History 544: Drugs in History. With Special Emphasis on Latin America

Course Description

"Drugs"--licit or illicit--are not just today's so contested and convoluted of global social problems. Drugs always have played a pivotal role in human histories--in connecting peoples and world political economy and in defining the frontiers of medicine, law, culture and consciousness. This advanced discussion Seminar attempts to develop dispassionate historical perspectives for the study of psychoactive substances.

Remarkably, drugs in history have attracted little serious interest from professional historians. A key purpose of our seminar is thus to ponder approaches from allied fields (anthropology, commodity studies etc.) or recent shifts within history itself (social history, cultural studies) that prove useful for developing a "new" drug history. As we refine these methods, we will pay special attention to "global" or transnational facets of drugs as commodity and culture and analyze the varied ways substances gain or lose their social meanings and political legitimacy--i.e., how their licit and illicit status are historically constructed. Along the way we'll surely encounter a huge range of mind-altering substances--from tobacco and coffee to LSD and Prozac--that fall under drugs in history.

The seminar develops in three parts. In the first phase (WEEKS 1-4), we rigorously toy with varying definitions and contexts of drugs for historians and others in the human sciences. Here, Schivelbusch's classic Tastes of Paradise will stimulate thinking about cultural legitimacy and the roles of European capitalism and colonialism in the making of modern drugs. Each of us will also analyze one methodological offering from the "recommended" book list below. In the second part (WEEKS 5-10) we focus in on the rich cornucopia of Latin American drug-foods and compare some varied histories: tobacco (a killer American drug that swept the world); sugar (a Eurasian transplant that transformed the Americas); yage (a native hallucinogen that never extended its cultural range); and the rise (in the heady "60s") of related underground drug cultures in the post-industrial societies of North America. In the third part (WEEKS 11-15), we hone our own new "case studies" of drugs in history. These may range from Gootenberg's research on the transformation of traditional Andean coca into the modern global menace of cocaine, to your own focused projects on specific drugs and substances. These studies are presented to the seminar in the final weeks.

Reading List

Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants -- W. Schivelbusch

Wizard of the Upper Amazon: The Story of Manuel Córdova-Rios -- F. Bruce Lamb

Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence -- J. Goodman

Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History -- S. Mintz

The Yage Letters -- A. Ginsberg/W.S. Burroughs

Storming Heaven; LSD and the American Dream Recommended -- J. Stevens

Murder, Magic, Medicine -- J. Mann

The Natural Mind: An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness -- A. Weil

Chilies to Chocolate: Food the Americas Gave the World -- N. Foster, L. Cordell

White Rabbit: A Psychedelic Reader -- J. Miller, K. Koral

Essential Substances: A Cultural History of Intoxicants in Society -- R. Rudgley

Bread of Dreams -- Piero Camporesi

Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture and the Past -- Sidney Mintz

Hep-Cats, Narcos and PipeDreams: America's Romance with Illegal Drugs -- Jill Jonnes

Drug War Politics: The Price of Denial -- E. Bertram, K. Sharpe et.al.

Mid-Term Methods Essay/Experience/Exercise

WHAT: You are to take the following topic and produce by next week's session a clear, compelling, and cohesive essay on the following theme. It could approach ten or twelve typed pages and demonstrate your (of course) serious engagement with the texts and analytic ideas of the seminar. Be sure to clean and polish your writing, for it may make lasting impressions upon the professor.

THEME: How American "drug" substances got accepted into (or shut out of) the mainstream of Western society is a fundamental, recurring theme in this seminar. Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Tastes of Paradise makes a stimulating and spicy starting point for historical analysis, with his long-term and comparative modeling of the role of "stimulants" in the progress of European capitalism, colonialism and its cultures. Other books followed up on specific kinds of cases: one that America cursed upon the world (tobacco), another that little England cursed upon the Americas (sucrose); or a cursedly "indigenous" drug (like yage).

First, rigorously explain (in a few pages) the gist of Schivelbusch's arguments about the place of exotic southern drugs in the global rise and transformations of northern capitalism. How would you assess this as an overall model: its historiographic strengths and weaknesses, its theoretical suggestiveness and limits? Second, take one of our case studies (say Goodman or Mintz) and carefully compare it to Tastes of Paradise. How was this good brought into--or left out of--the pantheon of normalized Western food-drugs? How did its legitimacy, prestige, consumption, uses or its economic, political, and symbolic power change? Does the history in detail of this substance fit into or diverge from the conceptions of a Shivelbusch? Do others (these guys, or the "theoretical" work you read) share a sense of what it takes to integrate a novel substance into the West?

Finally, how well can they deal with the other side or reverse of these processes? How far does each go in capturing how the non-West or colonial regions interact with Western drug cultures? How far does each go towards explaining how and why certain substances become illegitimate, unintegrated or banned from the European style of intoxicating drugs? Indeed, how far can we expect one model, or even type of approach, to take us in the variegated history of drugs?

ALSO REMEMBER: Your 1-page final paper proposal is also due (so we can discuss both this paper and that together), the day we do individual conferences. Focus on single substance (anything good, from ginseng to heroin) and what you gather to be the best bibliography on its history. The substance can be historical or recent, as long as your approach is designed as a critical review or analysis of "the literature".

Course Outline