“The mimesis brought about by the Golden Potlatch was decidedly imperfect. From the outset its intent, I think, was not to create a perfect copy, but instead to borrow from the idea of the potlatch for different objectives. The festival was the public performance of a larger narrative about economic prosperity (always already from a prospector’s/settler’s perspective). It was a form of mimetic excess framed by individual desire for wealth and power made possible by the conjuring of modern-day capitalism. Perhaps to fully enter modernity it was necessary for Seattle to perform this mimesis, to experience “the freedom to live reality as really made-up.” It was in the moment of creative freedom and a quite liberal bastardization of “other” economic values—fuelled by generalized understandings of the potlatch—that the Golden Potlatch achieved some of Marcel Mauss’s proposition for hybridized economies brought forth in his conclusion to the book The Gift. In his words: “These concepts of law and economies that it pleases us to contrast: liberty and obligation; liberality, generosity, and luxury, as against savings, interest, and utility—it would be good to put them in the melting pot once more.” Mauss argues for the re-recognition of the value of reciprocity and exchange, something that, for him, forms the very basis of social life, and by extension, social values.”
