The potlatch papers : a colonial case history

Summary: Variously described as an exchange of gifts, a destruction of property, a system of banking, and a struggle for prestige, the potlatch is one of the founding concepts of anthropology. Some researchers even claim to have discovered traces of the potlatch in all the economies of the world. However, as Christopher Bracken shows in this elegantly argued work, the potlatch was in fact invented by the nineteenth-century Canadian law that sought to destroy it. In addition to giving the world its own potlatch, the law also generated a random collection of "potlatch papers" dating from the 1860s to the 1930s. Bracken meticulously analyzes these documents--some canonical, like Franz Boas's ethnographies, others unpublished and little known--to catch a colonialist discourse in the act of constructing fictions about certain First Nations and then deploying those fictions against them. Rather than referring to objects that already exist, the "potlatch papers" instead gave themselves something to refer to a mirror in which to observe not "the Indian," but "the European." --

Record details

ISBN: 0226069877
ISBN: 0226069869
ISBN: 9780226069876
ISBN: 9780226069869
Physical Description: 276 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm
print
Publisher: Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1997
Copyright: ©1997

Content descriptions

Bibliography, etc. Note:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [251]-265) and index.

Formatted Contents Note:

Acknowledgments -- Maps -- Send-Off -- Folding -- Three Zones -- Limit -- Fold -- Gift -- Giving -- Nameless Distribution -- The Mark of Expenditure -- Patlach -- Encountering Language -- Words and Things -- A Double Inscription -- Doctoring -- Correspondences -- Potlack -- White Purveyors -- The Textual Gift -- Destroying Property -- Sacrifice -- At the Limit, Fire -- Eating -- Giving Eating -- Remembering Death -- White Cannibals -- Poet of Memory -- Summary Offenses -- Exact Information -- Epilogue -- The Image and the Gift -- Another Fold -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index