Things of Change

What is the essence of a social thing or substance?  Do things have meaning of their own or only through a shared social construct?  What makes a thing take on the label sacred or pleasurable and does this change throughout time and place? These are questions that a reader thinks about reading Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World.  A quick summary of this book can be found in her statement “… tobacco and chocolate were singular substances to consecrate social bonds.” (200).   Norton clearly is in the Appadurai camp of seeing things having a life of their own through multifaceted social links and meanings.

This book is different than the previous several in class in that she talks about the potential for social change because the thing is not only acting on the people of a place, but the people actually change because of the thing – or maybe the change was waiting to happen and just needed to tool (the thing) to trigger it.  A perfect example of this is found at the conclusion of chapter 10 – Enhancing the Profane.  Now the following quote is long, but I think it goes to the heart and essence of what Norton is communicating to the reader, “…the history of tobacco and chocolate in seventeenth-century Spain also demonstrates that nascent modernity encompassed more than state-building and disenchantment.  It also shows that the paradox of tobacco and chocolate became a prompt for kind of desacralizing and relativistic approach to Christianity that is conventionally associated with the eighteenth-century and northern Europe.” (256)  It in this statement Norton is saying products from the new world which lived a life of social and religious significance, overcame the initial distaste of the old world, through first changing the tastes and social structures of the colonist in the new world, spring boarding into acceptance in the old world to the point of challenging the power structures through the meaning that people place on these things, changing a philosophical worldview of a society.  

I agree with Norton and Appadurai, things not only have a life of their own through the eyes of society, but they can change what that society is looking at.