were involved. Finally, this account will rely on general ethnology, as we draw out the major organizing themes of Kwakiutl culture through analytic concepts that build on the comparative study of many cultures. My aim is to use this historically oriented ethnography and this analytic ethnology to explicate the particular links between power and ideas in a salient case derived from the anthropological inventory.
In anthropology, the Tsaxis Kwakiutl or “Fort Ruperts,” as they also came to be known, occupy a special position. As the principal group studied by Boas, who is often spoken of as the founding ancestor of American anthropology, their example had considerable influence on the field after Boas’s time. Their culture also became known to nonanthropological audiences, because Ruth Benedict portrayed it, in her widely read Patterns of Culture, as striving to annihilate “the ordinary bounds and limits of existence” (1934, 72). In this depiction, she drew on Friedrich Nietzsche’s vision of ancient Greek art, which he saw as marked by a central contradiction between the Apollonian search for measure and limits and the Dionysian will to break through the boundaries of the self in ecstasy and intoxication. To Benedict, the people of Zuni pueblo were Apollonian, the Kwakiutl their Dionysian antithesis. In this interpretation, the Zuni walked with care along the well-delineated pathways of life; the Kwakiutl sought instead to break through the boundaries of mundane reality. Apart from Benedict’s depiction, the Kwakiutl came to be known to museum visitors through their art, including their dramatic carvings and evocative masks.
Finally, the great public displays and giveaways of wealth of the Kwakiutl, the so-called potlatches, drew the attention of economists and sociologists, among others, because of their apparent nonconformance to “Western” canons of economic rationality. Some European intellectuals, such as Georges Bataille (1967), even celebrated the Kwakiutl as a dramatic example of how humanity might recover in the quest for excess the strength and purity of dynamic vitality.
The Kwakiutl reside on the northern Pacific coast of North America, one of the “First Nations” present there before the coming of the Europeans. Anthropologists include them—along with Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Nootka, and the Coast Salish—in an area of similar cultures grouped together as “Northwest Coast.” This cultural belt runs along the rainy, heavily dissected and forested coast from Yakutat Bay in Alaska south to Kato, near Cape Mendocino in Northern California. The Kwakiutl live along the northern coast of Vancouver Island and along the bays and inlets around Queen Charlotte Bay, from Smith Sound inlet in the north to Cape Mudge in the south. A high range of mountains, traversing Vancouver Island, separates them from their southern neighbors, the Nootka (now known as the Nuu-chah-nulth).
Kwakiutl speak Kwakwala, one of six languages of the Wakashan language family. This language family is grouped into two categories: northern Wakashan, including Kwakwala, Bella Bella (Heiltsuk), and Haisla; and southern Wakashan, made up of Nitinat, Nootka, and Makah. Although there were cultural exchanges between Kwakwala speakers and both Heiltsuk and Nootka, their languages are not mutually intelligible. Bella Bella and Haisla are divided from the other Wakashan-speaking groups by the Bella Coola (now Nuxalk), who speak a Salishan language. I want to underline that these named groupings all refer to languages, not to “tribes.” Speaking one of these languages may underwrite an acknowledgment of common identity that can be expressed in common ritual performance and myths, but it does not translate into sentiments of political unity or common organization. In all these groups the basic social unit was the localized community, often distinguished by dialect from its nearest neighbors. It is still unclear whether all these languages stem from a common linguistic stock that later differentiated or derive from different linguistic backgrounds.
Similarly, it is not yet certain whether the Kwakiud differentiated culturally from a basic pattern laid down some seven thousand years ago or whether the northern Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian and the southern Kwakwaka’wakw and Nootka are descendants of people that were organized rather differently, both socially and culturally (see Adams 1981). Rubel and Rosman argue persuasively that the social organization of the northern groups resembled that of neighboring Athabascan-speaking food collectors on their northern and eastern periphery, reckoning descent matrilineally and divided into exogamous moities and clans. In contrast, the southern groups, including the Kwakiutl, reckoned descent ambilaterally through both fathers and mothers. This produced lines of descent with overlapping memberships and crosscutting marriages, for which exclusive rules of exogamy or endogamy were irrelevant. They share these characteristics with the inland Salish-speaking people inhabiting the Thompson and Fraser River valleys of interior British Columbia (but not the Coast Salish); these inland groups lived in bands that were not based on exclusive criteria of descent, accorded recognition to individuals of wealth and influence, but lacked hereditary chiefs and nobles. Rubel and Rosman postulate that the Bella Coola, Nootka, and Kwakiutl once shared a common social organizational pattern with these peoples, and then developed bounded kin groups with fixed group claims to resources and social hierarchies of rank, hereditary leadership by chiefs, and differential privileges for senior and junior lines when they moved to the coast with its more abundant resources (Rubel and Rosman 1983; Rosman and Rubel 1986).
Scattered reports on the Kwakiutl were collected throughout the nineteenth century, and a number of field studies were carried out in the twentieth century (notably by Helen Codere, focused on the ethnohistory of the Kwakiutl associated with Fort Rupert, and by Ronald and Evelyn Rohner, on the tribes of Gilford Island). The bulk of what we know about them, however, comes to us from the work of Boas, aided by his local assistant George Hunt. Boas visited the Northwest Coast first in 1886 and for a last time in 1930; in all he made twelve field trips to the Northwest Coast, totaling twenty-eight and one-half months (White 1963, 9–10). Together Boas and Hunt are responsible for many thousands of printed pages, in a collaboration that spanned forty-five years. The most recent of the texts dealing with their Kwakiutl materials is Boas’s Kwakiutl Ethnography, left incomplete at the time of his death in 1942, then edited by Helen Codere and published in 1966.
Following Boas’s definition of culture as a manifestation of the mental life of man, the Boas-Hunt texts focus on myths and rituals, especially on those elaborated between 1849—when the Kwakiutl moved to the vicinity of Fort Rupert—and the time of the ethnographic inquiry. Much of the materials on ritual drew on native reports; some Boas observed himself, especially in 1886. Given Boas’s major concern with language and linguistics, native texts were recorded in Kwakiutl, then translated, and published in both Wakashan and English. Since controlling and enacting myths and rituals were largely the prerogatives of chiefs and nobles, what these texts reveal to us is primarily the discourse of chiefs and nobility, and to a minimal degree the doings of commoners. This bias was due not to neglect on Boas’s part but to the difficulty of obtaining information on commoners. When Boas urged Hunt to collect data on the names and rights of common people, because “they are just as important as those of people of high blood,” Hunt replied that this was “hard to get for they shame to talk about themselves” (in Berman 1991, 45).
The texts are also minimally informative about the lives of Kwakiutl women. Guided perhaps by the then-prevailing concept of culture as a homogeneous body of customs and ideas, these texts note gender differentiation in activities but leave them unexplored. They chart the distinctions in the social division of tasks, as well as customs surrounding female puberty, food taboos, ritual work in food processing, and female roles in arranged marriages. They speak of women, fictitiously defined as males, holding positions of authority until their successor was old enough to take over (Boas 1966, 52), and they mention that women with the appropriate privileges performed dances as part of the retinue of the major spirit-figure of the ceremonial season. But what women did and thought was not explored in their own terms, and their informal roles received no attention.
Although the materials collected constituted the cynosure of Boasian anthropology during its first decades, the texts themselves—along with Boas’s famous typewriter with Kwakiutl typography—were long neglected, because they did not easily fit with subsequent theoretical paradigms. More recently, they have served as the basis for new interpretations. One set of such studies has sought to move away from representations of the First Nations of the Northwest
