The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History - Softcover

Bracken, Christopher

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226069877 ISBN 13: 9780226069876

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 1997

Synopsis

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 Bracken meticulously analyzes these documents—some canonical, like Franz Boas's ethnographies, others unpublished and little known—to catch a colonialist discourse in the act of constructing fictions about certain First Nations and then deploying those fictions against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."

About this title

About the Author

Christopher Bracken is associate professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta. He is the author of The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226069877
• ISBN 13: 9780226069876
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288