potlatch

How To Use potlatch In A Sentence

• American Indian practice of 'potlatch' - a ritual ceremony in which the chiefs of rival tribes competed to destroy ever greater quantities of their own possessions. Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph
• In the potlatches of the Chinook, Nootka, and other Pacific Northwest peoples, for example, chiefs vied to give the most blankets and other valuables.
• Known as the potlatch feast, it was an occasion on which some of the more affluent members of the tribe went so far as to bankrupt themselves in order to demonstrate the extent of their openhandedness. Death in Winter
• The curious custom of the "potlatch" -- a man invites his friends and neighbors to a gathering and makes them magnificent presents, his reputation being great in proportion to the extent of his gifts -- appears to be a device for laying up property; the host in his turn receives presents from friends and neighbors. Introduction to the History of Religions Handbooks on the History of Religions, Volume IV
• Take the widespread tribal custom of potlatch, for example, where gifts are exchanged between families or communities.
• Social Darwinism should be made to work in reverse - those that have too much should be forced to hold a potlatch and divest themselves of their loot with those who have nothing.
• Perhaps the most familiar example of a gift culture is that of the native Americans of the Pacific Northwest such as the Kwakiutl and their famous potlatch ceremonies.
• And on this chilly Friday afternoon, the group is creating button blankets, traditionally used in First Nations ceremonies such as the potlatch.
• Never a whimper; never a pick-me-up-and-carry me .... never a I-told-you-so," and, Tommy says, the Siwash woman told him, "I'd sooner be flat-bellied of hunger and be your woman, Tommy, than have a potlatch every day and be Chief George's klooch. “The way of a man with a maid may be too wonderful to know. . .”
• Fox holds a potlatch to signalize his marriage to Lit-Lit and she, "tearfully shy and frightened, is bedecked by her husband with a new calico dress, splendidly beaded mocassins, a gorgeous silk handkerchief over her raven hair, a purple scarf about her throat, brass earrings and finger-rings, and a whole pint of pinchbeck jewelry, including a Waterbury watch. “I, in the course of making my living by turning journalism into literature. . .”