Substance and Seduction: Ingested Commodities in Early Modern Mesoamerica

Abstract

This edited volume, written by historical anthropologists, archaeologists, and not a few historians, makes a wonderful addition to the growing literature on commodities, food, and drugs in Latin American history. In some sense, these topics are all children of Sidney W. Mintz's field-making Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985). While historians, a lot of them “recovering” economic historians, tend to focus on what Mintz regards as the “outside meanings” that shape goods and consumption habits—political economies, commodity chains, larger, even imperial, power structures—the scholars in this volume are developing the harder-to-capture “inside meanings” of goods. Yet these essays go beyond vague longings for culture, identities, or hybrid material life. They shift the conversation from political economy to ideas about “ingestible commodities,” cultural enchantments and seductions, the interior or corporeal boundaries of colonialism, commodity succession, “thingyness,” and a myriad of sensory dimensions of colonialism and commodity culture. The menu of goods under study—sugar, aguardiente, pulque (maguey beer), peyote, chocolate, tobacco—may seem familiar enough to specialists, but the discoveries here are strikingly new and nuanced.The book starts off with a crisp but evocative foreword by Marcy Norton, a pioneer of this thinking in Atlantic perspective, followed by editors Kathyrn E. Sampeck and Stacey Schwartzkopf's introduction, punningly titled “Consuming Desires in Mesoamerica.” It nicely lays out the innovative conceptual lenses (thingyness, seduction, ingestibles) for looking at these commodities as well as more familiar if essential fascinations with questions of knowledge, economy, symbolism, and gender.Martin Nesvig, one of the historians here, begins with a chapter on “hallucinogens and cultural memory,” about colonial use of peyote buttons, mushrooms, and morning glory seed, pre-Columbian ritual substances suppressed as devilish by the Spanish crown. The chapter is lucid in two ways. First, Nesvig is able to periodize, from opaque and tattered sources, the usage of hallucinogens in colonial New Spain. Moreover, it seems that the use of these substances, long assumed by historians to be just forbidden or underground indigenous ritual goods, was spreading, by the seventeenth century, to groups of marginal creoles.Schwartzkopf's solo chapter, “Alcohol and Commodity Succession in Colonial Guatemala,” traces the pathways taken by native mead, Spanish wine, chicha beer, and sugar-based aguardiente among Mayan users from Postclassic times to the eighteenth century. Illustrating the use of ingestible commodities, he also reveals how each followed in the shadow of successive meanings of related goods. I wondered if this march was mostly a classic intensification of alcoholic goods.Chapter 3, by Sampeck and Jonathan Thayn, is aptly subtitled “A Cartography of Chocolate Colonialism.” Just when we thought there was nothing more to say about cacao, one of the most studied of Mesoamerica's colonial commodities, Sampeck and Thayn find it. The diversity of chocolate “tastes” was not simply rooted in its variety of precolonial regions, cultures, and recipes. The authors' remarkable and able use of geographic information systems analysis closely tracks the global provenance and flows of new spices and flavorings in the evolving hybrid of chocolate. Less convincing is the framing recourse to sociologist Erving Goffman.Joel Palka's chapter about the Lacandon Maya nicotine trade is a revelation, with a nod to classic anthropological exchange. Even isolated groups like the Lacandon, lowland tropical refugees from the Spanish state, used their unique native tobaccos to create a notable niche in colonial commerce and consumption. The chapter exudes a sensory feel for Lacandon smokes and their ethnographic present. As are many chapters in the book, it is also beautifully illustrated, as befits study of material culture.Joan Bristol, another historian, contributes on “pulque discourse in New Spain.” Long-dead colonial discourses conceal a paradoxical tie to pulque's present commoditized revival as a cosmic-race indigenous good. Colonial authorities actually lauded the purer qualities of pulque over other adulterated forms of alcohol or mixed mestizo-style consumption. A well-argued chapter, in the end I was not that surprised given New Spain's segregated caste system: pulque, like maize, could be good if within the republic of Indians.Chapter 6, by Guido Pezzarossi, concerns “sugar, alcohol, and biopolitics in colonial Guatemala.” Somewhat at odds with the agency acting up elsewhere in the book, he links Michel Foucault's well-trodden concept of biopower to documents and archaeological artifacts that relate to colonial authorities' control over local forms of sugar and alcohol making and trades by indigenous communities. The book's brief afterword by Carla D. Martin is suggestive of the “ethnographic,” “emotional” taste and gendered texture of the writings (pp. 176, 179).Such fine essays raise many conceptual questions. I, for one, was left wondering about how the concept of ingestible commodities adds to Mintz's own parallel category of early modern “drug foods,” essentially the same set of mild intoxicants or, in the case of sucrose itself, empty-calorie energy boosters. Or why not just consider them as (soft) drugs or intoxicants, consciousness-altering along with bodily shifting, the vital colonial American precursors to modern drug cultures? If so, Substance and Seduction makes a marked contribution to the field that Isaac Campos and I dubbed in this journal (vol. 95, no. 1) “the new drug history of the Americas.”In books about chocolate and sugar, it is customary to laud each chapter as a real treat. Indeed, this book proves how exceptionally well historical archaeologists and anthropologists write, one stilted exception aside, with evocative detail, beautifully construed narratives, and lucidly laid arguments. This well-integrated, daresay “seductive” volume is valuable for state-of-the-field grad seminars and commodity courses, and perhaps even as a complementary text in colonial Latin American or Atlantic history surveys.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.