It's Just Business: Crop Commercialization and Impacts on Ritual Consumption in Spanish Colonial Contexts

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The commercial production and control of ritually significant crops such as tobacco and corn had highly variable, and sometimes surprising, impacts on consumption patterns in Indigenous cultures throughout the Spanish colonial empire. This presentation will critically analyze theories of commercialism using case studies from the Americas and Southeast Asia. Drawing primarily on museum collections, archival and secondary sources, I argue that conceptual distinctions emerged between the commercial production and use of ritually important crops, and their continued ritual use in private and community rituals. Comparing the use of tobacco in the Philippines during the heyday of Jesuit plantations, as well as corn and coca in the southern Andes for chicha (maize beer) consumption, among others, the paper aims to complicate our understanding of the impacts of commercialization on Indigenous material culture and ritual practices in the context of Spanish colonialism.  

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Environmental Intimacies: Political Ecologies of Colonization and Anti-Colonial Resilience   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow