Consuming Habits: Global and Historical Perspectives on How Cultures Define Drugs

Drugs in History and Anthropology

Jordan Goodman, Andrew Sherratt, Paul E. Lovejoy, Jordan Goodman, Jordan Goodman, Andrew Sherratt, Andrew Sherratt, Paul E. Lovejoy, Paul E. Lovejoy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134093625
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Covering a wide range of substances, including opium, cocaine, coffee, tobacco, kola, and betelnut, from prehistory to the present day, this new edition has been extensively updated, with an updated bibliography and two new chapters on cannabis and khat. Consuming Habits is the perfect companion for all those interested in how different cultures have defined drugs across the ages.

Psychoactive substances have been central to the formation of civilizations, the definition of cultural identities, and the growth of the world economy. The labelling of these substances as 'legal' or 'illegal' has diverted attention away from understanding their important cultural and historical role. This collection explores the rich analytical category of psychoactive substances from challenging historical and anthropological perspectives.

1

ALCOHOL AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

Symbol and substance in pre-industrial cultures¹

Andrew Sherratt

CONSUMPTION RITUALS AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL IDENTITY

Food and drink are the most fundamental, if short-lived, media of material culture. The serving and sharing of these essential elements make up one of the central daily activities of the human domestic group. It is the everyday practices of who provides sustenance for whom, and in what circumstances that give family relationships and social classifications their substance; and it is here, both through the provision of daily bread and the rarer occasions of sacrifice, that the major metaphors of religious thinking have their origin.

Human diet is notoriously broad; our dentition resembles that of the omnivorous pig rather than that of specialized carnivores or herbivores. Even the poisonous roots of bitter manioc, the pungent fruits of peppers and the bulbs of the onion family have their role in the spectrum of human uses of plants.² The selection of sources of nourishment from the environment is an infinitely variable set of decisions that is only partly explicable on grounds of calorific rationality; the choice of consumables and the transformation of edible resources into food is at the heart of the cultural process. The harvesting of plants and the killing of animals are not simply practical activities but occasions for rites of passage in the production of eatable substances.³ The use of fire to break down resistant tissues and release nourishment is itself a uniquely human characteristic, practised for over a million years; and its consistent application to the preparation of food serves to reinforce a separation of the raw from the cooked, the natural substance from its cultural transform, and makes possible the infinite varieties of cuisine.⁴

Food is not simply a system of alimentation, then, but also a system of non-verbal communication; and its syntax can be illuminated by the kinds of structural analysis that have been applied to mythology and visual art.⁵ Only certain products and combinations are contextually appropriate, either to a society as a whole or to certain groups, gatherings and individuals within it. At its most basic level, this involves cultural definitions not only of food itself but of what constitutes a ‘meal’ or other forms of consumption event. At the same time, however, it has a socio-economic dimension in that these choices are constrained both by natural availability and social access. Not everyone in a given society is in a position to obtain the materials and appurtenances necessary for the more elaborate modes of presentation.⁶ Different practices are appropriate to different social positions; typically these involve classifications of age, gender and status, membership of particular groups and notions of exclusiveness or hospitality between them. They also involve different degrees of ostentation and formality, and the use of a wide range of items of material culture concerned with the preparation and serving of food and drink. To consume a certain substance in a certain way embodies a statement, but this assertion can be either accepted or controverted by others involved in the process of social reproduction. ‘Acceptable practice’ thus evolves through a constant network of negotiations and serves to define the identities of individuals and groups. It is the social, rather than the biological, interpretation that makes sense of Ludwig Feuerbach’s old aphorism – der Mensch ist was er ißt (‘man is what he eats’).

This process operates at several levels, including both the formal and the informal definition of groups, allowing strategies for the inclusion or exclusion of individuals through the use of characteristic ‘marking rituals’.⁷ At the domestic level, this may be no more than the prevalent conception of how everyday acts are properly done – Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus;⁸ in larger communities or associations it takes on greater formality in rarer and more explicitly symbolic occasions. Participation in such activities is often a defining characteristic of membership of these larger social groups, and the form of public consumption itself is often emblematic of their identity, constitution and structure.⁹ Ritualized forms of consumption may be explicitly religious acts, as in the Christian Eucharist or the complex wine-offerings to the ancestors in the elaborate bronze vessels of Shang and Zhou dynasty China. Such overtly symbolic uses help to fix the meanings of a wider range of social ceremonies and hospitable occasions, when eating and drinking may be combined with other forms of performance and recitation – as in the Polynesian kava-ceremony or the Greek symposion.¹⁰ In these more fluid social circumstances, entertainment involving eating and drinking may become a competitive arena of social display (both in the provision of food and in the syntax of its use¹¹) as appropriate groupings, boundaries and relative standings are actively negotiated. The choice and combination of particular items of food and drink thus embody notions of status and value, as well as conceptions of identity and belonging, whether actual or desired.

It is not surprising, therefore, that the word ‘consumption’ should denote not only the process of eating and digesting food but also the whole social arena of using material culture,¹² from its acquisition to the abandonment of its residues, over a whole range of societies from the ethnographic to the capitalist¹³ – much as ‘taste’ is extended to other forms of social discrimination.¹⁴ The consumption of food is a paradigm for understanding the ‘consumption’ of other materials, goods and services. Its constant physical necessity, and the variety of experiences which it encompasses, make it an especially useful medium for apprehending the ways in which societies and cultures are constituted and the manner in which they change.

A particularly relevant instance is offered by the way in which Western societies since the sixteenth century have accommodated the whole diversity of new plant products made available by the colonial experience (some of which are described in more detail by Goodman and Smith in Chapters 6 and 7 of this volume), which formed an important part of what has been described as the ‘consumer revolution’of the eighteenth century.¹⁵ These recent examples offer clues to the ways in which substance and symbol interact and provide opportunities for the acquisition of contextual meanings. Their absorption into Western culture and ultimately into global consumerism has involved a structural accommodation to earlier practices centred on the use of various forms of alcohol. Considering only the products consumed in liquid form, it is clear that they have given rise to a whole set of graded consumption rituals and contextually appropriate usages, based on perceived oppositions such as those between wine and beer, tea and coffee, as well as various forms of sugar and chocolate (among many others). These aligned with other category distinctions: inebriant versus stimulant, cold versus hot, silver versus ceramic. From an archaeological and art-historical point of view, it should be noted that each of these substances was associated with its own material culture, in the form of particular vessels and materials appropriate for their serving and consumption: the adoption (and adaptation) of ‘China’ porcelain for tea is a case in point. From a sociological perspective, what is interesting is the way in which they came to embody statements and aspirations. Since wine drinking was so closely associated with traditional aristocratic culture, the ‘cups/That cheer¹⁶ but not inebriate’ (William Cowper, A Winter Evening, 1785) came to be an obvious symbol of middle-class revolt against the values of the ancien régime (as, incidentally, was opposition to hunting and the warrior aristocracy’s cult of the horse).¹⁷ Economic changes were a fundamental part of this process, but its operation cannot simply be understood in economic terms: ‘the use of commodities such as sugar, coffee and tea is not simply a sign of more “real” or “basic” socioeconomic changes but an active process of cultural construction in itself’.¹⁸ Rather, the use of these consumables became ‘one of a number of significant elements of a cultural pattern that had meaning because it both signified and constituted the respectability of the people who participated in it.… All of these things constituted a demand for respect.’¹⁹ Food and drink embody not only statements, but also rhetorical statements.

In this perspective, the introduced novelties of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are only one chapter in the more general transformation of European societies which had been in process since the later Middle Ages.²⁰ The growth of courtly society and the formation of new foci of power were accompanied by the elaboration of eating practices and entertainment which replaced the quantitative contrasts of ‘feast and fast’ with a more subtle and differentiated cuisine.²¹ These practices provided a model for a broadening class of bourgeois imitators, in which the contrary principles of social distancing and wider recruitment were played out: as spices became more accessible to the bourgeoisie, so aristocratic tables emphasized game and natural flavourings instead, and placed a greater stress on the style of eating.²² These processes, too, had their material culture concomitants, in the form of a wider range of eating equipment, with a proliferation of tablewares such as maiolica, as well as forks, linen napkins and tablecloths.²³

The choice of foods and drinks, therefore, and their manner of preparation and serving, is fundamental to the definition – and, indeed, the creation – of social groups and classes. While it is not unique in these attributes, which it shares with many other forms of material and oral culture, it has the double significance (like poetry) of being a form of satisfaction both in itself and in what it conveys. Being perishable and constantly consumed, foods and drinks must be constantly produced, so that they are continuing elements of the relations of production and distribution: a continuous flow around the networks of exchange. As a commodity, they can generate wealth; as a possession, they embody value; in their consumption, they express the values embodied in them. Moreover, if the consumption of food or drink also affords some additional experience (if it has behavioural as well as nutritive effects) then it carries a further importance both in the sensations that it gives and the cultural significance attributed to them.²⁴ It is these properties which explain the cultural prominence of substances such as alcohol²⁵ and its alternatives, and indeed of the whole variety of psychoactive substances which have been incorporated into human culture and diet. It follows from the analysis presented above, however, that the meanings associated with consumption of these substances are not static. Everyday practices and explicitly symbolic usages will vary according to the constitution of the social group and may be tactically employed as a formation and maintenance. There can be no simple equation between particular acts of consumption and a single ideology or set of meanings. The history of psychoactive substances is a continuing process of transformation, involving complex patterns of incorporation, interaction and opposition. The remainder of this chapter attempts to exemplify some of these principles in relation to Old World uses of alcoholic drinks, and to situate them in a wider comparative context.

THE SOCIAL USES OF PSYCHOACTIVE SUBSTANCES

The use of psychoactive products covers a spectrum of practices which from a modern, Western point of view might be described as religious, medical and secular. Where only one such substance is available to a society, it may indeed combine all three aspects – though ‘secular’ uses are likely to be subject to contextually appropriate use and prescription. Isolated and archaic societies may have just one such privileged plant, as with pitcheri²⁶ among certain Australian aboriginal tribes. More complex societies, in contact with a diversity of neighbouring groups, are likely to acquire several such substances, especially since their high value and low bulk make them highly appropriate as commodities for long-distance exchange and trade, well illustrated in the case of kola.²⁷ In these circumstances their uses are likely to separate into different spheres of consumption, with some occupying a ritually prominent and highly circumscribed context (perhaps echoed in lesser everyday rituals of hospitality) others, for instance, a medicinal or pleasure-giving role. Stephen Hugh-Jones’ discussion of the complementary meanings assigned to coca, tobacco and yagé in a South American context in Chapter 2 in this volume is a good illustration of these subtleties. In urban societies, with their more widespread contacts, a great variety of such substances may be used, each in a different context and social setting.

It is important, therefore, that evidence for the employment of substances such as opium or cannabis at various times in the past should not immediately be interpreted as an indication either of profound ritual significance or of widespread employment for largely hedonistic purposes: they may simply belong to the materia medica. Nevertheless, even this latter catego...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: peculiar substances
• 1 Alcohol and its alternatives: symbol and substance in pre-industrial cultures
• 2 Coca, beer, cigars and yagé: meals and anti-meals in an Amerindinian community
• 3 Nicotian dreams: the prehistory and early history of tobacco in eastern North America
• 4 Betelnut ‘bisnis’ and cosmology: a view from Papua New Guinea
• 5 Kola nuts: the ‘coffee’ of the central Sudan
• 6 Excitantia: or, how enlightenment Europe took to soft drugs
• 7 From coffeehouse to parlour: the consumption of coffee, tea and sugar in north-western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
• 8 Tobacco use and tobacco taxation: a battle of interests in early modern Europe
• 9 Globalizing ganja: the British Empire and international cannabis traffic c. 1834 to c. 1939
• 10 Japan and the world narcotics traffic
• 11 The rise and fall and rise of cocaine in the United States
• 12 Building castles of spit: the role of khat in work, ritual and leisure
• Afterword
• Selected bibliography
• Index