ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Northwest Coast in Patterns of Culture is unabashed in its identification of the Kwakiutl with an entire area. The potlatch, which ethnographers and legislators alike had understood as the competitive institution par excellence, was posited as the very embodiment of the area's collective personality. In the period under consideration, the potlatch was the subject of many ethnohistorical studies that were themselves part of an attempt to reconstrue though not reconstruct Northwest Coast cultures. The potlatch, an abstract social and ritual institution, could answer the ethnographic desire for collection only when it was mediated or embodied as artifact. Indeed, from the museological perspective of the time, the potlatch was a social, political, and ritual context for display and was evoked only as part of the explanatory exposition in which objects were embedded. The objectifying tendencies of museum-based anthropology were buttressed by the emerging theoretical paradigms of functionalism and structural-functionalism.
