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Sovereign Remedies: Natural Authority and the Counterblaste to Tobacco
Michael Ziser
This instrument for asking life is the foremost thing we possess, so the old people said. We are thankful for it. We know that Earthmaker did not put us in charge of anything, and for that reason the tobacco we received is our greatest and foremost thing ... the song we will now start is a pipe-lighting song.
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| —Winnebago Testimony |
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In James towne he found but five or six houses, the Church downe, the Palizado's broken, the Bridge in pieces, the Well of fresh water spoiled; the Store-house they used for the Church, the market-place, and streets, and all other spare places planted with Tobacco, the Salvages as frequent in their houses as themselves ... the Colonie dispersed all about, planting Tobacco.
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| —Captain John Smith |
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Whole theses, even whole departments of literature (general or comparative) should perhaps be devoted to the study of coffee and tobacco in our literatures.1
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| —Jacques Derrida |
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| IN 1604, the first year after his coronation as the absolute ruler of Scotland and England, King James VI and I wrote, printed, and distributed a twenty-eight-page quarto pamphlet condemning tobacco, an American botanical import that had been making deep inroads into English culture since its introduction from the Americas nearly forty years earlier. Though the title page of his Counterblaste to Tobacco bore no explicit indication of its royal provenance, the royal origin of the tract was an open secret among its contemporary English audience. The allusive wording of Counterblaste's preface, coupled with the presence of King James's arms opposite the title page, made the authorship of the pamphlet transparent long before the fact was officially confirmed by its inclusion in James's collected Workes (1616). The manifold oddity of this episode, in which a sitting monarch felt compelled to issue an incoherent and quasi-anonymous attack on what he himself anathematized as a "common herbe," has long piqued the curiosity of Elizabethan and Jacobean scholars. In a century-long trend that has intensified in recent years, investigators across disciplines have produced a series of critical and historical studies of Counterblaste and its contexts that, combined with the larger body of work concerning tobacco culture generally, forms an archive far exceeding, in quantity and sophistication, any other compiled on a natural product.2 Though tobacco may no longer be king of the transatlantic economy, it now rules over smaller fiefdoms in the humanities and social sciences. |
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As many tobacco writers have noted, the remarkable attention bestowed on Nicotiana tabacum and N. rusticum is a surprising departure from the traditional reluctance among literary and cultural scholars to stray into the territory of the natural sciences. Indeed, one tobacco critic has characterized materialist and New Historicist methodologies that have self-consciously opened mainstream humanities to subjects such as tobacco as suffering from an addiction, or compulsion to "say something to" (ad- + dicere) their eccentric and insensible subjects. The logic of addiction, however, applies as forcefully to scholarship decrying the ascription of agency and causality to plants as it does to the enthusiastically enthralled.3 The academic addiction to tobacco, be it professed or denied, has become the centerpiece in an ongoing debate about the relative determinative and explanatory value of the nonhuman material world (as opposed to human ideological structures) in cultural and literary studies. Tobacco has provoked this materialist-antimaterialist conundrum throughout the history of its use in many locales, cultures, and contexts, suggesting that the latest version of the debate is but another instance of a peculiar symbolic logic—a phramako-logic—by the bewitching weed itself. |
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