Drugs and Alcohol in the Pacific: New Consumption Trends and their Consequences (The Pacific World: Lands, Peoples and History of the Pacific, 1500-1900) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0754601536 ISBN 13: 9780754601531

Publisher: Routledge, 2002

Synopsis

From the arrival of Europeans in the Pacific in the 16th century, introduced psychoactive drugs have played a crucial role in the history of societies from China to Peru, and from Alaska to Australia. Tobacco, followed by opium, distilled alcohol, caffeinated drinks, as well as laboratory drugs such as morphine and cocaine, became standardized and massively produced commodities. These substances joined a local base of indigenous drugs and fermented beverages to create new traditions of consumption that characterized entire peoples and cultures. They were also tools of European domination, so crucial elements of cultural and economic change: opium in China, coca in the Andes, and tobacco and spirits in Oceania. New consumption and production patterns revealed important differences among cultures and polities of the region, and spawned social problems that, in turn, transformed collective representations of these substances. Some became powerful moral symbols that shaped influential social and political movements, such as the Temperance League in the U.S., and the anti-opium movement in China.

About this title

Review

'The editor's introduction is useful in several ways, particularly as a good overview for non-experts... As to the specific articles, they seem to be well chosen to highlight the diversity of peoples, places, and practices in the Pacific.' Bulletin of the Pacific Circle

Synopsis

The regular use of mind-altering drugs is a human universal, a culturally patterned behaviour found world-wide. Anthropologists and historians have documented the use of intoxicants by peoples all over the planet, on all levels of cultural complexity, and seemingly in all periods of human history. Some psychologists argue that the desire to alter consciousness is an innate drive, and pharmacologists have shown how inebriation was a part of life long before mankind came into being, and that it is a primary motivational force in animals. Drugs have been used for religious, therapeutic and festive purposes, such as to achieve trance or possession states, to get in touch with preternatural or supernatural realms, for divination and prophecy, to cure or to alleviate physical or mental ills, to celebrate and mark socially relevant transitions, and to escape ordinary conditions of existence. The large-scale production of drugs in modern times has made them more widely available and affordable to larger sectors of the population. In many countries around and within the Pacific, this modern transformation has been especially intense and dramatic.

Since the arrival of Europeans in the 16th century, psychoactive drugs have played a growing role in the history of societies from China to Peru, and from Alaska and Siberia to Australia. This volume provides a selection of papers that re-evaluates both the history of mind-altering substances in the Pacific World and the crucial historical transformations connected with them. Coverage stretches from the arrival of Portuguese in Macao and Spaniards along the Pacific coast of America, until the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, two years after the Shanghai Conference that established the first international agreement on the control of "narcotics".

About this edition

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0754601536
• ISBN 13: 9780754601531
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 444
• Editor: Gamella Juan F.