Native Intoxicants of North America by Sean Rafferty

Abstract

Reviewed by: Native Intoxicants of North America by Sean Rafferty Cameron B. Strang (bio) Keywords Intoxicants, Native Americans, Indigenous, Drugs Native Intoxicants of North America. By Sean Rafferty. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2021. Pp. 294. Cloth $60.00.) Anthropologist Sean Rafferty's Native Intoxicants of North America is an overview of the plants, fungi, and animals that Indigenous people consumed to achieve altered states of consciousness. The scope of Rafferty's study is continental, reaching from Florida to Alaska, but he situates this research in a global and panhuman context. Thus, instead of zeroing in on how particular groups understood or pursued intoxication, Rafferty sees efforts to reach altered states of consciousness as a "universal human trait" (1) and asserts that "Native North Americans were no different from any other human population in terms of innate desires for intoxication" (203). While this desire to reach altered states of consciousness may be partially biological, the book argues that social behaviors, especially rituals, determine the prevalence and use of various drugs. Humans are intensely social creatures, and those individuals and groups with the most friends, lovers, trading partners, and allies have a competitive—and perhaps evolutionary—advantage over loners. So, the theory goes, intoxicants that foster connections among people tend to be more widespread and socially acceptable than those that lead to antisocial behavior. Tobacco was the most widely used intoxicant throughout North America because its mild effect encouraged social bonding and, relatedly, because the rituals and material culture associated with tobacco—most famously calumet smoking—strengthened relationships within groups, among nations, and between human beings and non-human beings. More potent drugs, especially powerful and risky hallucinogens, were more limited to ritual specialists (whom Rafferty associates with a broad shamanic tradition that may have had roots in central Asia). Drawing global significance from North American evidence, Rafferty concludes that "intoxication was an ancient and widespread practice" (16) among humans and that "it is the social value of intoxicants that has been largely responsible for their widespread use by human societies" (214). Rafferty supports these broad claims with both archaeological and documentary evidence. Archaeologists have uncovered centuries-old botanical specimens of intoxicating species as well as artifacts such as pipe bowls and other ceramics that suggest the degree to which intoxicants mattered [End Page 454] to social and spiritual rituals. Rafferty interprets petroglyphs from the Great Basin and Southwest as possible evidence of drug-inspired artwork, and while he is rightly cautious in drawing conclusions from these elusive drawings, he suggests that they may reflect some of the patterns and images often visualized by users of particular hallucinogens. The book also leans heavily on the work of twentieth-century ethnographers and the writings of early European observers. Assembling this wide array of textual sources is a practical way to fulfill the book's continental ambitions, but the author's decision to introduce most of this ethnographic and historical evidence through a parade of long block quotes makes for clunky reading. Although some of these passages do capture Native peoples' own perspectives on intoxicants—especially peyote use within the Native American Church—the overall dearth of Indigenous voices is glaring when compared to the surplus of quotations from white observers. Native Intoxicants of North America is at its best when interrogating how and why drugs were used in a comparative, continental context. For example, the discussion of datura, which early Americanists may know as jimsonweed—from "Jamestown weed," the deliriant that incapacitated some of America's first English colonists—is both far-ranging and culturally specific. As a powerful and potentially deadly hallucinogen, datura use seems to have been regulated by social and ritual norms within the many nations that ingested or smoked it throughout the continent. Interestingly, Native groups in both Virginia and California incorporated datura into male initiation ceremonies because, Rasmussen suggests, of its antisocial effects: Datura created such a strong disassociation from oneself and one's people that the period of delirium helped mark a break between childhood and adulthood. Moreover, kiva drawings resembling datura from the Southwest, datura-shaped ceramics from Cahokia, and chemical residue from datura on a Mississippian pipe bowl found in Tennessee all support the...