On page 157 of Chapter 4 Mintz brings up the meaning behind sugar. Due to the huge role that sugar took on in English society, it began to hold meaning in the public outside of just it's sweetness. Next Mintz brought up Clifford Geertz's idea of "webs of signification" and this concept that humans trap themselves in complicated representations of meanings rather than simply taken material items at face value. To me this seems like the anthropological way to say we as humans are reading too far into everything, creating these webs that socially trap us either through the economy or the politics tied to a specific object. Rather than naturally creating a web for those that thoroughly enjoy sugar to receive the most sugar, sugar gets thrown into a social construction that says if you have money you can have this also. It is not to say that the wealthy did not enjoy the sugar they had made available to them but rather that the social meaning of the commodity held more importance than the desire for it. It is the same as we look at brand names in our highly capitalistic society today- the wealthy wear jeans from Dolce & Gabbana, or Gucci and the less wealthy wear jeans from Target or Walmart. It isn't that the wealthy person's jeans are so much better in quality, rather just that it is a commodity which in existence alone separates the owner into an elite social category. Brands in today's day are about meaning, as sugar was in England all these years ago. This entire book works with this idea of signification, even in the title there is a presumed strong link between "Sweetness and Power." We are so eager as humans to learn the meanings behind each object and yet, as Mintz points out, we have a limited ability to explain those meanings, and answer in what way meaning equates to power.
The trickle down of sugar to the lower classes therefore could only occur gradually, considering the people had to re learn a new meaning for the product. An relative example of this trickle down for us might be the iPhone, I remember back around 2008 only the richest most famous people had iPhone's. There was a list of celebrities circulating pop culture of who had an iPhone, and yet today just eight years later, everyone has access to an iPhone, they are nearly a necessity and no longer just a luxury. Having read well into the book now, it is interesting to look back at just how deeply the social meaning of this one particular item has been explored. From no English person knowing of sugar to it being extremely limited in quantity, sugar slowly reached each hierarchical rank of the British castes from a luxury to a necessity, something needed to be able to drink afternoon tea, or bake a cake for a party. This demand for sugar prompted continued colonialism as well as the slave trade, which brings in the political aspect of the meaning of sugar. Wealth even today often equals political power, it takes time and money to be able to devout your life to a campaign for office. I think this development of political power tied to the commodity of sugar is what has allowed for the social separation of food production and food consumption over the industrial years. The photos between pages 184 and 185 helped to show some of the historical variety that developed out of the increased consumption.
The trickle down of sugar to the lower classes therefore could only occur gradually, considering the people had to re learn a new meaning for the product. An relative example of this trickle down for us might be the iPhone, I remember back around 2008 only the richest most famous people had iPhone's. There was a list of celebrities circulating pop culture of who had an iPhone, and yet today just eight years later, everyone has access to an iPhone, they are nearly a necessity and no longer just a luxury. Having read well into the book now, it is interesting to look back at just how deeply the social meaning of this one particular item has been explored. From no English person knowing of sugar to it being extremely limited in quantity, sugar slowly reached each hierarchical rank of the British castes from a luxury to a necessity, something needed to be able to drink afternoon tea, or bake a cake for a party. This demand for sugar prompted continued colonialism as well as the slave trade, which brings in the political aspect of the meaning of sugar. Wealth even today often equals political power, it takes time and money to be able to devout your life to a campaign for office. I think this development of political power tied to the commodity of sugar is what has allowed for the social separation of food production and food consumption over the industrial years. The photos between pages 184 and 185 helped to show some of the historical variety that developed out of the increased consumption.
The question of meaning and interpretation in culture is an important one for Mintz in particular and for anthropology in general. Mintz is building upon Geert' work on webs of significance, as you also note here. I want to clarify a couple of things about the discussion of meaning/culture in both of these authors. For Geertz, we are all born into specific cultures and always already entrenched into the webs of significance of that culture. In other words, for him culture (rather than, say, human nature) comes first. Another way of saying this is that we all get enculturated from early on. Mintz also agrees that people are situated in culture but he adds some important dimensions to this processes of enculturation: (a) culture and meaning also have a history, that is, they change and they become the way they are due to specific historical transformations; (b) because they change over time, culture and meaning are subject to power. In the case of sugar, Mintz then wants to say, yes, sugar has all these different kinds of meaning (social status, romance, etc) but how did sugar come to embody these meanings? His answer is the particular class relations in the UK on the one hand, and the economics of the sugar production through plantations on the other.
ReplyDeleteThanks also for drawing connections between sugar as a commodity and other similar commodities that go from rarely to massively consumed. We should pick this up in class.