Guilty Pleasures?: Global Commodities in Social Context

The past thirty years have seen an increasing number of analyses of the economic, political, and social ramifications of international commodity production and trade. Social and economic histories of specific agricultural commodities—such as Sidney Mintz's seminal work Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (1985)—have proved useful for exploring the ways the production, trade, and consumption of agricultural commodities have shaped, and continue to shape, both producing and consuming societies. Similarly, analyses of commodity chains, what George Marcus has called the "follow the thing" approach, have also placed commodities in the spotlight as a way to understand processes of globalization and the interrelationship of global and local systems.¹

Commodity-based studies have ranged widely in focus, from goods important in colonial and early postcolonial times, such as sugar and coffee, to the agricultural commodities—cut flowers, tomatoes, and cocaine—circulating in global markets today.² Such studies have shown that, although agricultural commodities have provided a livelihood to millions of small producers and revenue for struggling national economies, structural inequities and injustices in the global economy have often wreaked havoc on farming families and national economies throughout Latin America, thereby prompting a growing alternative trade movement to address such inequities.

The four books under review build on these traditions, adding to the understanding of the economic and political relationships inherent in transatlantic commodity chains and the sociocultural contexts in which the values and meanings of commodities are constructed. The emphasis given to consumption, production, and trade varies in each of these works. Marcy Norton focuses almost exclusively on the consumption of chocolate and tobacco on both sides of the Atlantic, whereas James Wiley's analysis of the banana industry revolves around production and trade, with little account of consumption practices. Henry Frundt and Frederick Smith both integrate, to varying degrees, aspects of production, consumption, and trade in their analyses of bananas and rum, respectively. All four works, in various ways, examine the role of agency and document the complex, iterative processes involved in the creation and re-creation of social and cultural—and hence economic—values as agricultural goods circulate in the realm of global commodities.

Norton and Smith both use a primarily historical approach to study how commodities acquire social and economic meanings. The historian Norton interprets the spread of two of the most important pre-Columbian agricultural goods—tobacco and cacao—throughout the Spanish empire, whereas Smith, an anthropologist, examines the production and consumption of rum in terms of both the larger political economy of the Caribbean and the more particular sociocultural systems of its various populations.

In her meticulously researched book, Norton provides an interesting account of the sociocultural factors underlying the spread of chocolate and tobacco into European society. Norton rejects prevailing arguments that attribute the assimilation of chocolate and tobacco into European societies either to the physiologically addictive nature of these substances or to gradual cultural transformations, which rendered these substances both "materially and symbolically" palatable to European tastes (7–8). Instead, she argues that the spread of these "pagan" and "barbaric" goods, and the rising demand for them, were not simply the result of overcoming pre-Columbian cultural meanings associated with their use but that their acceptance was the result of an inevitable syncretic process: "Europeans did not welcome tobacco and chocolate in spite of the meanings that Indians attributed to them, but often because of them. New...