The Potlatch Papers by Christopher Bracken

The Potlatch Papers by Christopher Bracken

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 the author of this text shows in this closely-argued work, the potlatch was in fact invented by the 19th-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 Bracken analyzes these documents - some canonical, like Franz Boas's ethnographies, others unpublished and little known - to catch a colonialist discourse in the act of constructing fictions about certain "first nations" and then deploying those fictions against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."

Bracken, Christopher: - 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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780226069876
ISBN 10	0226069877
Title	The Potlatch Papers
Author	Christopher Bracken
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of Chicago Press
Year published	1997-12-08
Number of pages	283
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable