Persimmon Preserves

    "In all the five prohibitions and ten laws of Buddha and in all the Buddhist codes of discipline, I have never found any precept that warned against persimmons."

-- Fabian Fucan, Japanese Zen Buddhist convert to Christianity, and subsequent apostate

    This quote made me stop.  I was laughing too hard to continue reading.  Indeed, Sahlins's 1994 Sidney M. Mintz lecture was an enjoyable romp, replete as it was with sidebars establishing the very particular peculiarity of the Judeo-Christian, a/k/a Western, genre of being.  I am puzzled that it is described as a lecture however, as I'm not entirely certain how the sidebars would be pulled off in that mode of delivery.  If anything, it was more reminiscent of the sourcebooks¹ I read in younger days, in which a rich tapestry of geographically coincident yet ontologically (and often cosmologically) divergent populations are represented through their encounters with and reactions to alterity.

    Sahlins provides an exceptional frame for Mintz's Sweetness and Power, by positioning a globe-spanning anthropological and sociological account of historical changes in food consumption and food production within the world-view of its telling, that is, within a western cosmology².  Although the point is not explicitly developed by Sahlins, or his interlocutors in the Reply section following the lecture proper, one is reminded that just because various populations were drawn into, by Mintz's telling, a metropolis-countryside dynamic³ of drugfood production, a proto-capitalist liminality of pre-industrial agri-industry, such a telling necessarily comports with its cosmological genre, this does not imply that those indigenous American, African slave, Indian contract worker, or indeed even English working class, populations accounted for in Mintz's telling would have told the same tale, were the hermeneutic task of making sense of a world of sugar and tea and coffee open to them, let alone how a Kaluli, Hawaiian, or Zen Buddhist might have understood the same data Mintz presents.

    

notes

¹ Sourcebooks, here, refer to supplementary materials provided in various role playing game (RPG) systems, for tabletop or live action role play (LARP) use, in which particular fictional or fictionalized settings or populations were described in accordance with the tropes of the genre represented by those subjects.  Not all RPG systems leverage alterity as a game mechanic, but of those that do, the World of Darkness system (White Wolf Games) was well known at the time Sahlins was writing.  Sourcebooks for the TORG system (West End Games), from the same period, even more closely resemble the structure of Sahlins's article, although this system was not nearly as well known.  Sahlins's "Anthropology of _____" formulations are reminiscent of the World Laws that provided the phenomenological grist for characters representing each of the genre-worlds, or cosms, of TORG.

² It might be noted that at least one of the replies to Sahlins suggests that there may be more than one such cosmology.

³  Although, see De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History for another telling of city-outskirts temporality.