Symbolic Immortality by Kan Sergei;

Author:Kan, Sergei;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Published: 2015-03-09T16:00:00+00:00

CONVEYING LOVE AND GRATITUDE THROUGH FEASTING AND GIFT GIVING

The distribution of food and gifts among potlatch guests has long been a fascinating and puzzling subject for European observers and anthropologists. Scholars who offered cultural materialist and ecological explanations of this phenomenon have looked at the items given out by the hosts simply as material objects, wealth, and subsistence products and argued that the potlatch served as a form of their redistribution (Suttles 1960; Vayda 1961; Piddocke 1965). Others (e.g., Benedict 1934) focused on the enormous quantities of objects given away and saw this generosity as an expression of megalomaniacal and other psychological characteristics.

Only recently have Northwest Coast ethnologists returned to Mauss’s (1967) notion of gift exchange as a symbolic structure.30 As Elizabeth Traube (1980:92) pointed out, “In the circulation of wealth and wealth tokens, where others had seen a flow of material goods accumulated and distributed for material ends, Mauss discerned a perpetual play of representations, an intermingling of persons, things, spirits, rights.” One of the first among Northwest Coast ethnologists to rediscover Mauss and focus attention on the symbolic dimension of material objects and food was Irving Goldman, who pointed out that anthropologists’ preoccupation with the use of large quantities of blankets in late nineteenth-century potlatches “obscured for many scholars what had actually been the traditional pattern of a linked regard for both the quantity and the symbolic significance of each item of complementary property” (1975:134). In my view, the exchange of potlatch food and gifts was a rich and complex system of communication, in which material objects carried metamessages about eschatology, power, and rank, as well as about success in subsistence activities, trade, and warfare and about key cultural values and structural principles. Using the artifacts circulating in the potlatch system, the participants negotiated their social and power relations and expressed their feelings and attitudes toward each other.31 Loving and grateful messages toward opposites were more explicit than competitive and status-aggrandizing messages, which are examined in the next chapter.

The notion that every object given to the guests expressed the donors’ positive feelings toward them was fundamental to the potlatch. This belief explains why the hosts did not sit down to eat with the guests. To do so would be to withhold some of the food destined for paying off the opposites. In his study of Kaluli ceremonialism, Edward Schieffelin (1976:51) described the guests behaving in a similar manner when feasting their affines: “The social distance maintained between hosts and guests allows the gift of food to be a public demonstration of good faith in the relationship. In this context, for the hosts to eat some of the food they present to their guests would be, in effect, to take some of it back and throw a cloud over the relation they wish to affirm. Thus, even when the hosts do get hungry and eat, they tend to do so furtively after the guests have finished, and never from the same batch of food.”

Food and gifts were perfect objects for expressing gratitude and affection, since this was their role in daily life.

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