Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures

"What exactly, did it mean for Europeans- bound as they were to an ideology that insisted on their religious and cultural supremacy- to become consumers of goods that they knew were so enmeshed in the religious practices of the pagan "savages" whom they had conquered?"  (3)

 This is the question that Marcy Norton sets out to answer in Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures. She is interested in analyzing the symbolic meanings encoded in the social aspects of the two commodities; especially the way in which their uses carried over meanings from pre-Columbian Meso-America to Europe. She begins by demonstrating, in much the same respect as Appadurai or the Coe's had done, the integral part these commodities played in the social rituals of Meso-American peoples in their ways of communicating distinction and association in the real and spiritual sense. The relationship to the spiritual is especially important given the role religion played in the cultures on both sides of the Atlantic. Ultimately she concludes that the cultural meanings connected to chocolate (the sacred gift) and tobacco (the profane pleasure) were more or less continuous from their meso-american origin as they were transplanted to Europe through Spain and it is this revelation that has her conclude, "that the paradox of tobacco and chocolate become a prompt for a kind of desacralizing and relativistic approach to Christianity that is conventionally associated with the eighteenth century and northern Europe." (256) 

Thus she is placing agency on tobacco and chocolate for the European Enlightenment. I will tell you why this is wrong tomorrow.