Incorporating Culture: How Indigenous People Are Reshaping the Northwest Coast Art Industry by Solen Roth (review)

Incorporating Culture describes the business connections and social networks that link northwest coast artists, communities and markets. This is a story of capitalism: a capitalism that has been modified within the traditions and conventions of northwest coast potlatch economics. This rich ethnography describes the way in which the northwest coast artware industry has been transformed over more than one hundred years into "an Indigenous-led effort to harness capitalist means of production, distribution, and consumption for the purposes of cultural and economic sovereignty" (17).

Roth's is an original view of the northwest art market in Vancouver, British Columbia, which draws on fieldwork in Vancouver between 2006 and 2013. It is a contemporary, urban and business ethnography that revisits and reinvestigates topics found in earlier ethnographic work on potlatching and rank. With fieldwork that consisted of visiting with artists and business owners and attending exhibition openings and artist talks, Roth has produced a nuanced understanding of the interplay between artware production and distribution. In writing and researching as Roth does, Vancouver emerges as a hub for northwest coast artware.

The book depends on two highly elaborated and carefully deployed terms: artware and culturally modified capitalism. Artware is a catch-all term for a wide range of products that could be left blank but are, in this case, adorned with northwest coast motifs (9). These items are found in tourist shops and galleries, and are different but not entirely separate from art. Culturally modified capitalism refers to "the encounter between a capitalist market and the desire to protect culturally specific values and practices [that] results in an economic system that remains recognizably capitalist and yet bears the marks of transformation by local worldviews" (5). Roth points to parallels with culturally modified trees, an iconic marker of Indigenous presence and identity in many parts of the northwest coast. Just as a tree is modified by Indigenous Peoples through the harvesting and use of its wood and bark, the northwest coast artware market is modified by northwest coast economic and cultural practices; in both cases, changes perpetuate "Indigenous cultural heritage and ways of life" (173) As Roth shows, the economic tensions of production and protection, as well as consumption and preservation are epitomised by the artware market. Taken together, a strategic approach to cultural and economic continuity is illustrated.

Incorporating Culture has five chapters framed by an introduction and conclusion. Each chapter engages with a pair of ideas that points to the larger interplay of the local and global as well as the subtleties of capitalism in its conventional and modified forms. Chapter 1 tells of the participants in the artware industry, investigating topics including trust, racism, networked relationships and, drawing on the work of Anna Tsing, frictions within the industry.

Chapter 2 offers a fascinating presentation of the history of the artware market, describing the expansion of artware production in context of the history of twentieth-century colonialism in Canada and the efforts of the state to make Indigenous Peoples into better capitalists. The shift over time toward a greater inclusion of the interests of Indigenous stakeholders is an important observation.

Chapter 3 pairs the global and local and observes that the artware market indexes place and identity for Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples alike. Chapter 4 delves into the mechanics of the artware market to discuss notions of property and contracts, and stewardship and relationships, all of which point, once again, to competing and complementary interests stemming from Indigenous modifications of capitalist activities.

Chapter 5 is notable for its lengthy discussion of accumulation and redistribution as markers of potlatch economics and the implications of those processes for understanding the pressures on artists and business to "give back" and to "make one's name good" within their communities. Indeed, through the book, central concepts within northwest coast economic practices are explained and shared. These include reciprocity, redistribution, witnessing and potlatching. The intellectual context draws on the substantial use of northwest...