Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures



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In Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Cornell University Press Hardcover, Oct. 2008), Marcy Norton, GW deputy chair and associate professor of history, traces chocolate and tobacco’s pre-Columbian origins and reveals how these two goods became material and symbolic links to the pre-Hispanic past for colonized Indians and colonizing Europeans alike.
 
Although European explorers brought tobacco and chocolate back to Europe in the early part of the sixteenth century, these two commodities did not catch on immediately with European palates, as is often alleged. Developing a taste for chocolate and tobacco, it turned out, was a learned experience; discovering these alien tastes, however, had an important collateral effect: the exposing of European minds to important Indian belief systems.

Weighing in on the interaction between Europe and the Americas, Norton infuses needed balance and depth to conventional wisdom about the “Columbian Exchange.”  The meeting of the two cultures was simply a matter of exploitation, infection, and conquest. When Europeans came into contact with these goods, they learned from indigenous peoples not only about what tobacco and chocolate should taste like, smell like, look like, and where and when they should be consumed, but also about their spiritual, medicinal, and social, associations.

Across pre-Columbian America, Indians used tobacco in a wide range of rituals, while chocolate was a central fixture for those inhabiting what is today Mexico and Central America. In the wake of the Spanish conquests, vestiges of these customs migrated into European cultures, some surviving to the present day.  Aztecs welcomed visiting dignitaries with a frothy cup of chocolate; in the mid-seventeenth century, no upper-class Spanish home was without quarters dedicated exclusively to the serving of chocolate. Most rituals of sociability in Native America required offerings of tobacco, as was the case in European societies until the lethal effects of nicotine became widely known. Chocolate sanctified wedding ceremonies in Mesoamerica; today we give chocolate as a token of affection, especially on Valentine’s Day.  But Europeans’ adoption of Native American habits flew in the face of their notions about Christianity triumphing over paganism and civilization vanquishing barbarism. European efforts to come to terms with the paradox of “going native” had surprising and consequential effects.

Though we take them for granted today, oftentimes simultaneously as the cause of, and solution to our day-to-day problems, Norton explains that tobacco and chocolate are not only natural goods, but essential cultural artifacts, products of sophisticated technologies, no less than weaponry or writing. And in Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures, she explains the fascinating, lively, epic, and insightful story of two easily overlooked items that literally changed the course of human history.

About the Author
Dr. Marcy Norton is deputy chair of history and associate professor of history at The George Washington University.  An expert on the history of chocolate and tobacco, Dr. Norton has lectured extensively on these subjects.  She is the associate editor of Tobacco in History and Culture: An Encyclopedia.  She grew up in Montreal and the Bay Area, received her  Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and now resides in Washington, D.C.