Ceremony, Medicine, Caffeinated Tea: Unearthing the Forgotten Faces of the North American Stimulant Yaupon (Ilex vomitoria) (2021)
Folch, Christine (Author)
Comparative Studies in Society and History
Volume: 63
Issue: 2
Pages: 464-498
Yaupon (the unfortunately named Ilex vomitoria) is a holly commonly used as yard décor in the southeast United States, but many North Americans will be surprised to learn that it is the source of a stimulant tea that has been in continuous use for nearly a millennium. Yaupon is more than a drink; it is a window into questions of identity, community belonging, and how the New World was inserted into the global economy. From Cabeza de Vaca's sixteenth-century brush with the beverage, yaupon has iterated between ceremony, medicine, and caffeinated tea as inhabitants of North America—Indigenous, enslaved, and settler colonial inhabitants of North America—have harnessed the leaf's properties to different, culturally situated aims. This article traces narratives, recipes, and medical descriptions of yaupon from contact to the present, and compares these against material and archeological records to explore differences between settler and extractive colonial encounters with Indigenous psychoactive substances (and thus indigeneity). The story of yaupon reveals contests between regimes of knowledge, the political economy of colonialisms, and the fraught intersections of identity and cuisine. Despite abundant ethnographic, documentary, and scientific evidence to the contrary, the scientific and medical literature long mislabeled yaupon as emetic. This raises questions about how knowledge is transferred and how scientific authority is constructed. I argue that indigeneity, race, and class have steered how yaupon has been understood, and help to explain why a popular caffeinated product waned at a time when the use of stimulants was increasing, and “proletarian hunger-killers” were on the rise.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Article
Smithers, Gregory D.;
(2015)
Beyond the “Ecological Indian”: Environmental Politics and Traditional Ecological Knowledge in Modern North America
Article
Carlos Viesca Treviño;
Maríablanca Ramos de Viesca;
(2018)
Mexican Medicinal Plants a Therapeutic Resource of Physicians and Traditional Healers
Book
Householder, Michael;
(2011)
Inventing Americans in the Age of Discovery: Narratives of Encounter
Multimedia Object
Lance C. Thurner;
Bigelow, Allison Margaret;
(2020)
Allison Bigelow, “Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World” (UNC Press 2020)
Book
Robins, Nicholas A.;
(2011)
Mercury, Mining, and Empire: The Human and Ecological Cost of Colonial Silver Mining in the Andes
Book
Peter Dowling;
(2021)
Fatal Contact: How Epidemics Nearly Wiped Out Australia’s First Peoples
Book
Few, Martha;
Tortorici, Zeb;
(2013)
Centering Animals in Latin American History
Book
W. George Lovell;
(2015)
Conquest and Survival in Colonial Guatemala: A Historical Geography of the Cuchumatán Highlands, 1500-1821, Fourth Edition
Book
Erika Rappaport;
(2017)
A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World
Book
Cozzi, Annette;
(2010)
The Discourses of Food in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction
Book
Bromyard & District Local History Society, ;
(2007)
A Pocketful of Hops: Hop Growing in the Bromyard Area
Book
Henry Notaker;
(2022)
A History of Cookbooks: From Kitchen to Page over Seven Centuries
Article
William Eamon;
(2018)
Corn, Cochineal, and Quina: The “Zilsel Thesis” in a Colonial Iberian Setting
Article
Vanessa Finney;
(2022)
Dining on Geologic Fish: Claiming the Australian Ceratodus for Science
Book
Gae Ho Hwako Norma Jacobs;
Timothy B. Leduc;
(2022)
Odagahodhes: Reflecting on our Journeys
Article
K. Uthara;
(2024)
Influences of botanical knowledge from the East in the colonial medical developments: A case study from early modern Kerala, India
Book
Headrick, Daniel R.;
(2010)
Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present
Book
Mairin Odle;
(2022)
Under the Skin: Tattoos, Scalps, and the Contested Language of Bodies in Early America
Book
Sarah Besky;
(2020)
Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea
Book
Seth Garfield;
(2022)
Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World's Most Caffeine-Rich Plant
Be the first to comment!