The Elite Potlatch: Gifts, Girls, and Distinction Among the Global VIP

As income and wealth concentration reach historic highs, sociological research on inequality has begun to focus on the social and cultural lives of the world’s “one percent.”  This article presents rare ethnographic data on spending behaviors among the increasingly global elite and documents how the nouveau riche convert their economic capital into symbolic and social capital.  Central to such conversions are gift giving rituals and exchanges of women.  Based on two years of observations at high-end nightclubs in the global VIP leisure circuit, as well as 70 interviews with club organizers and guests, I document how gift giving is a central condition of conspicuous consumption among nightclub patrons, who distinguish amongst themselves through the display of beautiful women and the display, wasting, and gifting of high-priced bottles of alcohol in ritualized potlatches.  I develop the concept of girl capital to describe women as a resource for status-seeking men.  Club promoters work to accumulate and mobilize girl capital through the circulation of gifts, perks, favors and intimacies to establish reciprocity; thus, free goods sustain relationships between paid brokers (men) and unpaid women, thus masking the labor behind conspicuous leisure and framing economic relationships as friendships.  Additionally, women are themselves circulated as gifts among men, largely through their symbolic presence on display.  Thus this article documents two levels through which gifting practices sustain structural gender inequalities and uphold a traffic in women system:  gifts to recruit women and women as gifts.  This article also demonstrates how gifting practices are fundamental to stratification among elites.  Lastly, this article genders elite space by revealing the logics of gendered worth within a contemporary high-society arena, one which recognizes and rewards economic capital for men but bodily capital for women.