried food), canoes, and slaves among the very wealthy, but otherwise not income-generating assets such as resource rights. 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. In some (relatively rare) cases, goods were actually destroyed after being received. 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. 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. Kim Stanley Robinson adopted the term in his Mars trilogy. In these, a gift economy existed with the social expectation that all deals exchanges were on equal terms. Potlatching in this situation became essentially the equivalent of ripping someone off in a standard economy, and seen as unfair to the recipient. | ||||||||
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