Sophie Coe and Michael Coe present our
first text that seems to place the commodity itself at the center of the narrative. In The
True History of Chocolate the question is not the development of global
capitalism, but instead how chocolate spread across the land. This is not to say that chocolate has
any sort of agency, it is certainly clear that people poses agency in this
text. Indeed, in some places of
the book, chocolate seems to be a minor detail that ties together an agglomeration
of vignettes on linguistics, botany, imperialism, aristology, religion, et
cetera.
If the focus of the Coes is on the
global spread of chocolate, rather than its movements in and out of various
scholarly topics, then it is most clear in their attempts to establish when
chocolate pierced a culture to become the célèbre of another court. This seems to lead to many instances
where The True History of Chocolate
chronicles a series of firsts. For
example in discussing when chocolate was consumed in Italy the Coes present a
few members of the nobility and a widely traveled merchant as the heroes.[1] This seems particularly unimportant,
not only because of the lack of evidence, but also because the first
importation does not necessarily lead to wide consumption. The credit, if there is any historical
significance to that credit, I suspect, belongs to a nameless mariner.
The story of a first in a
particular place seems to treat cultures a bounded entities. This type of approach to culture is
mutually exclusive with their earlier discussion of culture in general. In this type of approach, creolization,
is much more fluid and culture changes in its contact with other cultures. The Coes use this creole metaphor to
explain how conquistadores picked up a taste for chocolates in their contacts
with Mesoamericans. Although their
argument is more deductive than anything; the approach is more coherent with my
thought. This more fluid, less
anachronistic, notion of culture is reflected in the creative use of linguistic
evidence, and I suspect that these multiple approaches are the result of a work
written by two people.
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