For years I’ve heard about the academic pressure to publish. Now, as a graduate student, I’ve come across some results of that pressure. These are books that make an interesting subject dull.[1] I’ll consider one of them in this post.
To be sure, my professors have taken pains to assign only books they consider important and relevant, the “cream of the crop.” (A professor advised his class that if we didn’t like these, we would hate the ones he had rejected.) Nevertheless, a few clunkers come through. Well, I consider them clunkers. As an editor (current and past), I am frustrated when I see tremendous talent combined with disappointing execution.
The book I’m commenting on was praised on its cover as “superior and fascinating.” It reflects enormous research (12 years’ worth), including meticulous gathering of visual artifacts across two continents and several centuries. And it exhibits heroic efforts to come up with new interpretations. But, in my view, its impact is restricted by having to meet the academic goals that lead to tenure and full professorship.
Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World[2] is the story of how tobacco and chocolate, substances that were part of pre-Columbian social and religious rituals in Mexico and Central America, became popular products in Europe during the 1600s.
Like other scholarly books, Sacred Gifts is steeped in detail because, as is so often the case, historians have to probe archives and piece together an argument from such sources as explorers’ diaries, private letters, court cases, church registers, and so forth. Historians’ arguments are also expected to reflect new interpretations of previously existing information. 
But, I ask, do we really need all those facts to be published? And, can a new interpretation be just too obscure and complicated, and thus unpersuasive?
Historians usually lay out their aims early in their books. Norton says her book is a “revisionist account of how Europeans assimilated tobacco and chocolate.”[3] Past historians have neglected the “cultural content” of these substances in Europe, she says. Instead, they emphasized the substances’ addictive (or in the case of chocolate, “hedonic”) qualities or viewed them as commodities that Europeans mundanely adapted for European use (for example, by adding sugar to chocolate).
In contrast, Norton argues that the Europeans not only used the substances but picked up some of their spiritual associations from their pre-Columbian ritualistic use. In Mesoamerica, she says, the use of tobacco and chocolate “concretized notions about relationships between humans and between humans and the spirit world.”[4] After they were transferred to Europe, their syncretistic use (that is, use that reflected both Mesoamerican and European cultures) embraced some of the same mystery.
This underlies Norton’s ambitious goal. She argues that tobacco and chocolate helped “move Europe into a more secular society.“ Users of these substances “at some level” found they provided “individual and social transformations not fully accounted for through ‘rational’ explications grounded in either religion and science.” Thus, they redirected “sublime attention” from ritual to “secular rites.”[5]
In fact, the Catholic Church in Spain worried over the demonic potential of tobacco and the association of chocolate (which was drunk as a beverage) with the blood of the Eucharist. The Church debated for years whether fasting parishioners could drink chocolate. Meanwhile, the substances “infiltrated the institutional Church and undercut its sanctity and authority.” [6]
That tobacco and chocolate undermined religiosity in the Catholic Church is a big claim. There is probably something to it, but the evidence, which may be large in aggregate, is so piecemeal and fragmented here that that it is hard to evaluate. The book is so awash in facts about these substances (a chapter on the medical use of tobacco, for example, seems to contradict the connection with the spiritual world) that it’s hard to put it all together.
Furthermore, the author must keep jumping from chocolate to tobacco and back, and the two aren’t really all that similar. As a result the reader, at least this one, loses the author’s train of thought.
Talent has been misspent. One (too late) idea: Norton could have cut the problems in half by writing about just one of these substances. And then she could have written two books. That would have strengthened her publishing record! And perhaps won a more enthusiastic public audience.
[1] Not an original phrase, but I don’t know who said it first.
[2] Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).
[3] Norton. 7.
[4] Norton, 9.
[5] Norton, 252.
[6] Norton, 252.
Whether it be a scholarly paper, a book built upon scholarly papers, or delivery of a written scholarly speech to a group of scholars and academics, I always end up asking the “so what?” question.
The purpose of study is ultimately to communicate information of substance and benefit to the reader or listener, in a form that is easily understood and remembered. Academics, at least in my experience, often fail to do this — which means they are not asking themselves the “so what?” question.
I recently attended a meeting of a scholarly society, at which almost all of the papers were delivered by the authors reading rapid fire from a manuscript – including by the keynote banquet speaker!
True academics are used to living in such a world, and can comprehend this delivery better than I can — but how can the substance of such hard work be communicated to those who are “out there”? Scholarly inquiry is wonderful, but learning how to effectively communicate the results makes it come alive.
I feel that I have just been deprived of a good story by academic “standards” that demand a certain pomposity of language and exotica. “Concretized notions”? Yes, from the samples and description, it would seem that the author felt the need (demand) to make a fine cake with Portland cement. Maybe she’ll apply some readability program and produce a best seller.
But, alas, she would have to enslave good narrative to the necessity of a thesis no one has thought of (perhaps for good reason).
How does one measure the impact of tobacco use on the un-measurable quantity of sanctity and authority? Such impossibilities, of course, immunize scholars in the humanities from the concretization of dubunkation.
However, the claims made for tobacco in the 16th and 17th centuries do rival the church’s claim for balms and healing powers of prayer and belief.
Of harmless Bowls I mean to sing the praise,
And th’ Herb which doth the poets fancy raise;
Aid me, O Phoebus; Thee I do invoke.
Fill me a Pipe (boy) of that lusty smoke,
That I may drink the God into my brain,
and so inabled, write a buskin’d strain;
For nothing great or high can come from thence,
Where that blest plant denies his influence.
No Mortal had the honor to descry
This noble Herb first, but a Deity . . .
(Raphael Thorius, Hymnus Tabaci, Leyden 1625, trans. by Peter Hausted, London 1651)