Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The word smoking has widely come to mean “consuming tobacco,” and yet throughout history other substances – such as opium, cannabis, phencyclidine (PCP), and crack cocaine – have been smoked as a principal mode of their consumption. Equally, tobacco has been consumed in a multitude of ways other than through smoking. For example, prior to contact with Columbus, indigenous peoples of the Americas had variously chewed, snuffed (tobacco powder up the nostrils), drunk (tobacco juice), licked (applying tobacco resin to the gums and teeth), topically applied (to the skin), ocularly absorbed, and anally injected tobacco ( Wilbert 1987 ). What we refer to as smoking should be understood first and foremost as a historically diverse set of practices surrounding the use of a range of drugs which, at various stages, did not necessarily involve the practice of smoking itself. That said, smoking today, as in pre-Columbian America, is by far the most widespread mode of consuming tobacco: the term refers to a phenomenon that has come to have enormous social, cultural, and economic significance. What follows is a broad and brief account of the sociocultural development of smoking divided into three main “stages”: pre-Columbian smoking; modern smoking; and contemporary smoking. This focus on developments at the most general level serves to highlight the emergence of key themes in cultural uses and ... log in or subscribe to read full text