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 Routledge is an International Thomson Publishing company This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” 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,