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Chocolate and sugar, alcohol and tobacco, peyote and hallucinogenic mushrooms—these seductive substances have been a nexus of desire for both pleasure and profit in Mesoamerica since colonial times. But how did these substances seduce? And when and how did they come to be desired and then demanded, even by those who had never encountered them before? The contributors to this volume explore these questions across a range of times, places, and peoples to discover how the individual pleasures of consumption were shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political forces. Focusing on ingestible substances as a group, which has not been done before in the scholarly literature, the chapters in S...
Chocolate and sugar, alcohol and tobacco, peyote and hallucinogenic mushrooms—these seductive substances have been a nexus of desire for both pleasure and profit in Mesoamerica since colonial times. But how did these substances seduce? And when and how did they come to be desired and then demanded, even by those who had never encountered them before? The contributors to this volume explore these questions across a range of times, places, and peoples to discover how the individual pleasures of consumption were shaped by social, cultural, economic, and political forces. Focusing on ingestible substances as a group, which has not been done before in the scholarly literature, the chapters in S...
While the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico may conjure up images of vacation getaways and cocktails by the sea, these easy stereotypes hide a story filled with sweat and toil. The story of sugarcane and rum production in the Caribbean has been told many times. But few know the bittersweet story of sugar and rum in the jungles of the Yucatán Peninsula during the nineteenth century. This is much more than a history of coveted commodities. The unique story that unfolds in John R. Gust and Jennifer P. Mathews’s new history Sugarcane and Rum is told through the lens of Maya laborers who worked under brutal conditions on small haciendas to harvest sugarcane and produce rum. Gust and Mathews weave t...
"This book explores how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish settlers attempted to uproot Indigenous Nahua healing practices in the process of creating and protecting the settler colony of New Spain. By using primary sources written in Spanish and Nahuatl this book shows how Nahua people's understood their healers and the ways in which they survived, but were altered by, Spanish attacks"--
Sugar, coffee, corn, and chocolate have long dominated the study of Central American commerce, and researchers tend to overlook one other equally significant commodity: alcohol. Often illicitly produced and consumed, aguardiente (distilled sugar cane spirits or rum) was central to Guatemalan daily life, though scholars have often neglected its fundamental role in the country's development. Throughout world history, alcohol has helped build family livelihoods, boost local economies, and forge nations. The alcohol economy also helped shape Guatemala's turbulent categories of ethnicity, race, class, and gender, as these essays demonstrate. Established and emerging Guatemalan historians investigate aguardiente's role from the colonial era to the twentieth century, drawing from archival documents, oral histories, and ethnographic sources. Topics include women in the alcohol trade, taverns as places of social unrest, and tension between Maya and State authority. By tracing Guatemala's past, people, and national development through the channel of an alcoholic beverage, Distilling the Influence of Alcohol opens new directions for Central American historical and anthropological research.
Exploring the use of digital methods in heritage studies and archaeological research The two volumes of Digital Heritage and Archaeology in Practice bring together archaeologists and heritage professionals from private, public, and academic sectors to discuss practical applications of digital and computational approaches to the field. Contributors thoughtfully explore the diverse and exciting ways in which digital methods are being deployed in archaeological interpretation and analysis, museum collections and archives, and community engagement, as well as the unique challenges that these approaches bring. This volume begins with discussions of digitization at museums and other heritage insti...
This interdisciplinary volume brings together a richly substantive collection of case studies that examine European-indigene interactions, economic relations, and their materialities in the formation of the modern world. Research has demonstrated the extent and complexity of the varied local economic and political systems, and diverse social formations that predated European contact. These preexisting systems articulated with the expanding European economy and, in doing so, shaped its emergence. Moving beyond the confines of national or Atlantic histories to examine regional systems and their historical trajectories on a global scale, the studies within this volume draw examples from the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, North America, South America, Africa, and South Asia. While the contributions are rooted in substantive studies from different world areas, their overarching aim is to negotiate between global and local frames, revealing how the expanding world-system entangled the non-Western world in global economies, yet did so in ways that were locally articulated, varied and, often, non-European in their expression.
"This essay reveals how a global "New Drug History" has evolved over the past three decades, along with its latest thematic trends and possible next directions. Scholars have long studied drugs, but only in the 1990s did serious archival and global study of what are now illicit drugs emerge, largely from the influence of the anthropology of drugs on history. A series of key interdisciplinary influences are now in play beyond anthropology, among them, commodity and consumption studies, sociology, medical history, cultural studies, and transnational history. Scholars connect drugs and their changing political or cultural status to larger contexts and epochal events such as wars, empires, capitalism, modernization, or globalizing processes. As the field expands in scope, it may shift deeper into non-western perspectives, a fluid historical definition of drugs; environmental concerns; and research on cannabis and opiates sparked by their current transformations or crises"--
From khat to kava to ketamine, drugs are constitutive parts of cultures, identities, economies and livelihoods. This much-needed book is a clear introduction to the anthropology of drugs, providing a cutting-edge and accessible overview of the topic. The authors examine and assess the following key topics: How drugs feature in anthropology and the work of anthropologists and the general role of drugs in society Comparison between biochemical and pharmacological approaches to drugs and bio-socio-cultural models of understanding drugs Evolutionary origins of psychotropic drug sensitivity and archaeological evidence for the spread of psychoactive substances in pre-history Drugs in spiritual and...
This scholarly collection explores the method and theory of the archaeological study of indigenous persistence and long-term colonial entanglement. Each contributor offers an examination of the complex ways that indigenous communities in the Americas have navigated the circumstances of colonial and postcolonial life, which in turn provides a clearer understanding of anthropological concepts of ethnogenesis and hybridity, survivance, persistence, and refusal. Indigenous Persistence in the Colonized Americas highlights the unique ability of historical anthropology to bring together various kinds of materials—including excavated objects, documents in archives, and print and oral histories—to provide more textured histories illuminated by the archaeological record. The work also extends the study of historical archaeology by tracing indigenous societies long after their initial entanglement with European settlers and colonial regimes. The contributors engage a geographic scope that spans Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and other models of colonization.