Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology

by Goodman; Jordan

• ISBN13: 9780415425810
• ISBN10: 0415425816
• Edition: 2nd
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-08-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Covering a wide range of substances, including opium, cocaine, coffee, tobacco, kola, and betelnut, from prehistory to the present day, this new edition has been extensively updated, with an updated bibliography and two new chapters on cannabis and khat. Consuming Habits is the perfect companion for all those interested in how different cultures have defined drugs across the ages. Psychoactive substances have been central to the formation of civilizations, the definition of cultural identities, and the growth of the world economy. The labelling of these substances as 'legal' or 'illegal' has diverted attention away from understanding their important cultural and historical role. This collection explores the rich analytical category of psychoactive substances from challenging historical and anthropological perspectives.

Author Biography

Jordan Goodman is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL Paul K. Lovejoy is Distinguished Research Professor at York University Andrew Sherratt was Professor of Archaeology at the University of Sheffield

Table of Contents

List of figures and tables	p. vii
Notes on contributors	p. ix
Preface	p. xiii
Introduction: peculiar substances	p. 1
Alcohol and its alternatives: symbol and substance in pre-industrial cultures	p. 11
Coca, beer, cigars and yage: meals and anti-meals in an Amerindinian community	p. 46
Nicotian dreams: the prehistory and early history of tobacco in eastern North America	p. 65
Betelnut 'bisnis' and cosmology: a view from Papua New Guinea	p. 86
Kola nuts: the 'coffee' of the central Sudan	p. 98
Excitantia: or, how enlightenment Europe took to soft drugs	p. 121
From coffeehouse to parlour: the consumption of coffee, tea and sugar in north-western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries	p. 142
Tobacco use and tobacco taxation: a battle of interests in early modern Europe	p. 158
Globalizing ganja: the British Empire and international cannabis traffic c. 1834 to c. 1939	p. 178
Japan and the world narcotics traffic	p. 194
The rise and fall and rise of cocaine in the United States	p. 215
Building castles of spit: the role of khat in work, ritual and leisure	p. 238
Afterword	p. 255
Selected bibliography	p. 261
Index	p. 269
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