By Stanley Walens
Professor Walens indicates that the Kwakiutl visualize the realm as a spot of mouths and stomachs, of eaters and eaten. His analyses of the social rituals of food, local principles of the ethology of predation, a key Kwakiutl delusion, and the Hamatsa dance, the main dramatic in their ceremonials, reveal the ways that oral, assimilative metaphors encapsulate Kwakiutl rules of man's function within the cosmos.
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Extra resources for Feasting With Cannibals: An Essay on Kwakiutl Cosmology
Example text
Instead, these seem to be sacred acts in much the same way as the winter ceremonials or the potlatch. In addition, once we realize that meals are sacred occasions, then all large ceremonials that have as one of their parts the eating of a meal, the distribution of food, or the ritual enactment of any aspect of the gath ering or eating of food are reinforced in their religiousness by virtue of their association with that food-act. As we should expect, Kwakiutl social commentary does not take the form of criticizing an individual for his peculiarly idiosyncratic traits.
For the Kwakiutl, the spiritual welfare of the tribe is a costly commodity that can be preserved not by the accumulation of profits, but by the acting out of those sacred responsibilities to provide wealth for others at one's own expense because it is one's moral responsibility. The purpose of the pot latch is to lose money and thus to gain spiritual purity. The Kwakiutl eschew profit making at a potlatch to avoid being placed in social debt. In addition, faced with the dilemma of a ceremony in which people lose money in their transactions, we must not resort to the economists' hypothesizing of a quality called prestige, which makes up for one's fi nancial loss (Suttles, 1960).
The dominant component of this state, which enables humans to recognize it immediately, is the overwhelming fear they feel at the great power that is in their presence. So deep is this fear that even the strongest people begin to shake and tremble. The hamatsa dancer, for example, has as a basic part of his dance step a trembling gesture meant to indicate the potency of the power (of Man Eater) that is possessing his frail human body. 2 The Kwakiutl consider experiencing noumenal fear to be a basic part of all hu mans' lives, occurring not once or twice in a lifetime, but many hundreds of times; in dances, feasts, meals, visions, dreams, fasts, in short, in all ceremonial activities.