Review: [untitled] Author(s): Eric R. Wolf Source: American Ethnologist, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Nov., 1986), pp.

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reviews
Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. RALPH S. HATTOX. Near Eastern Studies No. 3. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986. 192 pp., illustrations, notes, glossary, appendix, bibliography, index. $9.95 (cloth). ERICR. WOLF City University of New York, Herbert Lehman College This appealing little book grew out of a dissertation in Near EasternStudies in which the author attempted to investigate how Islamic law was applied "to some specific question" (p. ix). His choice of focus fell upon the sequence of legal efforts to prohibit coffee drinking among Muslims; yet his treatment of the question ranges far beyond the formal issues of law. The relevance of this treatise on "The GreatCoffee Controversy"to anthropologists lies in the fact that Hattox uses the legal dispute as an indicator of "the way in which the urban intellectual of the sixteenth century saw his society, and why some saw a threat to that society through the use of coffee" (p. 5). Hattox begins by tracing the diffusion of coffee drinking in coffeehouses. The brew had first come into widespread use in Yemen, where it was probably first drunk by sufis to generate excitement (marqaha = a "coffee high") and to ward off sleep during their nocturnal services. Probably it was also sufi traders and scholars who carried coffee drinking beyond the confines of southwestern Arabia. By the middle of the 16th century the pattern had established itself in Istanbul. But the use of the new drink also generated unease. Hattox recounts how, in 1511, the Mamluk pasha of Mecca, who also served as an inspector of the marketplace, broke up a gathering of coffee drinkers, and convoked a meeting of religious scholars who decided against the drink because of its mind-altering qualities. The pasha ordered the coffee in Mecca burned, with beatings administered to those who trafficked in it. While the decision was laterset aside, it was the first of many edicts against drinking coffee, coupled with equally persistent efforts to continue imbibing it. In several chapters Hattox shows that the battle was fought on different levels. One level involved what could be called the politics of cognition, a reminder to componential analysts that taxonomies are rarely neutral. Did the drink violate Islamic law because it resembled wine, in being heated, fermented, and capable of destroying a person's selfcontrol, or because it was processed by roasting beyond the point of carbonization? Did it derange the properbalance of the body humors? Ifdoctors were right in classifying coffee as cold and dry, it could be seen as aggravating a tendency toward humoral cold and dryness, thought to induce bile and produce melancholy. On the other hand, being cold and dry, it might be good for the sanguine and others who were warm and moist, like women. Yet medical opinion was mixed, and-indeed-while drinking coffee might be prohibited, chewing coffee beans could still be allowed. After dealing with law and medieval medicine, the author looks for a still deeper level of determination, interpreting the legal and medical controversies as symptoms of "a shift in the relations among men" that "gave rise to new habits and attitudes reaching beyond the cafe" (p. 8). The coffeehouse provided a public space for contacts beyond the settings of home and mosque. In a society "without a significant restaurantculture" (p. 89), it offered a "perfect setting for consorting with one's fellow patrons" (p. 91). Before the advent of the cafe, only the lowly and marginal might be seen in public places such as taverns. The status-conscious ate, drank, and entertained at home. The domestic sanctuary guaranteed the sacred tie between host and guest. Instead, the coffeehouse drew "people from all social strata" (p. 79), and offered new public opportunities for gaming, storytelling, puppet shows, music, drug-taking, sexual encounters, and-possibly-subversive discourse. Mary Douglas would be quick to see in this shift from home to coffeehouse a threatening transition from the restricted code of group to the more flexible codes of grid. Indeed, Hattox's findings would support her hypothesis that "the more value people set on social constraints,the more value they set on symbols of bodily control" (NaturalSymbols, New York:Pantheon Books, 1970, p. 64). One of the main objections to the coffeehouse was that it provided a framework for unseemly behavior: a show of conspicuous leisure in place of productive activity; an exhibition of enjoyment in place of moderation, as in passing around a cup of coffee like a cup of wine and drinking from it in turn; a spur to loquaciousness in place of prized taciturnity. All this lent behavior in the coffeehouse "a general air of debauchery" (p. 120). But, then, one might want to go further and ask about what, indeed, produced the shift "in the relations among men" of which the author speaks? Was the Ottoman world more sociable than the preceding Mamluk regimes? Was the ascendancy of the cafe related to rapid population growth, intensified urbanization, and an increase of nonproducers in urban locations, all characteristic of the 16th-century Near East?In that century Istanbulbecame by far the largest city in Europe. Was it prompted by increased competition among segments of the surplus-receiving groups of soldiers, officials, and religious scholars? Did it have some connection with the burgeoning of kinship networks and patron-client sets that increasingly filled the interstices of the state? Was it linked with the increasing commoditization of the Ottoman economy and with the quickening pace of internal and external trade? And what recommended the new pattern of sociability fostered by the coffeehouse to people in

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absolutist-mercantilist-preindustrial Europe?Drinking coffee in specialized coffeehouses reached Oxford in 1650, Parisin 1669, Vienna in 1683. Clearly the coffeehouse played a major part in the "social mobilization" of rising bourgeoisies and literarypolitical avant-gardes; similarly it quickly differentiated to serve distinct occupational, residential, political, and artistic clienteles. Then why did it continue to thrive on the Continent while in England it would yield to the social predominance of the private and exclusive club? Such questions receive reinforcement from a convergence in recent years of inquiries by both anthropologists and social historians into what we eat and drink; when, how, and where; and with what consequences for the structure of society. Hattox speaks to this interest, with a welcome discussion of patternsfrom a civilizational orbit with a different dynamic and yet close enough to Europeto exert a measurable and importantinfluence. The book suggests that there is a lot more to be found and found out in pursuing inquiries into patterns of culinary and bibulous sociability. La Potiere-Jalouse. CLAUDE LEVI-STRAUSS. Paris: Librairie Plon, 1985. 314 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography. Fr 85 (paper). BERNADETTE BUCHER Fordham University After a collection of essays (Le Regard Eloigne, 1983) and of lectures (Paroles Donnees, 1984), Levi-Strauss'latest book brings us back on the creative track of The Savage Mind and Mythologiques for a brisker,somewhat more humorous, but no less enriching journey. Likea skillfully devised fugue, La Potiere Jalouse ("The Jealous Potter Woman") startsquietly with a small riddle posed by a Jivaro myth: What do pottery, jealousy, and the nighthawk-a technology, a feeling, and a bird-have in common? In a quite unOedipal, but very L6vi-Straussianmanner, the answer winds its way through an impressive array of motifs, combinatory variations, transformational systems, drawn from both North and South American mythology (with an occasional incursion into Europeanand Japanese folklore), getting in and out of the reference myth as a fugue's "episodes" out of its three-pronged "subject." As the bird-nesterin The Raw and the Cooked led us into the arcana of the origin of cooking fire, so the jealous potter woman and her acolyte or avatar, the plaintive, glutton nighthawk, guide us through the intricacies of the discovery of pottery clay. This new mythological system is, so to speak, in a metonymic relation to the former and subservient to it: the invention of pottery presupposes the acquisition of fire. But where the latter results from a fight between men and animals or supernatural beings, a fight that has been won once for all, the former is a precarious secret received by humans (characteristically through a woman), standing as the passive witnesses of an ever-questioned battle between the world above and the world below. Not to mention its blatantly virocentrist implications, this new system, in relation to the first, is in-

deed not redundant, as the author points out. Unraveled through a combinatory logic, the close relationship manifest in these myths, between the invention of pottery, marital discord and a threetiered cosmos (Above/Below/On the earth), launches us right onto Freudian turf. The semantic fields of tree-living animals (nighthawk/whippoorwill, sloth, howler monkey), subaquatic serpents, chthonian dwarfs, and cosmic characters (Moon, Sun, comets, and shooting stars), coil around two recurringmotifs usually associated with psychoanalytic theory: orality and anality. Whether through the mouth or the anus, the characters involved in the origin of clay pottery show an excessive avidity, retention, or incontinence. Here is where, in tune with the fugue writing style, Levi-Strauss, by dint of the "canonic formula," prepares us for his most explosive stretta since The Savage Mind's concluding chapter. Ifthe implications of the concept of "mythic" or "undomesticated" thought stood out there in contradistinction to Sartre's views of dialectical reason and philosophy of history, this time it is Freudiantheory that serves as an unavoidable foil. More than in any other of his books, Levi-Strauss gives us here a clear and calculated demonstration of the scope and originality of structuralanalysis vis-a-vis both psychoanalysis proper and psychoanalytic anthropology (for example, culture and personality). One may speculate on what a follower of Freud or even of G. Roheim would do with these images of mouth- , anus- , or vagina-less, overeating or overdefecating, fire-farting,excrement-eating creatures, aggressive severed heads in search of their lost bodies, hollow tubes getting in and out of corporal apertures. To L6vi-Strauss,they function as a code that articulates with others (astronomical, ecological, zoological, sociological, and so on) to form a coherent, logical system accounting for the problem of the origin of the world and of society, a sort of Amerindian Genesis. Tryingto make sense out of these myths by focusing exclusively on the sexual code, as would a psychoanalytic interpretation, reduces their intelligibility and reveals a misunderstanding of how symbolic processes function. Not only do they operate on a multiplicity of codes, but each one is like a grid applied to empirical data, out of which each myth selects only a few slots that it combines with other slots drawn from other codes, thus forming a metacode. The message they convey becomes intelligible through their mutual convertibility, which in turn appears in the transformationof myths into one another. Here, Freudagain did not go far enough in grasping the language of the unconscious (whether in myths or dreams). Not unlike Sartre'sambivalent, if not self-contradictory views of dialectical reason, Freud's theory of symbol wavers between two poles: one "realist" (one might rather call it "univocal" as it assigns one meaning to each symbol), and a relativistic one whereby it draws its meaning from its context and its relationship to other symbols, including the hint that they may be the transformation of one another. If Freud had pursued this last track, he would be a structuralist,but he did not. This also gives Levi-Straussa chance to reiterate his often misunderstood position in relation to Saussure's theory of the arbitrarinessof linguistic signs.

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