Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures

James notes Norton’s weakness in her efforts to connect chocolate and tobacco to the rise of European absolutism.  This is clear is her discussion of salt, where she glosses over the crown’s monopoly on salt.  Salt might provide a clearer, and earlier, example of a commodity’s role in the development of states.  However, this is a subset of her other argument in the ninth chapter, that the state’s association with tobacco vis à vis it’s granting monopoly privileges, legitimized the vice good.  This is an interesting take, but I am not familiar enough with how Europeans during the era related to the state to be sure of its veracity.

Norton’s overall argument is much more compelling.  She challenges previous efforts to explain the spread of chocolate and tobacco through biological determinism or commodity acculturation.  She argues that, in the New World, Europeans adopted these commodities through direct contact with their practitioners, in spite of earlier disgust with the specific commodities and a general disdain for Amerindian culture. Perhaps the context for this is best explained as cultural immersion.  Then, some Europeans returned to the continent and their demand brought about the first trade in chocolate and tobacco.  She also makes innovated use of sailors as cultural middlemen.  Notably the form of consumption followed the Amerindian patterns, instead of entering more European forms.

Norton explains this in terms of cultural syncretism, in which contact between different cultures result in some sort of mixed practices.  In this process, each culture adopts and modifies the other’s habits to create something new.  Among scholars who use this type of analysis, there is often a debate as to which of the initial cultures has a greater impact on the final culture.  Norton clearly thinks that the Amerindian impact on Europe was previously underestimated, and contends that the America’s originated many of the world most common habits.  This view is more empirical than the tendency to assume that colonized people were simply crushed underfoot and had no impact on the colonizers.

I prefer creolization to syncretism, which is more or less the same, in principle.  Yet, I find in practice that this entails an assumption that all cultures are inherently mixed.  It also allows for a better understanding of the tensions between each of the initial cultures and how the one or the other has a greater impact on the resulting culture.