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POTLATCHSociologyindex, Sociology Books 2011 Potlatch among some N. American Indians of the Pacific coast is an extravagant and competitive ceremonial feast at which a person or a chief, gives presents and gives away or destroys possessions in order to enhance his or her status. Potlatch is a custom of the First Nations peoples of the Pacific north-west coast, where a ceremonial period of feasting was accompanied by lavish giving away, and sometimes destruction, of goods and property. Potlatch is a feast marked by distribution and destruction of valuables, as a demonstration of wealth and status, characteristic of the Kwakiutl and some other Northwest Coast Indians. Those who gave away or destroyed the most property earned the greatest social prestige. Anthropologists have described the ceremonies as a form of ‘war with property’. The Potlatch also had important elements of economic distribution, social bonding and political processes, all central to the maintenance of a society. The potlatch ceremonies of Native Americans were a form of barter that had social and ceremonial functions that were at least as important as its economic functions. Consequently when the potlatch was outlawed in Canada (by an act that was later repealed) some of the most powerful work incentives were removed - to the detriment of the younger sections of the Indian communities. This form of barter was not unique to North America. Glyn Davies points out that the most celebrated example of competitive gift exchange was the encounter, around 950 BC, of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. "Extravagant ostentation, the attempt to outdo each other in the splendour of the exchanges, and above all, the obligations of reciprocity, were just as typical in this celebrated encounter, though at a fittingly princely level, as with the more mundane types of barter in other parts of the world." - Davies, Glyn. A history of money from ancient times to the present day, 3rd ed. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2002.
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