Today I went to my favorite local art museum in Sacramento~
This is a close-up of Wiley’s work. “Tapping high-spirited musings became the hallmark of Wiley’s eclectic imagery and ceaseless narrative ingenuity. In the 1970s, indulging his urge for stream of consciousness thinking, Wiley began to assemble words and objects in paintings that had ‘the feeling of a diary written in incomplete phrases.’” ~Crocker website
“By the end of the 16th century, the Portuguese and Spanish had introduced tobacco to China, where it was first smoked in pipes. In the early Qing dynasty (1644-1911), smoking was forbidden, but the use of snuff was accepted because of its percieved medicinal properties. The tobacco was finely ground, fermented, and augmented with aromatics such as jasmine, mint, and camphor.
Snuff consumption was originally centered in the imperial court in Beijing. By the end of the 18th century, the custom had spread throughout the country and snuff became available to all levels of society. The humid climate in China led the Chinese to adapt their traditional medicine bottles to hold snuff, dispensed using a small spoon mounted under the cap. Snuff bottles were beautifully carved, decorated, and produced in a variety of media, including jade, ivory, bone, porcelain, lacquer, crystal, glass, metal and semi-precious stones.”
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Because I enjoy going down rabbit holes, I started reading this evening about how Portuguese Jesuits travelled across global trade routes to find medicines and drugs. They did this with tobacco/snuff from Brazil. I then found this study on the cosmology of the plant in the ancient Maya tradition, “The Angel in the Gourd: Ritual, Therapeutic, and Protective Uses of Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) Among the Tzeltal and Tzotzil Maya of Chiapas, Mexico” by anthropologist Kevin P. Groark. The research for this paper took 17 years and attempted to document Highland Maya tobacco culture before it dissapeared.
The Maya had a magical courtship with these “helper” plants, as they were called. Armed with the technology of sea travel, explorers of the Americas eventually brought this medicine back to Europe. In 1560, Catherine de’ Medici, the Queen of France, was gifted tobacco to help clear her migraines. When cured, she gave her blessing to cultivate the seeds for all.
Tobacco was considered a “cash crop” in early American colonies like Virginia. It was traded, used as currency and a means to resolve debts. As I read about how tobacco and snuff made their way over and across the globe, I think about where we are today with the plant. According to the WHO:
Tobacco kills up to half of its users.
Tobacco kills more than 8 million people each year. More than 7 million of those deaths are the result of direct tobacco use while around 1.2 million are the result of non-smokers being exposed to second-hand smoke.
Over 80% of the world's 1.3 billion tobacco users live in low- and middle-income countries.
When I was a teenager, I joined a program with the American Heart Association where they gave me free movie tickets and rewards for attending new films to count how many scenes tobacco products appeared. My first film was Memoirs of a Geisha directed by Rob Marshall in 2005. I made so many tallies in my notebook as a young ethnographer I could hardly remember the plot.
“In 2019, the largest tobacco companies spent $8.2 billion marketing cigarettes and smokeless tobacco in the United States. This amount translates to about $22.5 million each day, or nearly $1 million every hour.” - 2019 Federal Trade Commission report and CDC
As a response to the glamour industry around tobacco, truth started anti-smoking campaigns in 1998 in an attempt to curb youth smoking. I remember being enraged when seeing their stunts on TV, like the body bags in front of tobacco offices or their die-ins. truth highlights the work of Lincoln Mondy on their blog, a young creator who made a short film that reveals predatory tactics tobacco companies use to target Black communities.
The founder of toxicology, Paracelsus (1493-1541), said, “All things are poisons and nothing is without poison, only the dosage makes a thing not poison.”
If we consider what sacred plants and medicines exist today, how can we ensure their medicinal integrity over their propensity toward poison? How did we get from magical courtship to massacring “consumers?” Is there a way tobacco can help us in mass scale, or can it only be poisonous?
After almost 23 years in business, truth is now fighting the e-cigarette battle with another generation of youth. Will we have e-yahuasca fifty years from now? Pen-yotes®? While it feels abhorrent to think of such things, Big Tobacco is already making big investments in marijuana after a decline in use of tobacco products (although not enough to knock America down from being the leading producer of them).
Anywayyyyyyyys I guess this is the weird stuff that crocks in my brain after visiting The Crocker.
9/10 museum experience and research spiral rating. Always leave room for improvement!
~h