The potlatch is a festival
or ceremony
practiced among Indigenous
peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. At these gatherings a
family or hereditary
leader hosts guests in their family's house and hold a feast for
their guests. The main purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution
and reciprocity
of wealth.
The potlatch, as practiced by the
indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, seemed like such a
sensible way to deal with our poss that, if we don't watch out, can
possess us in turn. So imagine my surprise when I came across a
version of the potlatch in the most unlikely place: the streets of
Budapest.
It turns out that the authorities in
Budapest designate a day for a massive trash pickup, which means that
all the apartment dwellers, and there are hundreds of thousands of
them, get to dump their unwanted things into huge piles along the
often narrow sidewalks (and there are an endless number of these
snaking sidewalks) over the course of a couple of days.
One Friday during this September, I
witnessed the sprouting of small mounds of discarded clothing, books,
cardboard, pots, mops, you name it. Then a couple of hours later, the
mounds grew, as more substantial objects were heaped on them.
At this
point, I noticed small groups of men, mostly Roma, settling in for
what looked like a long haul on discarded couches, chairs, and on
thoroughly abused mattresses.
By Saturday morning, the piles along
the streets where I was staying grew so large that they threatened to
block access to pedestrians along the sidewalk. But that wasn't to
last long, as slowly, people, other than the Roma, started to wade
through the piles, picking up and examining objects, some of which
they then hauled away in small batches. Not so the Roma, who waited
for the small trucks to pull up, which they then loaded with the
broken furniture and the seeming worthless piles of detritus to the
gills.
By Saturday night, the piles have
diminished considerably from what they were only hours before. Gone
were too the groups of men smoking and socializing on broken
furniture, all the while watching the things to which they had laid
claim earlier.
(strategic browsing of goods with remote assistance, via cell phone, apparently)
(headless as they are, even these two found a new home within hours of their decampment -- apparently)
By the time we got up Sunday morning,
the sidewalks were empty once again, save for an odd half-emptied can of paint, too toxic even for the pickup crew,
here and there.
