Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World

Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2008.

Some scholars have attributed the integration of tobacco and chocolate into European society on their addictive properties and sensory appeal. Others have argued that Europeans changed tobacco and chocolate to fit their palate or for their medical properties. However, in Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World, Norton seeks to demonstrate that both of these historiographic trends inadequately explain the significance of chocolate and tobacco in the Atlantic world and ignore early contemporary accounts of their consumption. She argues that Europeans did not embrace tobacco and chocolate in spite of their meaning but, rather, because of their meaning. (9) New European tastes “emerged out of the social matrix created of Atlantic Empires.”(9) The sensory experience created by tobacco and chocolate had both material and symbolic meanings to Europeans.

Norton begins by exploring the relationship of Mesoamerican groups with spirituality, tobacco, and chocolate. She argues that both goods were not only important but also essential to Mesoamerican religious rites and healing. The consumption of chocolate was distinct from food consumption; separated by ritual hand-washing. Tobacco was used both with and without hallucinogens to produce visions and dizziness, which were crucial means to access the divine. As is often the case with Amerindian practices, Europeans conjured an image of tobacco as diabolical and chocolate as a drink of the “noble savage.” (60) Although Europeans may have indulged in this good in America, they represented cultural “otherness.” As a means of colonization, the Spanish approach was to keep all practices that were not specifically pagan and build their empire off of the practices within Mexica society. Within this syncretic nexus, tobacco and chocolate survived the attempted purges of Indian religious practices and  symbols.

Norton argues that the European colonizers did not consider tobacco and chocolate as imperative to Indian paganism the way that Indians viewed them to be.

When tobacco and chocolate reached the Old World they were primarily introduced for medical purposes. Norton argues that colonial science was “defined by” European “fascination and dependence” on Amerindian knowledge and the discourse of European hegemony. (11) Despite their first introduction being medicinal, the demand for both goods were predicated on their social stigma, with most production of the goods mirroring Amerindian systems. The integration of both goods into Iberian and European society was less about the goods themselves but rather the set of practices and habits that went with them. Although many of the first colonist detested the taste of chocolate, the social milieu of chocolate enticed them and many develop a palate for chocolate. Often, the demand came from elites, merchants, missionaries and mariners, rather than doctors or students. By the 1630s, tobacco and chocolate were essential aspects of Iberian society and culture. Both the means of production and ingestion of chocolate and tobacco changed over time but the process was “gradual rather than a radical disjunction based on essential taste difference” between Europeans and Amerindians. (170) Luxury and vice taxes in the Old World on chocolate and tobacco prove its integration into European society. However, the response of clergy to tobacco and chocolate as diabolical continued and many questions remained on the relationship between both goods and religious devotion. Thus, tobacco and chocolate became fuel for the secular elite.

Norton’s analysis of Atlantic World trade through the lense of tobacco and chocolate is significant because it diverts from traditional narratives of colonialism. Rather than just discussing the historiographically common narrative of the Columbian Exchange-- the absorption of western culture and society in the New World, the spiritual holocaust of Native American religions, and the spread of communicable diseases-- as a flow of ideas and practices from the Old World to the New, Norton places the direction of influence from the New World to the Old. This is critical to our understanding of the Columbian Exchange because it highlights the agency and the desirability of Amerindian culture and society. It suggests that syncretism, both culturally and religiously, went both ways. This narrative fundamentally challenges Western notions of supremacy, because a narrative that only highlights a singularly flowing syncretism essentially suggests that one culture (Western) was inherently better and more suited for civilized culture than the other (Amerindian cultures).