Sidney W. Mintz EXCITANTIA AND THE EVERYDAY: THE RISE OF PLEBEIAN LUXURIES

his paper1 sets forth a discussion of the does this mean that the ethnographic portraits consumption of goods and services, that we have been given of these societies by our Tas anthropologists have focused upon it. predecessors are complete or correct in every Consumption is a subject beloved of economists, detail, or that the societies themselves are frozen and it has gained popularity as a research topic in time, unchanged and unchanging. Yet it can among historians and sociologists in the last two be argued that they were more like each other decades or so. The history of its study among than any was like, say, Finnish society, or British anthropologists, however, has been curious—a society, or Japanese society. coefficient, really, of the kinds of society at which In that first era of , it addressed the ethnographic, data-collecting aspect of our societies such as these for good reasons. But discipline was traditionally aimed, especially did not feel limited by its own during that era when the field of anthropology choices. Alfred Louis Kroeber writes: was achieving its greatest growth. The societies with which ethnography After all, the subject of anthropology is concerned itself—those of the so-called non- limited only by man [he means man and literate or ‘primitive’ peoples—were typically woman; this was written almost fifty years small, relatively unstratified, non-Western, ago]. It is not restricted by time—it goes highly localized, non-machine in their back into geology as far as man [and technology, and both integrated and divided woman] can be traced. It is not restricted by ties of blood and kinship. Of course those by region but is worldwide in scope. It has societies were many other things, too; this specialized on the primitives because no crude list is only suggestive. But they were not other science would deal seriously with Western, or big, or literate, or based on machines, them, but it has never renounced its intent or prodigal in their consumption of fossil fuels, to understand the high civilizations also. or urban, or anonymous in their social relations. Anthropology is interested in what is most For examples, there are the supposedly ‘classic’ exotic in mankind [and womankind] but instances: Malinowski’s Trobriand Islanders, equally in ourselves, here, now, at home. Evans-Pritchard’s Nuer, Firth’s Tikopians, (Kroeber 1953: xiii) Fortes’s Tallensi, and so on. From this one sees that the nature of the societies being chosen Kroeber wrote that in 1953. But by then what is in these ways shared. That is not to say that he asserted was already being played out in these societies were like each other; there is no a whole new era of anthropological inquiry. need to reduce the so-called primitive world to The change in subject matter happened quite a sample of one, even less than would be true suddenly, and also quickly. Boas in the Americas, for capitalism itself, which clearly takes on a and Malinowski, Radcliffe Brown and Rivers different character in different cultures. Nor in the Old World, had marked together the

suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 45 Sidney W. Mintz

beginnings of modern ethnographic fieldwork, short, production and consumption in such societies somewhere between the start of this century are intimately connected parts of the same thing. and the end of the First World War. Raymond When anthropologists began, really only Firth was Malinowski’s student and Leach’s with the Second World War, to look at larger, teacher; Alfred Kroeber was Boas’s student richer, more modernized and energetic societies, and—to name one—Julian Steward’s teacher. they discovered that those societies—societies They stand for the period. Firth, Malinowski’s like Finland, for example—were simply student, was as clearheaded and astute as ever, too big and too many-sided to be mastered when this writer last saw him, in 1994. Kroeber ethnographically. Thinking back to their earlier died in 1960, but he had been Boas’s first Ph.D. experiences and the triumphs of the first in 1901. Between them, Kroeber and Firth ethnographers, they did the expectable: they oversaw the first three quarters of anthropology chose and studied communities within such in this century, and the zenith of that sort (if societies, which they hoped were somehow you will, of the ‘primitive’ sort) of ethnography. representative of them. When this writer went Because of the kinds of society to Puerto Rico in 1948 as one of the student anthropologists chose to study in the classic team organized by Julian Steward to test some period, the study of production and the study of his ideas about complex societies, we did just of consumption were of a piece with the that. We were expected to add insights at a later societies themselves, most of whose economic stage, in order to deal with the fact that the activities were quite neatly bounded. One communities we studied were integrated within reason why the is of such consummate larger socio-cultural systems. But we soon interest, for example, is because it transcends discovered that that was easier said than done. Trobriand locality. Malinowski writes of it with What those larger systems were, how to describe wonder, since it involved so many communities them adequately, turned out to be beyond our stretched over so many miles of open sea. The powers. The People of Puerto Rico (Steward et al. raiding of Dinka herds by the Nuer catches our 1956), the book that came out of that experience, attention because they are Dinka, and not Nuer, was a pioneering work. But it was not wholly herds. But these wider connections, which are successful because the techniques to do what we always present to some degree (Lesser 1961), were attempting to do had not yet been devised. are ancillary to the basic economic system in Most of the conceptual and methodological each case. The larger systems of production problems persist, a half a century later. and consumption (of which these untypical externalities are admittedly a part) are linked Tracing the linkages internally in each instance, by arrangements not between production only for production, but also for circulation or and consumption distribution. Such arrangements ‘on the inside’ reveal, rather like a pinball machine when it In the Puerto Rican sugar plantation community lights up, who has power; whence it comes; and this writer studied, it soon became apparent how it is transmitted in space and time. In each that production and consumption were hardly case it is possible to see how power works, so connected to each other at all. My friends that access to the basic material needs of life were rural proletarians who had no productive is not interdicted by supervening authority. In property, except perhaps a few shovels and a

suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 46 Sidney W. Mintz

couple of chickens. They sold their labor in When anthropologists took up the study order to acquire the means to buy what they of consumption again—I have in mind, for needed to live. In these ways, they were not example, Arm Stoler’s 1975 study of Javanese at all like Trobrianders or Nuer or Tikopians. rice cultivators, or Mary Weismantel’s 1988 In the community in which I worked, which study of an Ecuadorian village—they often produced sugarcane from which raw sugar was found themselves dealing with communities in made and shipped elsewhere for final refining, some ways analogous to what 1 have described it would not be entirely off the mark to say here for my friends, the Puerto Rican sugarcane that production and consumption really weren’t workers. The penetration of the modem world connected, except by labor. People did not consume into local life had particular and peculiar effects what they produced, and did not produce what on their focus, and on their methods of study, of they consumed. The community, such as it was, small communities. existed to produce sugar. Even the sugar that Said differently, the early ethnographers people consumed there had nothing to do with chose societies that lay at least superficially the sugar they produced there. Working there, outside capitalism, while the later ethnographers it was easy to see how that vital connection began dealing with societies that lay much more between production and consumption, which squarely within it. That is a change of focus of the early ethnographers saw on every side as enormous proportions, and one with which we they did their work, might easily be forgotten are still, and will for long be, struggling. Studies when one was studying the modern world. of consumption in societies of ‘our’ sort, of a Of course production and consumption capitalistic sort, will be at a substantial remove are everywhere linked; but in some eras, the from, say, the Trobriands, no matter how we go mystification of that linkage has been more about it. Of course, that has to do with the way subtle. More than a decade ago, and nearly forty capitalism transforms economic relationships. years after that Puerto Rican fieldwork, I wrote a Within the past century and a half there book about the history of sugar, in which I tried have been many attempts to analyze the large- to document a connection between production scale historical processes behind such changes. and consumption. In that case, the connection The scholars who did so differed widely in their was, on the one hand, between production and interpretations and in their scope of treatment; consumption in the insular sugar-producing but all confront more or less directly certain colonies; and, on the other, between production basic features of economic change that appeared and consumption in the metropolitan powers, in within Europe, somewhere between the my case in the United Kingdom. I was struck by fourteenth and the eighteenth centuries, and the way the links between the two, colony and that contributed to the rise of a new, vigorous, metropolis, tended to be ignored or forgotten and seemingly ever more powerful system, in the modern world, even though they seem which came to be called capitalism. so obvious, because the loci, the places where It is a system the nature of which has the production and consumption occur, were so been explored from many different perspectives. remote from each other, and the categories of Among them is the development of the texture laborer in the colonies and in the metropolises and structure of the rewards in goods and ostensibly so different from each other. services, both material and symbolic which,

suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 47 Sidney W. Mintz

over time, came to characterize the lifeways indulgence to repeat here my concluding of proletarians in the leading capitalist sentences: countries. Such rewards were part of a much larger transformation of life. They were linked The first sweetened cup of hot tea to to changes in the nature of capital itself; to be drunk by an English worker was a runaway urbanization in western Europe, significant historical event, because it and a corresponding decline in the rights of prefigured the transformation of an entire landless or poor rural dwellers; to the growth of society, a total remaking of its economic industry of all sorts, and the differentiation of and social basis. We must struggle to industry; to different conceptions of time; and, understand fully the consequences of that of course, to the development of new wants. We and kindred events, for upon them was know that the system expanded geographically, erected an entirely different conception implicating new regions both inside and outside of the relationship between producers Europe and, with them, new populations, who and consumers, of the meaning of work, became its servitors, both those who made it of the definition of self, of the nature of work, and those who figured (though sometimes things. What commodities are, and what only minimally) among its beneficiaries. For the commodities mean, would thereafter system to work best, ordinary people, those who be forever different. And for that same did the hardest work, had to learn to desire reason, what persons are, and what being things that they had not had before, and to a person means, changed accordingly. In want to work hard and long enough not just understanding the relationship between for prestige or personal satisfaction, but also to commodity and person, we unearth anew fulfill those desires. They also had to believe that the history of ourselves. (Mintz 1985: 214) they really could obtain those things, and they had to sustain such beliefs. Food and drink were only one small slice of We still don’t fully understand how that the rewards capitalism promised, and sooner happened. That book I wrote about the history or later delivered. Material culture, especially of sugar enabled me not only to link production household furnishings, was an additionally and consumption, but also to talk about the rewarding sphere of expanding expenditure. desires and about some of the rewards, modest Dress, for men, women and children, and of though they were—or seem to us now to have course for babies and for the dead, also became been. After all, when we speak of ‘eating like important. Nor were food and drink, housing a king’, it is a letdown to add that once meant and furnishings, dress and decor all there having strong black tea with lots of sugar in was to be had, either. But the acceptance and it; or large helpings of coarse but heavily- legitimation of desire for such new materials sweetened jam, to put on one’s store-bought was a lengthy process, and probably less simple bread to eat with the tea. Yet so important were than it seems to us now. It involved much more such acquisitions by the poor that one could than just persuasion. That we may still not fully defensibly argue that the first cup of tea drunk understand how such a process unfolds, results by a British worker marked a turning-point in most of all, perhaps, from our being convinced the history of human society. I beg the reader’s (or convincing ourselves) that it is all a matter of

suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 48 Sidney W. Mintz

simple common sense. It is more likely a series anthropology, it cannot be essayed here. But a of changes, some of them probably quite subtle, few paragraphs on such differences, may not be that exceed by much the idea of choosing. To out of place. put it crudely, a buyer deciding between two However common or universal we may makes of automobile is only making a choice— think human emotions to be, when one crosses he has already come to the decision that he those blurred and permeable boundaries that needs a car. To a certain extent the decision has separate one society from another, the economic been made for him by other constraints, such systems themselves—within which our personal, as where he must live, and where he must work. emotional lives are lived—may be quite different But he probably perceives these as conditions, as from each other. Thus the seemingly same givens, things with which he simply must cope, emotions are given culturally different contexts rather than as constraints. The all-important within which to be experienced and played out. precondition is some kind of felt need to buy; For example, in a capitalist society the marginal and ‘felt need to buy’, in the case of capitalism, efficiency of capital does determine who works has to mean the exchange of labor time for some and who is unemployed. But in the societies part of its market value so that the purchases anthropology first concentrated upon—and no themselves, and the ‘choices’ they involve, can matter how individualistic the people may have become possible. We can really speak of labor been—whether one worked or did not was not time here, because the buyer-to-be becomes a subject to the marginal efficiency of capital, but seller, the seller of his own labor; and he is often to utterly different social forces, That means that not in a position to set as he wishes the price for the context within which emotional states were that labor. experienced and played out was a quite different 2 All this for the proletarians, who have matter. nothing but their labor to sell, and who came into the world as a precipitate of changes Capitalism and that separated them from all of the means of the meanings production to which they had had, before, slim of consumption but nonetheless real access. We distinguish them from persons in other social categories—not Hence the question arises whether what only from the feudal labor that had preceded consumption meant, and how it was enjoyed, them in Europe, and from those who owned were the same things, or different things, for productive property; but also from the so-called producers and consumers who were still largely ‘primitive’ people who still lived outside the outside capitalism.3 What seems certain is that capitalist system, and whom anthropology first the desires of such people could be awakened, studied; and from the enslaved Africans, who even if their understanding of what lay beyond became so important, and such an odd fixture, those desires—their understanding of how to capitalism in the form that it took on the capitalism worked—might remain meager, and plantations of the New World, in the fifteenth their need to respond to external pressures less to nineteenth centuries. acute. Native Americans, for example, were Though study of how persons in those repeatedly implicated in trade relationships categories became consumers of new goods with Europeans, and frequently found those and producers for capitalism is a vital task for relationships agreeable as long as they did

suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 49 Sidney W. Mintz

not become totally dependent upon them. well known. The category carries the term ‘The beaver does everything perfectly well’, a excitantia, which comes from Jordan Goodman, Montagnais Indian says to a French missionary; whose article by that name appeared three years ‘it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread ago (Goodman 1995). Goodman had borrowed (...) in short, it makes everything’ (Axtell 1988, the term in turn from L. Lewin, whose 1931 167). We can figure out easily enough what this book, Phantastica, was devoted to the study Montagnais was thinking; and that was the way of drugs and drug-induced effects. Goodman it looked, from his perspective. refers to substances that produce altered states Analogous—yet wholly different—were of consciousness. That usage is helpful though the slaves who produced the sugar, indigo, perhaps not altogether appropriate for all of the cotton, coffee, molasses and rum that the New substances covered. The word is used here more World shipped to the Old, in return for the crudely and broadly than that, because the line lumber, grinding machinery, Osnaburgh cloth between such substances and what can be called and instruments of torture required by the foods is sometimes really rather hard to draw. plantations. In discussing the New World slave Consumable goods that became newly plantations of the nineteenth century, Marx available in Europe during the growth of had conceded to the slaves no buying power at capitalism before being carried elsewhere by all. All of the slave’s labor, he argued, looks like the Europeans included tea, coffee, chocolate, unpaid surplus labor for the master. But in fact tobacco, distilled alcoholic beverages, laudanum we know that in many of those instances the (which was opium in alcohol), some other drugs slaves did produce much or even most of their meant as medicines that resembled laudanum, own subsistence, and as part of that surplus labor and rum, sugar and molasses. In some cases these they also produced exchangeable wealth, some substances replaced or supplanted indigenous of which they could and did use as they wished (that is, European) herbs or plants that were (Mintz 1955, 1978). Their understanding of how used to make quasimedicinal infusions, teas, capitalism worked was surely better than that tisanes, and the like. of most so-called ‘primitive’ peoples; and their Some of these new substances can be uses of the things they bought were no doubt aligned on the food side of a seam that separates closer to capitalist notions of consumption. In foods from drugs but others are plainly what any event, these remarks are meant to show we call drugs. One of items on the list, for that anthropology still has before it work of a example, sugar or sucrose, is well known to us, serious kind, before the study of the history of yet somewhat anomalous. Except for some quite consumption succeeds in taking into account all exceptional moralists (Dufty 1976; see also of the larger characteristics of those societies Mechling & Mechling 1983), hardly anybody within which that consumption was or is thinks of sugar as a drug. There is no convincing occurring. scientific evidence yet that hyperactivity among The kind of consumption to which the children is actually traceable to sugar, and the balance of this essay is devoted, however, is of so-called ‘Twinkie defense’ simply has not held a fairly specific sort. It focuses upon our sort of water.5 But except for the sugar companies, society, and seeks to deal with a single rather probably few people think of sugar as simply unwieldy category of substances, the histories another food, the way they think of cabbages or and consumption of which are not yet all that potatoes. Processed sugar (sucrose) first became

suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 50 Sidney W. Mintz

widely used as an accompaniment to other the seventeenth century. The easy definition of ingestibles, particularly the three bitter beverage this range of substances is as psychoactive or stimulants, coffee, tea and chocolate, which mind altering. But anyone who consumes both reached Europe a few centuries after sugar itself. coffee and whisky, say—or betel nut and crack— Chocolate possesses some caloric value, while will recognize instantly that such a definition the other two beverages have none. All are does not solve all of our problems. bitter; all contain a stimulant; all were primarily In any event, Bradburd and Jankowiak do consumed hot. To these early commodities one not think that such things as tea and alcohol might add tobacco, which is certainly not a food, simply diffused to the margins of capitalist but which became popular partly in conjunction expansion; they show how they were carried with these other substances (and like them was there and peddled—or given—to local people, often sweetened before being consumed). in order to ‘domesticate’ their labor power. In an unpublished paper, Bradburd and Their paper provides documentary evidence Jankowiak have undertaken to show how of the conscious intentions of many traders substances of this sort were not only introduced to use substances of these sorts to make into Europe as part of the creation of capitalism, those whom they wished to employ, or to buy but also how they were used in its expansion in from, dependent upon external access to new frontier areas not yet fully assimilated within a ingestibles.6 cash and wage-labor economy. These authors Among the enslaved, particularly in the invoke the term ‘drug food’ (Mintz 1966), eighteenth century, rum was employed by the which they define as ‘substances like coffee, planters to provide pleasure and good feeling, tea, sugar, chocolate, tobacco, alcohol, opium particularly at the close of the harvest— and coca, pharmacological agents that alter ‘cropover’ in the anglophone islands (cf., for cortical stimulation and modify mental activity’. example McDonald 1993). But over time, tea, Though the category is not on firm ground coffee, sugar and tobacco were also important pharmacologically, there are other substances substances for slave consumption in the Antilles. one might include here. Thus, for example, Paul In many cases, the slaves were themselves the Lovejoy (1995) writes of kola nuts in the Sudan; producers of the last three of these (tea, of course, others have written about qat (Catha edulis) in has remained an Asian import throughout its Yemen and nearby; and of pan (betel nut and history). leaf), both on the Indian subcontinent and in . Some hallucinogenic substances used Redefining commodities religiously in South America qualify. But it is not always clear in specific instances whether It was in Europe, however, that these drug a substance does belong in this makeshift foods or psychoactive substances were most category or not. The whole sphere of alcoholic important and, in later centuries, in the major beverages, for instance, should be considered, European-settled or ‘white’ colonies—where the even though many of the least spirituous, such consumption swiftly became enormous, where as weak beers made from sorghum, millet or patterns of work and leisure developed around bananas, for example, are barely alcoholic at the use of such things as tea and tobacco, and all; while the distilled liquors became especially where we can say that people redefined the important within capitalism and beyond, after commodities, while being partly redefined by

suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 51 Sidney W. Mintz

them. In Europe itself, the rise of coffee houses cocaine, ‘crack’ and many other things. But in and later, tea gardens; the appearance of such a National Public Radio report some years aesthetic productions as Bach’s ‘Coffee cantata’, ago on delinquent adolescent behavior in or the adventures of Candide; the significance Salt Lake City—not a place famous for its of political utterances such as Michelet’s, that criminality—the chemical culprit turned out coffee contributed to the French Revolution; to be an over-the-counter cough remedy called the role of tea in British social history, including Pertussin, which adolescents were drinking in the part it played in de-alcoholizing the working large quantities to produce a mood of elevated class (Mintz 2002); the commercial significance well-being. It is well known that nutmeg in of the importation of china from China, and the large doses produces hallucinations. So does subsequent rise of the House of Wedgwood; the the sniffing of some glues, dry cleaning fluids, spread of snuff and tobacco use—subjects that, and so on. There are so many chemicals that we for the most part, had lain dormant for centuries, moderns cannot do without, that controlling have only recently become topics of scholarly all such substances is impractical. But for those discussion once more. All have to do with the who want to settle for chemically or biologically insinuation of excitantia within the cultural life based explanations of behavior, without taking of the masses. into account the social context of use, the While the term excitantia was borrowed, situation is even worse. the phrase ‘plebeian luxuries’ was not. These days, There are, after all, various behaviors— of course, it could refer to many things that, only such as gambling—that certainly seem to a couple of centuries ago, were not only beyond be addictive for some persons. But no one has the reach of ordinary mortals, but even beyond identified a chemical substance or a gene to the reach of kings. Among them are some of explain such addiction. There is no doubt that those balms for the spirit mentioned above: some scientists are looking, because if there is those warming, cooling, sweetening, uplifting, no gene or substance to explain the apparent calming, exciting substances, which now travel addiction, one would have to explain it by worldwide. reference to social context, and that is a direction It is worth mentioning that none of these in which many observers are unwilling to go. A excitantia really deserves to be ‘explained’ in gene for gambling? A food that makes gamblers terms of its inherent chemical properties. In into addicts? How convenient such discoveries United States culture—perhaps because it is would be! For if there were such a connection, it in some degree a relatively recent derivative would ‘explain’ addictive behavior automatically, of North European puritanism—people seem without the need for any reference to the social particularly prone to discuss sin as if it were a and cultural circumstances of addiction—and kind of voltage or magical power, and to find for some people, that would be a reassuring its more than merely chemical power present discovery, indeed. in some substances and not in others. Alcohol Nonetheless, we know as a matter of fact is the best illustration, of course, especially that, at any time, some people are seeking when viewed from the perspective of the North different emotional states, to feel close to others, American national experience with Prohibition. to give life additional meaning, to experience Since that time, marijuana has become an altered states of consciousness. We need to important substance in this way, not to mention remember that many people who are involved in

suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 52 Sidney W. Mintz

such searches may be induced in various ways to decipher the path along which these advertisers try things they might not have tried otherwise. are seeking to lead their youthful readers. They are not induced to try substances such It may seem like a giant leap from tea as coffee or cigarettes or alcohol because the and the British working class, at the start of substances are addictive, but for other reasons. the eighteenth century, to the growing success But they do try them, often because they are of Guts, Zapped, Jolt and Boost among the made to believe that doing so is sophisticated, a twenty-somethings and six-year-olds in today’s way of showing love, a way of growing up, a way America. But there should be no need to build of belonging. Accordingly, in modern society, a bridge between these phenomena; there is telling people to ‘just say “no”’ — probably will more and more convincing evidence that the not help, most of all because so many others are bridge was there, all along. If tea, coffee, tobacco simultaneously shouting ‘just do it’ in our ears. and rum are the forefathers of XTC, Jolt and That circumstances are critical to the Zapped, the study of consumption may help us taking on of new habits is, of course, not news; to discover how consumption has changed or and of course different substances are different stayed the same, even as the items consumed— chemically. An attractive illustration is provided their production, distribution, promotion and by the August 22, 1997 Business section of The consumption—have evolved. New York Times, in a story headlined ‘More In summary, the intention here was to hip, more hop’. It concerns the new vogue for suggest, first, that consumption as studied by heavily-caffeinated beverages in North America, anthropologists is a difficult undertaking when with campaigns aimed at young males in we have in mind the complex division of labor, particular. ‘What the cola companies have found highly-developed transportation, machine is that cola is dead’, says Steven Grasse, head of technology, and capitalist economy that typify Gyro Worldwide in Philadelphia, an advertising the modern world. Elaborate and nuanced firm that specializes in marketing to teenagers though it was, the economy of the Trobriand and twenty-somethings. ‘Kids are saying, “Those Islands, or of Tikopia, for example, posed very are the drinks of my grandparents.”’ ‘Caffeine,’ different problems for the ethnographer than the publisher of Trends Journal tells us, ‘is the does a community that is now unmistakably new-millennium drug of choice’. But the part of ‘The West’. This has led to a research growing market for high-caffeine beverages, it concentration on consumption, but often quite turns out, is not just the crowd at Starbucks— divorced from the study of production. more than anybody else, apparently, it’s the If one turns back to the period when six-year-olds. Among the names for the new the first commodities created by capitalism beverages are Jolt, Hype, Boost, Guts, and were being installed in European popular Zapped. Some names—such as XTC and consumption, it may be a little easier to Krank 20—associate to familiar illegal drugs understand in what ways these things were tried, such as Ecstasy, the hallucinogen, and crack, a accepted, then enthusiastically embraced. Such popular methamphetamine. ‘Krank 20 is water is what happened within working-class Europe, with caffeine’, its manufacturers tell us at their with the bitter stimulant beverages, such as tea website. ‘Lots of caffeine. All that we could get and coffee; with their sweetener, sugar; and with away with. If this stuff doesn’t roll your oats, that now over-familiar accompanying comfort, better check your pulse!’ No one needs a map to tobacco.

suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 53 Sidney W. Mintz

Though substances of this sort might serve background does not allow him to treat this as much the same subjective needs in different the universal, unique, and dominant imperative in the determination of his behaviour’ (1950). kinds of societies, it still mattered in what ways Firth’s discussion of the economic characteristics the societies themselves were different. Where of a primitive economy is still lively and astute. a money economy, a price system, competition 3 At least one anthropologist, , among sellers, advertising, and a self-regulating employs the difference between consumption under capitalism and consumption outside it as market are all part of daily life, then how the decisive difference. Sahlins’ argument follows products are sold, and how supply and demand that which he has laid down in earlier work. The are tied together without reference to environing Western definition of human fate begins with social needs, become processes that leave the The Fall. Joyless creatures, born in sin, cursed to labor for their daily bread, destined to die with no Trobriands and Tikopia far behind. It is not more than the hope of posthumous redemption, that tea, Jolt and Coca Cola are all that different humankind was to find its salvation in economic from each other, whatever their exact chemical theory The application of limited means to composition. But as they have become part of infinite ends is as good as can be expected; guaranteeing no satisfaction but unending the culture of consumption, their nature—what labor, and death as a final resting place. Such a they mean, how they are used, the power their moral framework is reinforced at later points producers can exercise—changes in ways that in Western history by the Reformation and the simply cannot be matched in the non-capitalist rise of capitalism. Individualism receives a new definition: consumer satisfaction. In contrast, world. The democratization of consumption has Sahlins argues, we have the Savages. Like animals, accompanied the forging of a world in which they have no sense of sin. They do not view who you are is, more and more, a matter of what their means as scarce, nor their ends as infinite. and how you consume. Whatever their joys, consumer satisfaction among them is defined in radically different ways. Hence, the subjective effects of such use They shock us; they appear to lack ambition. They may be approximately the same; but the context also choose not to excel—at least not in order to of use has become radically different. In the separate themselves from the common herd, so ambiance of plebeian luxury—the luxury of much as to be able to join it again. Their interest in material accumulation is feeble, another sign of Everyman under capitalism—even six-year-olds their animality and primitivity. They seem to put have buying power, and they must be appealed group welfare above individual success. But since to accordingly. Those who have buying power they are feckless and improvident, they often have power: the power to buy. Because they starve together. The grasshoppers are cared for by the ants. These societies ‘are not going anywhere’, have buying power, they are entitled to a thrill. to use a modem expression. How else would they—or for that matter, their 4 The term was used with reference to a famous parents—know how lucky we all are? criminal case where there had been speculation by the defense that the ingestion of sucrose could produce a state of altered consciousness. NOTES 5 The most infamous instance, of course, was that of the peddling of Indian opium to the Chinese 1 This article first appeared in Suomen Antropologi by Great Britain in defiance of the Imperial 23 (4), published in 1998. Reprinted with Government -undertaken to obtain foreign permission of Mrs. Jackie Mintz. exchange to pay for the tea that the British were 2 Surely no one has stated this more eloquently importing from China since the Chinese were than Raymond Firth: ‘Primitive is definitely alive uninterested in anything the British had to sell. to his economic advantage, but his traditional

suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 54 Sidney W. Mintz

REFERENCES Mechling, Elizabeth, and Mechling, Jay 1983. Sweet Talk: The Moral Rhetoric of Sugar. Central Axtell, James 1992. Beyond 1492. NewYork: Oxford States Speech Journal 34 (l):19–32. University Press. Mintz, Sidney W. 1955. The Jamaican Internal Dufty, William 1976. Sugar Blues. NewYork: Watner. Marketing Pattern: Some Notes and Hypotheses. Social and Economic Studies 4 (l): 95–103. Firth, Raymond 1950. A Primitive Polynesian Economy. New York: Humanities Press. Mintz, Sidney W. 1966. The Caribbean as a Socio- cultural Area. Cahiers d’Histoire Mondiale X (4): 912– Goodman, Jordan 1995. Excitantia: Or How 37. Enlightenment Europe Took to Soft Drugs. In: Jordan Goodman, Paul E. Lovejoy, and Andrew Mintz, Sidney W. 1978. Was the Plantation Slave a Sharratt (eds.), Consuming Habits. : Proletarian? Review II (1): 81–98. Routledge. Pp. 126–47. Mintz, Sidney W. 1985. Sweetness and Power Kroeber, Alfred 1953. Introduction. In: Alfred NewYork: Viking-Penguin. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mintz, Sidney W. 2002. Quenching Homologous Thirsts. In: William L. Merrill and Goddard Ives Lesser, Alexander 1961. Social Fields and the (eds), Anthropology, History and American Indians: Evolution of Society Southwestern Journal of Essays in Honor of William Curtis Sturtevant. Anthropology 17:40–48. Washington D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Lewin, Leo 1931. Phantastica: Narcotic and Steward, Julian H. et al. 1956. The People of Puerto Stimulating Drugs. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Rico. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Trubner & Co. Stoler, Arm 1975. Garden Use and Household Lovejoy, Paul 1995. Kola nuts: The ‘Coffee’ of Consumption Patterns in a Javanese Village. (No the Central Sudan. In: Jordan Goodman, Paul E. publisher listed.) Lovejoy, and Andrew Sharratt (eds.), Consuming Habits. London: Routledge. Pp. 103–25. Weismantel, Mary 1988. Food, Gender and Poverty in the Ecuadorian Andes. Philadelphia: University of McDonald, Roderick 1995. The Economy and Pennsylvania Press. Material Culture of Slaves: Goods and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana. Baton sidney w. mintz Rouge: Louisiana State University. (1922–2015)

suomen antropologi | volume 41 issue 1 spring 2016 55