领域：学术论文 · 社会科学

The paper begins with a discussion of feasting in small-scale societies and suggests that recognizing the manner of articulation of three particular variables-the scale of participation and financing, the frequency and structure of occurrence, and the food resources used-is an effective starting point for gauging how politically charged feasts may have been, the actual social role feasting may have played, and the variation in feasting practices across space and through time. I then present the evidence for feasting in the Southwest from A.D. 850 to present, focusing particular attention on these three variables. I conclude the paper with a case study that highlights feasting as a political resource that is linked with, but subordinate to, other resources of power, especially the control of rituals and of the knowledge necessary to perform them.
There are two sides to all communal behaviors: one that integrates and one that differentiates. Communal feasts are no exception. By their very nature, feasts bring people together to experience one of life's biological necessities in a communal, social manner. The communal exchange and sharing of food may be considered one of the most fundamental human transactions that, through social interaction and exchange, promotes social integration. This integrative aspect of feasting can have significant social and economic consequences. As Rappaport and Ford have noted, feasting can be an important mechanism for redistributing food among community members, and thus can be instrumental in promoting economic and social interdependence among community members. At the same time, to varying degrees, feasting can be an active context in which social hierarchy is established. Indeed, the hosting of feasts may be a particularly effective means through which to demonstrate one's economic and political abilities, and to engender prestige and the support of followers. Numerous aspects of feasting operate as public counting and ordering devices, which in turn reduce the vagueness of a social and political situation by promoting social comparison. For example, depending upon the quantity and quality of resources mobilized for communal feasts, and the frequency with which they are mobilized, feasting can be a quantitative measure of the abilities of the host as an efficient, skillful, vital, and generous leader. Since organizing and financing communal feasts often involves the cooperation of multiple individuals (e.g., communal hunts or large-scale domestic animal slaughters often precede communal feasts), large and elaborate feasts indicate that the host has control over the labor of others and is an efficient mobilizer of cooperative effort and, thus, a potential leader. Moreover, the degree to which the host successfully coordinates intercommunity participation at feasts is a particularly strong incentive for community allegiance and support, especially in situations involving supra-community alliances, exchange and marriage relations, conflict, and competition notes, "when food distributions are financed from outside，such as in many Highland New Guinea Big-man societies, abundance of food also is an indicator of a broad network of supportive social ties." Finally, if rare, exotic, or highly valued resources are presented and consumed in a feast, both the host's success as a procurer of these resources and, potentially, the host's control of sacred knowledge (i.e., the knowledge of how to acquire the exotic or rare resources) may be demonstrated by hosting a particularly successful feast.These display/performance aspects of communal feasting that promote social comparison operate in tandem with feasting's more fundamental capacity as a vehicle for engendering political support by creating debt-obligations through the unequal imparting of gifts and food). The creation of debt obligation is, in many anthropologists' eyes, a fundamental aspect of feasting that makes it a potent political vehicle .
However, indebtedness may not be an effective political resource unless there are social or technological mechanisms in place that allow for the monopolization of the resources necessary to finance a feast so that a number of potential followers incur debt without the means for repayment by either paying off the debt or financing their own feast. It is only under these conditions that feasts may be used effectively to amplify and maintain social differences over the long term (e.g., a generation), regardless of the productivity of the environment. In addition, financing a feast may place the host in considerable debt to the host's supporters, a situation that may actually lessen the status of the host as an independent leader. 
Communal feasting also may be part of healing ceremonies, which are not usually structured by ritual cycles but which must occur on a fairly regular basis to prevent or cure illness. The Blessingway ceremony of the Navajo, for example, involves the feeding of the audience, which can sometimes number in the thousandsThese points are addressed below.There is tremendous variation in what has been termed feasting in middle-range societies. Most discussions of this variation have been couched in terms of ideal "types".The approach taken here, while not denying the utility of types as analytical constructs, focuses more on three particular dimensions of feasting that can combine in a number of ways to produce a variety of social and economic effects: 1) the scale of participation and financing; 2) the frequency and structure of occurrence; and 3) the food resources used.
Communal feasts can range in scale from those in which a single household sponsors a feast for bilateral relatives or other households to those hosted by entire villages and offered to members of multiple communities. The scale of most communal feasts ranks somewhere between these two extremes. Among the Mae Enga and Chimbu of Highland New Guinea, feasts may be hosted by tribes (made up of clans), clans, subclans, or lineages. Many feasts in Puebloan communities are sponsored by multiple households within a community, with much of the community invited (or obligated) to participate . To a large extent, the means through which a feast is financed, and ultimately the purpose of the feast, determines its scale. Here it is useful to distinguish between household-level finance and supra-household finance . Assuming there are inherent limits on home production as a means of expanding the resource base of a feast, the establishment of social relations outside the lineage or household through sodality membership, marriage, exchange, or indebtedness all become paramount to hosting and financing largescale feasts. Postcontact Mae Enga big men of highland New Guinea, for example, may draw upon upwards of 2,000 followers for a single feast . The greater the scale of the feast, the greater the potential for prestige enhancement on the part of sponsors. Moreover, using feasting as a recurrent social practice to enhance prestige usually requires financing on a larger scale than that of the single household or lineage (Young 1985). Scale also may relate to whether feasts are primarily "intra-communal" or "inter-communal" affairs (although this distinction is often hard to make ethnographically.) Hayden (1995), for instance, delineates within-group feasts, which he terms "solidarity feasts," and between-group feasts, which are either "reciprocal" or "competitive" feasts. Reciprocal feasts function primarily to create alliances and promote cooperation among groups, while competitive feasts are hosted primarily to enhance the prestige, and political and economic support, of an aggrandizer and his/her followers or to negotiate and reaffirm extra-community political ties and agreement.Many within-group feasts have the principal effect of facilitating social integration or redistributing food among households within the village . Feasts of this type are usually financed by multiple households (often anonymously) and tend to be relatively non-competitive in nature. Compared to situations in which sponsors compete to enhance their prestige by contributing more to a feast than other sponsors, the inherent anonymity of, and lack of direct competition for, prestige in many intra-community integrative feasts tends to limit the quanitity of resources mobilized. In contrast, when feasts involve more than one community, cooperative effort on the part of village coresidents often facilitates the financing of larger and more elaborate feasts than is possible in intra-village contexts. It is in the context of inter-community (or large-scale) feasts that the prestige of aggrandizers becomes greatly enhanced relative to their followers.Much of the variation in occurrence of feasts is related to the degree to which feasting is regulated by the structure of ritual. Feasting often is associated with calendrical rituals that occur at prescribed times of the year. The kyanakwe feasting ceremony of the Zuni, for example, is held four times a year. Many feasts are held only once every several years. The Kaiko ritual of the Tsembaga of New Guinea may take place only once every 7 to 15 years . The scale of these feasts is smaller than that of unregulated or ad hoc feasts. Kaiko ritual feasts involve the participation of hundreds of people from several communities. Yet, over a year-long period of ritual feasting, only a hundred or so pigs may be killed by members of a single community. In contrast, the highly competitive, "less regulated" (in terms of scheduling) feasting of the Mae Enga of Highland New Guinea may involve the killing of up to 240 pigs per feast, and there may be several feasts per year, depending upon the productivity (and production) of feasting resources, as well as the number of aspiring leaders competing for prestige . Thus, ad hoc feasts are often geared more toward the enhancement of prestige than are feasts that are highly structured by a ritual cycle. Moreover, the feasibility of ad hoc feasts as aggrandizing vehicles may be restricted by the potential of the subsistence economy to generate a surplus . Societies with seasonally structured subsistence abundances may be restricted to feasting in the contexts of seasonally structured ritual feasts. This is especially the case in the context of the unpredictable yields of hunting and gathering and dry-farm agriculture.
The scheduling of feasts associated with rite-ofpassage rituals, such as weddings and initiation rituals, and with life-crisis events, such as mourning rituals, may not be "regulated" to the same degree as feasts connected with a ritual cycle. Mourning rituals, for instance, can take place months or years after a death, allowing a family to collect the necessary food and goods. Mortuary feasts are indeed prime aggrandizing events in various parts of North America and Melanesia . Initiation rites also may be postponed until there are enough initiates (i.e., the wherewithal to hold appropriately elaborate ceremonies) . On the other hand, male initiation rites in many large-scale New Guinean societies were highly regulated in the sense of occurring at regular intervals. These ceremonies are conducted by part-time ritual specialists (hatathli) but are hosted by the patient and the patient's family. Thus, this feasting is not competitive, but an obligation of the patient and his entourage. In contrast to feasts hosted by self-selected aggrandizers, the fact that the host is "chosen" more or less randomly (i.e., whoever gets sick) creates a situation in which feasting operates to distribute rather than consolidate responsibility, and perhaps prestige, and serves as an element in a larger ritual structure that operates to maintain community and tribal integration。In contrast, in New Guinea, feasts associated with healing ceremonies can be an avenue for prestige-enhancement on the part of big men. The relatives of the "victim" may organize and finance the feast, and particularly competitive individuals can search out opportunities (i.e., sick relatives) to exploit by feasting.

翻译考点：
考点1:"social comparison“推荐翻译为”社会攀比“
考点2:"Big-man societies“必须翻译为”头人社会“，人类学专业术语，固定译法
考点3:"aggrandizer“推荐翻译为”夸富者“，该词在文中偏贬义，对于该词的翻译需要体现出“是通过财富、权利提升地位，提高自身声望和影响力”的意思；且不可译为“扩张者”（表意不明确）
考点4:" initiation rituals“推荐翻译为”成人礼“
考点5："victim"推荐翻译为“患者”