The Formation and Protection of Property Rights among the Southern Kwakiutl Indians

Abstract

THIS essay is about economics, anthropology, and law. I use the historical context of the Southern Kwakiutl (kwaikd[y]uid'l) Indians following contact with European civilization to test the relevance of economic theory to primitive societies. When recorded contact with the Southern Kwakiutl was first made along the north Pacific coast of North America, they were found to have established a curious reciprocal exchange system called potlatching. Since that time, potlatching has received considerable attention from ethnographers and anthropologists but virtually none from economists. I argue in this essay that the Southern Kwakiutl Indians used the potlatch system to maintain exclusive property rights in their most important capital asset and main source of wealth, the salmon fishery. In so doing, I demonstrate that recognizing the structure of property rights as endogenous-that is, at the discretion of the participants greatly enhances our understanding of primitive societies. In general, economic theory has a great deal of power in explaining the institutions and behavior of primitive man. The Kwakiutl potlatch has been described as "the ostentatious and dramatic distribution of property by the holder of a fixed, ranked and