The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History - Softcover

Bracken, Christopher

 
9780226069876: The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0226069877 ISBN 13: 9780226069876
Verlag: University of Chicago Press, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

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 Bracken meticulously analyzes these documents—some canonical, like Franz Boas's ethnographies, others unpublished and little known—to catch a colonialist discourse in the act of constructing fictions about certain First Nations and then deploying those fictions against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

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christopher Bracken is assistant professor of English at the University of Alberta.

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Verlag
University of Chicago Press
Erscheinungsdatum
1997
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0226069877
ISBN 13 
9780226069876
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Buchbär
info@buchbaer.de

Weberstr. 67
Osnabrück
49084
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780226069869: The Potlatch Papers: A Colonial Case History

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0226069869 ISBN 13:  9780226069869
Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR, 1997
Hardcover