Talk:Potlatch

Need for some references to our own Quasi-Potlatches?

As is briefly mentioned in the separate article on the Canadian Potlatch Ban, the Indians themselves saw similarities between potlatch and Christmas (in my experience as a poor person, Christmas tends to destroy about 50% of my annual savings just before the coldest time of year, when the poor are most in need of savings - presumably this increases their illness and death rates; suicide among women also peaks in December, which is thought to be due to the stress of Christmas; and so on; but Christianity and many corporations at least appear to benefit from Christmas). I expect other instances to include the ritual destruction of family wealth at weddings (again at a time when young poor people are most in need of money and family resources as a backup), and the prestige gained by billionaire philanthropists from Andrew Carnegie to Bill Gates. There is also an intellectual and/or spiritual and/or semiotics and/or memetics aspect, as religions, ideologies, science, and Wikipedia itself, can all be seen as potlatches freely giving away potentially valuable knowledge and ideas - indeed I only found out about potlatches through the Baudrillard article's mention of our modern world as involving a potlatch of symbols. I can't simply add any of this in the article myself without violating all sorts of Wikipedia rules against original research, etc. But clearly common sense, and the Baudrillard reference, and the Indians noting the similarity to Christmas, all suggest there must be some reliable works out there that do discuss the link. I don't have the knowledge or the time or the inclination to go looking for those works myself, but hopefully there are other editors out there who will have such knowledge and time and inclination, and I think this might greatly improve the interest and relevance of this article.Tlhslobus (talk) 23:40, 6 January 2013 (UTC)

Etymology

This article originally said that the word comes from Nuu-chah-nulth p'ačiƛ and used as its source the OED. I checked, and that's not what the OED actually says. See, I found two words for potlatch in Nuu-chah-nulth (from Davidson's grammar of Nootkan): p'ačiƛ and paɬaˑč. The OED entry says it comes from "patlatsh"-- it seems that somebody looked that up, and then looked up in another source that p'ačiƛ is a word for potlatch in Nuu-chah-nulth and wrongly assumed that that was the word OED refers to. At least that's my assumption. Etymonline also says it's from p'ačiƛ. The point is, it is much much much more likely that paɬaˑč would come into English as /pɒtlætʃ/ (or into Chinook Jargon as "potlatch"), than that p'ačiƛ would. So I'm changing this article to say paɬaˑč, for the time being. It strikes me as possible that p'ačiƛ is the real etymon, and that Nuh-chah-nulth paɬaˑč is loaned back from Chinook Jargon... but I don't have a source that says that for the moment so it seems less likely.64.179.181.61 (talk) 01:24, 10 June 2013 (UTC)