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Book Review
| Drugs, Labor, and Colonial Expansion. Edited by WILLIAM R. JANKOWIAK and DANIEL BRADBURD. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2003. 253 pp. $50.00 (cloth).
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The possible benefit of compiling an anthology of anthropological writings concerned with "drugs" and colonial labor markets is that drugs, whether stimulant, opiate, or psychoactive, invoke an entire language of pain, desire, the forbidden, the marginal, and the fantastic. As eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial labor markets invoke images of social relationships at their most polarized and repressive, "drugs" as an analytic category borrows notions from classical political economy such as "commodity" and "consumption" and imbues them with an air of the verboten that can scarcely be applied to worsted wool or petroleum distillates. Taken together, as they are in Drugs, Labor, and Colonial Expansion, these two concepts ought to do nothing less than reach up from the page and grab the reader by the collar, offering him nothing less than an anthropology of the human soul. |
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The possible disadvantage of such an anthology is the slipperiness of the categories upon which it must rely. Is it possible to contain alcohol and tobacco within a stable category? Both are addictive, but so is cane sugar, the example par excellence of Sidney Mintz's "drug-foods."1 The editors are able to forge an agreement based on the work of the contributors that "drugs are not like other products," because, in other words, drugs "are pharmacologically active," and they "interfere with neurotransmitters" (p. 5). Further, the editors and the majority of the contributors are heavily reliant upon the definition of the commodity posed by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai.2 This definition, in its determination to identify value with exchange rather than production, was forced to rely upon the work of deservedly obscure interwar German sociologists, such as Georg Simmel, as antidotes to more conventionally materialist definitions of value. The problem, as James Ferguson so correctly pointed out, was not so much that Appadurai chose to associate himself with problematic scholars of a different era as it was that, in order to find the framework for a fundamentally monetary (as opposed to labor-based) theory of value, he literally had nowhere else to go.3 |
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