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Aristotle And Marxist Explanations Of The Potlatch

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Aristotle And Marxist Explanations Of The Potlatch
Potlatch means ‘giving’. The potlatch was an opulent ceremony where possessions are given away or destroyed to display wealth or enhance prestige, by potential candidates to political offices and titles. Anthropologists tried to come up with way to understand this seemingly irrational conspicuous consumption. There are three explanations that anthropologists have given in an attempt to explain this behavior however this essay will compare two of the three namely the cultural-ecological and the Marxist explanation.
According to Suttle (1960: 299) the potlatch is an occasion where the host/s invites members of other communities to the host community to receive gifts of wealth in order to confirm changes of status and exercise of inherited privileges. An example of people who practice the potlatch system is the Southern Kwakiutl society commonly described as having plenty of food and other natural resources which were made even better by …show more content…
Ruyle’s Marxist view was that potlatches, served to attract and hold a free labor force to enable the chief to exploit the productive resources he owned (Ruyle 1973: 615). .Slaves formed an important captive labour force, since, unlike commoners, they could be kept against their will unable to get away. It also functioned as an exploitative tool, due to the fact that although the group contributed to the potlatch, the division of wealth was according to rank (Ruyle 1973: 615). For example there was a potlatch in which a chief gave away 480 blankets, 180 of them his own and 300 of his followers, while it may be seem as though the chief is reducing himself to poverty, his poverty lasts a short time as they will soon gain from the next giving ceremony while people get rich according to their industry (Ruyle 1973: 615). The Marxist take sees the potlatch as a tool that mainly benefits those according to their
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