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Stewart has made is his locating Indian villages and trails with respect to modern landmarks. Three of the five appendices are devoted directly to this purpose. The canons of professional scholarship are observed in the excellent notes, and the bibliography will lead the interested reader to many of the primary ethnohistoric sources for the area.

Feasting with Mine Enemy: Rank and Ex- change Among Northwest Coast Soci- eties. ABRAHAM ROSMAN and PAULA RUBEL. New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1971. 221 pp., charts, diagrams, tables, bibliography, index. $10.00 (cloth).

Reviewed by JOHN W. ADAMS and ALICE KASAKOFF

Smithsonian Urgent Anthropology

Although the subtitle describes this book as being about rank and exchange, the cen- tral focus is on marriage structures. The authors have applied, in rather literal fash- ion, the ideas of elementary and complex structures devloped by Lhi-Strauss to data which is notoriously fragmentary and dif- ficult, to arrive at a model of a “potlatch- type” society, defined by its having rank which is inherited, but which must be vali- dated by a distribution of property.

Thus they postulate a system of mayu- &ma alliances for the Tsimshian, FaSiDa marriage among the Tlingit and Haida, and marriage based upon options (i.e., “complex structures”) for the Bella Coola, Kwakiutl, and Nootka. They have made an extensive search through the published literature and have explored many sets of unpublished fieldnotes to assemble pertinent facts, but the data is simply not substantial enough to support their conclusions. They have not, moreover, done fieldwork, for they believe that too much of these systems has dis- appeared, despite continued reports that several of these groups still potlatch nowa- days. We have spent the past five years studying the Gitksan (an up-river group of Tsimshian) who have managed to retain their matrilineal organization, corporate groups, much of their religious beliefs, and who continue to feast extensively. And in our

fieldwork we assembled from church records, Indian Agency files, and from in- formants themselves a file of some 5300 people, going back to 1830, which have been identified in substantial quantity as to phratry, House affiliation, territory, resi- dence, as well as marriage patterns. It is from the perspective of this data that we wish to criticize Feasting with Mine Enemy.

In support of their contention that the Tsimshian have a mayudama patterns, Rosman and Rubel are unable to find any direct evidence, and look primarily at the structure of the potlatch for confirmation. They find that the principal groups may be characterized as “father’s people” and “son’s people” (who are the hosts) and assume that for the Tsimshian, as for all Northwest coast peoples, hosts feast affines. We have found no evidence in our marriage files for mayu- dama relationships; in fact, rates of marriage to cousins is low (Kasakoff 1973). This means that in the potlatch-as our data on them bear out-the host is feasting the “father’s lineage” of his predecessor, not his own fatner’s group, and that the feast actual- ly marks the extinction of a relationship, not another act in a continuing series of presta- tions. Our potlatch data further reveal that the contributors as a group include all the people who share rights to the host’s re- sources, including the spouses who are at that moment using them, so that potlatching really has nothing to do with marriage ties in the sense in which Rosman and Rubel assert. For another example, among Kwakiutl some feasts are initiated by the gift of a copper from the father-in-law to his son-in-law, by which he buys back his daughter. The ex- son-in-law sells the copper and uses the proceeds to give a potlatch for his son, to which he invites his ex-father-in-law and his group. After the feast, he often re-marries his former wife. Clearly we have a case here of an attempt at distinguishing the child of a marriage who has potential rights in two sets of resources as a member of his father’s group, even at the cost of divorce to do it. Rosman and Rubel accept Levi-Strauss’ premise that bilateral societies like the Kwakiutl cannot have elementary structures. But Fox (1962) has shown how easy it is to derive a model of marriage from their myth and ritual very like an elementary structure (whatever the actual marriages might look like on the ground).

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The discussion of Tlingit and Haida mar- riage is similarly marred by lack of proper data. The one published siudy with better figures-Rosemary Allen’s on the Alaskan Haida (1954)-has been overlooked, but it happens to refute the authors’ theory. More perplexing is their treatment of what useful data they have found. They dismiss a low rate of sister-exchange among Tlingit, which their figures show to have a frequency of roughly 3% (pp. 41-42) as an exception, but accept a rate of 3.5% for marriage within the Kwakiutl numaym as a legitimate pattern (p. 47). Similarly, they suggest that only mar- riages of chiefs need be of the preferred type for the Northern groups to exhibit ele- mentary structures (p. 181), but dismiss evidence of MoBroDa marriage among Tlingit as an unimportant pattern ex- emplified only by chiefs (pp. 39-40, 190).

They do not cite the considerable sec- ondary literature, spawned by Lhvi-Strauss, which utilizes statistics. If they had done so, they would have realized the great difficul- ties posed by raw data on marriage, for it is not enough to accept these at face value without first inquiring what the rates of availability of certain types of kin for mar- riage really were when the marriages were made. Our conclusion from extensive testing of Gitksan data is that the elementary struc- tures exist only in the conscious models, and that actual marriage patterns there are com- plex. Other difficulties raised by their review of the data are the lack of any discussion of kin terms, especially whether those terms reflect genealogical reckoning or alliance groups-surely a vital and contentious focus of attention in all studies of alliance-and adequate precision in the use of such terms as “lineage,” “clan,” “House,” “Side,” and so on; their lack of clarity in this regard renders their argument almost unintelligible.

There is not space here to go through all their data, but we may set out a few tenta- tive conclusions that we have reached about the social organization of Northwest coast groups as a reference to another point of view (Adams 1973). First, all these societies are bilateral in that they recognize ties to both “sides” of the family and rights to at least two sets of resources. Second, potlatch- ing identifies participants who are seeking to validate a particular status with a certain set of resources. Third, these societies are all

organized as sets of resource-owning cor- porations which may contain two or more (often unrelated) lineages of differing rank. They are not descent groups. Whether they recruit their personnel matrilineally, patri- lineally, or ambilineally has no effect on this aspect of their organization. Fourth, the most general rule of marriage is that no one should marry anyone else who shares rights to the same resources. The only instances of kin marriage that are adequately docu- mented occurred when one of the parties had changed his affiliation to a corporate group (typically by adoption), or where the succession was changing within one of the two groups and a new and biologically un- related lineage was taking over the positions of “father’s people.” Fifth, this means, in effect, that Northwest coast peoples do not feast affines as such, although affines may be in attendance as guests. One never feasts people with whom one shares property. Sixth, the corporate groups are institutional- ized as sets of “perpetual statuses” with perpetual rights to certain resources, but the effect of variability in demographic rates is that lineages which are entitled to control resources frequently die out and “outsiders” must be brought in to fill the vacant posi- tions, hence the peculiar feature of the potlatch-type society which Rosman and Rubel point out: status is inherited but must be validated by a distribution of property. The guests to whom the food and money are given witness the proceedings and, by ac- cepting the gifts, acknowledge the right of the claimant to the status as well as the relative rankings of all other potential claim- ants. Seventh, all marriages are “complex” because they all involve strategies of trying to improve one’s rights to resources as well as trying to build coalitions which will furnish mutual support for these claims.

Rosman and Rubel are at their best when discussing the strategies of complex marriage in the Southern groups and in their argu- ments as to why FaSiDa marriage is a theo- retically possible form at all, as is MoBroDa marriage in a matrilineal society. But the book suffers for lack of a specific problem. No reason is given as to why it might be interesting to study these groups, nor why the model of a “potlatch-type” society might lead to important conclusions. They promise further work with the model in

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comparative studies, two of which have ap- peared (1970, 1971), but this is model- building of the “butterfly-collecting” sort. The central importance of Northwest coast studies at the moment is twofold: first, we have sufficient data, really for the first time, to test out some of the ideas about ele- mentary structures which Levi-Strauss pro- posed, as well as enough to go far beyond his ideas using efficient statistical tests on actual data instead of only by simulation (valuable as that is); and, second, we can hazard some guesses about the relationship of these forms to ecological processes, for we are beginning to get reports from archeologists (e.g., Mac- Donald 1969) that far from being recent, many of these societies are 3500 to 4000 years old with dwellings being rebuilt in unbroken continuity on the same sites throughout this time, in many instances. In this perspective, perpetual resource-owning groups through which peoples flowed as demographic variability caused some lineages to expand and hive-off to take up vacant statuses in other corporations where lineages died off, is a cogent ethnographic model to explain how these societies could have per- sisted so long in time. Potlatching helps regulate this flow, and by the competition which it engenders, facilitates the redistribu- tion of people to the resources owned by the perpe t u a1 corporations. Unfortunately, though concerned with forms of marriage, and with the rankings associated with the potlatch, Rosman and Rubel have neither a usable theoretical perspective nor enough ethnographic data to elucidate the nature of Northwest coast social organization, let alone relationships between rank and ex- change.

References Cited

Adams, John W. 1973 The Gitskan Potlatch, Toronto:

Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Allen, Rosemary

1954 Patterns of Preferential Marriage Among Alaskan Haidas. Anthropologi- cal Papers of the University of Alaska 2:195-201.

Fox, James J. 1962 Kin and Affine among the Kwak-

iutl. B.A. Honors thesis. Department of anthropology. Harvard University.

Kasakoff, Alice 1973 Uvi-Strauss’ Idea of the Social

Unconscious: The Problem of Ele- mentary and Complex Structures in Gitksan Marriage Choice. I n Perspec- tives in StructuralismL Ino Rossi, Ed. New York: Dutton (in press).

1 9 6 9 Preliminary Culture Sequence from the Coast Tsimshian Area, British Columbia. Northwest Anthropological Research Notes 3:240-254.

MacDonald, George

Rubel, Paula, and A. Rosman 1970 Potlatch and Sagali: The Structure

of Exchange in Haida and Trobriand Societies. Transaction of the New York Academy of Sciences, Series 2,

1971 Potlatch and Hakari: An Analysis of Maori Society in Terms of the Potlatch Model. Man 6:660-673.

32 : 7 32-742.

Ethnohistory in Southwestern Alaska and the Southern Yukon: Method and Con- tent. MARGARET LANTIS, ed. Studies in Anthropology, 7. Lexington: Univer- sity of Kentucky Press, 1970. vii + 311 pp., figures, illustrations, maps, tables, chapter references, index. $9.75 (cloth).

Reviewed by CHARLES C . HUGHES Michigan State University

This is more like two books than one, the first largely concerned with telling how to do it, and the second showing what can be done. The subject matter is ethnohistory and about half of the book is the result of a symposium at the 1967 annual meeting of the American Society for Ethnohistory in which the several authors spoke to the point of defining the field, work in progress, and methodological problems involved in trying to exact convergent truth value from such variegated data frames as archeological find- ings, ethnographic data, written documents of various types, oral “ethnohistory,” and myths and legends. The authors of these several chapters, all specialists in Arctic and sub-Arctic anthropology, are Robert E. Ackerman, James W. VanStone, Joan B. Townsend, Catherine McClellan, and Mar- garet Lantis, who authors the second half of the book and serves as editor.

In speaking of contents, it is necessary to address the two different parts of the book