3

      The Kwakiutl

      If the connections between power and ideas can be unraveled by focusing on instances in which both dimensions are dramatically evident, one promising scenario is offered by the people long called Kwakiutl by anthropologists, as well as others. The Kwakiutl have furnished a type-case of a “chiefdom,” a term applied to societies that are neither simple nor lacking in social stratification but are without the complex architecture of states. They are headed by personages endowed with managerial authority, “chiefs,” who can overrule segmentary interests yet are not able to marshal their subjects with a fully fledged apparatus of coercion that can compel obedience. Chiefs usually derive this authority from a culturally constructed connection with supernatural forces, and they are thus in a position to endow their political functions with a unique cosmological aura.

      The name for the people that became known to outsiders as Kwakiutl was used by Franz Boas and George Hunt in their inquiries in the field, as well as in their writings, and thus passed into general use in both professional and popular writings. The people now want to be known as Kwakwaka’wakw, speakers of the Kwakwala language, of whom the four tribes of Kwakiutl who inhabited the village of Tsaxis adjacent to Fort Rupert form a part. For clarity’s sake, I shall refer to this group as Kwakiutl or Tsaxis Kwakiutl, and to the Kwakwala speakers in general as Kwakwaka’wakw. Expunging “Kwakiutl” from the literature altogether seems counterproductive.

      Examining the case of the Kwakiutl will involve us in ethnography, to detail some of their unfamiliar characteristics, but I shall also try to be historical, to highlight changes in their society and culture. These changes often responded to influences stemming from the larger social fields in which they 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