[“Yurok men scrupulously avoided being placed in a situation of debt or ongoing obligation to anyone else. Even the collective management of resources was frowned upon; foraging grounds were individually owned and could be rented out in times of shortfall. Property was sacred, and not only in the legal sense that poachers could be shot. It also had a spiritual value. Yurok men would often spend long hours meditating on money, while the highest objects of wealth – precious hides and obsidian blades displayed only at festivals – were the ultimate sacra. Yurok struck outsiders as puritanical in a literal sense as well: as Goldschmidt reports, ambitious Yurok men were ‘exhorted to abstain from any kind of indulgence – eating, sexual gratification, play or sloth’. Big eaters were considered ‘vulgar’. Young men and women were lectured on the need to eat slowly and modestly, to keep their bodies slim and lithe. Wealthy Yurok men would gather every day in sweat lodges, where an almost daily test of these ascetic values was the need to crawl headfirst through a tiny aperture that no overweight body could possibly enter. Repasts were kept bland and spartan, decoration simple, dancing modest and restrained. There were no inherited ranks or titles. Even those who did inherit wealth continued to emphasize their personal hard work, frugality and achievement; and while the rich were expected to be generous towards the less fortunate and look after their own lands and possessions, responsibilities for sharing and caring were modest in comparison with foraging societies almost anywhere else.
Northwest Coast societies, in contrast, became notorious among outside observers for the delight they took in displays of excess. They were best known to European ethnologists for the festivals called potlatch, usually held by aristocrats acceding to some new noble title (nobles would often accumulate many of these over the course of a lifetime). In these feasts they sought to display their grandeur and contempt for ordinary worldly possessions by performing magnificent feats of generosity, overwhelming their rivals with gallons of candlefish oil, berries and quantities of fatty and greasy fish. Such feasts were scenes of dramatic contests, sometimes culminating in the ostentatious destruction of heirloom copper shields and other treasures, just as in the early period of colonial contact, around the turn of the nineteenth century, they sometimes culminated in the sacrificial killing of slaves. Each treasure was unique; there was nothing that resembled money.
Potlatch was an occasion for gluttony and indulgence, ‘grease feasts’ designed to leave the body shiny and fat. Nobles often compared themselves to mountains, with the gifts they bestowed rolling off them like boulders, to flatten and crush their rivals.
The Northwest Coast group we know best are the Kwakwaka’wakw (Kwakiutl), among whom Boas conducted fieldwork. They became famous for the exuberant ornamentation of their art – their love of masks within masks – and the theatrical stage effects employed in their rituals, including fake blood, trap doors and violent clown-police. All the surrounding societies – including the Nootka, Haida and Tsimshian – appear to have shared the same broad ethos: similarly dazzling material cultures and performances could be found all the way from Alaska south to the area of Washington State. They also shared the same basic social structure, with hereditary ranks of nobles, commoners and slaves. Throughout this entire region, a 1,500-mile strip of land from the Copper River delta to Cape Mendocino, inter-group raiding for slaves was endemic, and had been for as long as anyone could recall.
In all these societies of the Northwest Coast, nobles alone enjoyed the ritual prerogative to engage with guardian spirits, who conferred access to aristocratic titles, and the right to keep the slaves captured in raids. Commoners, including brilliant artists and craftspeople, were largely free to decide which noble house they wished to align themselves with; chiefs vied for their allegiance by sponsoring feasts, entertainment and vicarious participation in their heroic adventures. ‘Take good care of your people,’ went the elder’s advice to a young Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) chief. ‘If your people don’t like you, you’re nothing.’
In many ways, the behaviour of Northwest Coast aristocrats resembles that of Mafia dons, with their strict codes of honour and patronage relations; or what sociologists speak of as ‘court societies’ – the sort of arrangement one might expect in, say, feudal Sicily, from which the Mafia derived many of its cultural codes. But this is emphatically not what we are taught to expect among foragers. Granted, the followers of any one of these ‘fisher-kings’ rarely numbered more than 100 or 200 people, not much larger than the size of a Californian village; in neither the Northwest Coast nor the Californian culture area were there overarching political, economic or religious organizations of any kind. But within the tiny communities that did exist, entirely different principles of social life applied.”]
david graeber and david wengrow, the dawn of everything: a new history of humanity, 2021
