Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology

256 Pages·1995·1.45 MB·English

by  Jordan Goodman

CONSUMING HABITS
CONSUMING HABITS
Drugs in History and Anthropology
Edited by
Jordan Goodman, Paul E.Lovejoy
and Andrew Sherratt
London and New York
First published 1995
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
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Editorial material © 1995 Jordan Goodman, Paul E.
Lovejoy and Andrew Sherratt;
individual chapters © respective author
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known
or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and
Anthropology
I. Goodman, Jordan
394.1409
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the
Library of Congress
ISBN 0-203-99316-0 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-09039-3 (Print Edition)
CONTENTS
List of figures and tables vi
Notes on contributors vii
Preface ix
INTRODUCTION: PECULIAR SUBSTANCES 1
Andrew Sherratt
1 ALCOHOL AND ITS ALTERNATIVES: SYMBOL AND 11
SUBSTANCE IN PRE-INDUSTRIAL CULTURES
Andrew Sherratt
2 COCA, BEER, CIGARS AND YAGÉ: MEALS AND ANTI- 47
MEALS IN AN AMERINDIAN COMMUNITY
Stephen Hugh-Jones
3 NICOTIAN DREAMS: THE PREHISTORY AND EARLY 66
HISTORY OF TOBACCO IN EASTERN NORTH
AMERICA
Alexander von Gernet
4 EFFICACY AND CONCENTRATION: ANALOGIES IN 88
BETEL USE AMONG THE FUYUGE (PAPUA NEW
GUINEA)
Eric Hirsch
5 KOLA NUTS: THE ‘COFFEE’ OF THE CENTRAL SUDAN 103
Paul E.Lovejoy
6 EXCITANTIA: OR, HOW ENLIGHTENMENT EUROPE 126
TOOK TO SOFT DRUGS
Jordan Goodman
7 FROM COFFEEHOUSE TO PARLOUR: THE 149
CONSUMPTION OF COFFEE, TEA AND SUGAR IN
NORTH-WESTERN EUROPE IN THE SEVENTEENTH
AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
Woodruff D.Smith
v
8 TOBACCO USE AND TOBACCO TAXATION: A 165
BATTLE OF INTERESTS IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE
Jacob M.Price
9 JAPAN AND THE WORLD NARCOTICS TRAFFIC 185
Kathryn Meyer
10 THE RISE AND FALL AND RISE OF COCAINE IN THE 204
UNITED STATES
David T.Courtwright
AFTERWORD 227
Jordan Goodman and Paul E.Lovejoy
Selected bibliography 233
Index 239
FIGURES AND TABLES
FIGURES
Figure 1 Food in Barasana society 59
Figure 2 Non-food in Barasana society 60
Figure 3 Marked and unmarked non-foods 61
TABLES
Table 1 Caffeine and theobromine in mild stimulants 103
Table 2 English/British tobacco exports to Spain, 1696–1775 173
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
David T.Courtwright is Professor and Chair of History at the University
of North Florida. He is the author of Dark Paradise: Opiate Addiction in
America before 1940 (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press,
1982) and other works on drug use and addiction. He is currently
writing a book about single men and social disorder in American
History.
Alexander von Gernet teaches anthropology at the University of Toronto.
His recent contributions include The construction of prehistoric
ideation’ (Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 1993, vol. 3, pp. 67–81).
His current research relates to archaeological and ethnohistorical theory,
and to the symbolic context of Amerindian tobacco use.
Jordan Goodman is Lecturer in International Economic History at the
University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. He is the
author of Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence (London,
Routledge, 1993) and is currently researching the history of
pharmaceutical research in Europe and the United States since 1800.
Eric Hirsch is a lecturer in social anthropology in the Department of
Human Sciences at Brunel University. He is the co-editor of Between
Place and Space: Landscape in Anthropological Perspective (Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 1995) and is currently completing a research
monograph based on his fieldwork in Papua New Guinea.
Stephen Hugh-Jones teaches social anthropology at the University of
Cambridge. He is the author of The Palm and the Pleiades (Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 1979) and is currently researching a book
on social and economic change in north-west Amazonia.
Paul E.Lovejoy is Professor of History at York University, Canada. He is
the co-author of Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in
Northern Nigeria, 1897–1936 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
1993) and other works on slavery, the kola and the salt trade. He is
viii
currently working on a history of slavery and the slave trade in
nineteenth-century West Africa.
Kathryn Meyer teaches East Asian history at Lafayette College. She has
written several articles on drug control policy and is currently
completing a co-authored book provisionally entitled Dirty Money: A
Study of the International Narcotics Traffic.
Jacob M.Price is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of
Michigan. In addition to many articles, his books touching on tobacco
include The Tobacco Adventure to Russia (1961), France and the
Chesapeake (Ann Arbor, Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 1973),
Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade (Cambridge, Mass.,
Harvard University Press, 1980) and Perry of London (Cambridge,
Mass., Harvard University Press, 1992).
Andrew Sherratt teaches archaeology and anthropology at the University
of Oxford where he is responsible for the prehistoric collections in the
Ashmolean Museum. He is a Fellow of Linacre College and a lecturer at
New College. A volume of his collected papers about prehistoric Europe
is to appear shortly from Edinburgh University Press.
Woodruff D.Smith teaches European history and currently serves as an
administrator at the University of Texas at San Antonio. His most recent
book is Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany, 1840–1920
(New York, Oxford University Press, 1991). He is currently writing a
book on the demand for overseas commodities in Europe, 1600–1800.
PREFACE
The essays in this volume focus on the history or anthropology of a group
of substances which are generally considered to be neither food nor
medicine, but have in common the fact that they are psycho-active—in the
sense that they alter, to a greater or lesser extent, the state of consciousness
of the user. While it has become customary to equate psychoactive
substances with ‘drugs’ as a category of illicit commodities, it should be
remembered that some of the world’s most widely consumed products,
such as tobacco, coffee, tea and cocoa, have these mind-altering properties.
Consumers of tobacco and coffee, for example, habitually self-administer
psychoactive compounds—nicotine and caffeine—in the most efficient
manner possible by smoking and drinking respectively. Although these are
both legal substances (tobacco’s status is currently contested), the
categories of licit and illicit are neither static nor rigid. Some substances
that are presently illegal in the West were legally consumed here not too
long ago: opium, cannabis, cocaine and LSD, for example. And the
opposite is true. In some times and places, both tobacco and coffee have
been classed as illicit commodities with heavy penalties for use or (in this
classification) abuse. Some substances, moreover, are classed as licit in one
culture and illicit in another: alcohol, for instance, is forbidden in Islamic
societies, but in most of the rest of the world it has usually been legally
available, at least to adult males. The boundary between illicit and licit is a
shifting and negotiable one, historically and cross-culturally. As Richard
Rudgley reminds us in his recent study, restrictions on psychoactive
substances embody the outcome of conflicts over who has access to the
means to alter consciousness and behaviour, such as bodily control. Such
proscriptions specify who is permitted to alter their state of consciousness
and under what circumstances. Which states of consciousness have been
encouraged, tolerated or forbidden have been culturally and politically
specific.
It is now generally recognized that the consumption of these substances
reaches back into prehistory and across most cultures. The issues that
historians and anthropologists raise about the production, distribution and
consumption of other goods and commodities are just as appropriate,