A01=Seth Garfield
Amazonian ethnobotany
Amazonian ethnohistory
Amazonian ethnopharmacology
Author_Seth Garfield
botanical history
Category=JBCC4
Category=JHMC
Category=WB
economic botany
eq_bestseller
eq_food-drink
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
food history in Latin America
Guarana
history of Amazonia
history of Brazil
Indigenous knowledge
Indigenous Peoples of Brazil
mass consumerism in Latin America
multi-sited ethnography
nutrition transition in Latin America
plants with caffeine-content
Satere-Mawe people
soft drink industry in Latin America
Product details
- ISBN 9781469671277
- Weight: 363g
- Dimensions: 155 x 233mm
- Publication Date: 20 Dec 2022
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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In this sweeping chronicle of guarana—a glossy-leaved Amazonian vine packed with more caffeine than any other plant—Seth Garfield develops a wide-ranging approach to the history of Brazil itself. The story begins with guarana as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Satere-Mawe people in the Lower Amazon region, where it figured centrally in the Indigenous nation's origin stories, dietary regimes, and communal ceremonies. During subsequent centuries of Portuguese colonialism and Brazilian rule, guarana was reformulated by settlers, scientists, folklorists, food technologists, and marketers. Whether in search of pleasure, profits, professional distinction, or patriotic markers, promoters imparted new meanings and uses to guarana. Today, it is the namesake ingredient of a multibillion-dollar soft drink industry and a beloved national symbol.
Guarana's journey elucidates human impacts on Amazonian ecosystems; the circulation of knowledge, goods, and power; and the promise of modernity in Latin America's largest nation. For Garfield, the beverage's cross-cultural history reveals not only the structuring of inequalities in Brazil but also the mythmaking and ordering of social practices that constitute so-called traditional and modern societies.
Guarana's journey elucidates human impacts on Amazonian ecosystems; the circulation of knowledge, goods, and power; and the promise of modernity in Latin America's largest nation. For Garfield, the beverage's cross-cultural history reveals not only the structuring of inequalities in Brazil but also the mythmaking and ordering of social practices that constitute so-called traditional and modern societies.
Seth Garfield is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin. His most recent book is In Search of the Amazon.
