The hallucinogenic and medicinal effects of peyote have a storied history that begins well before Europeans arrived in the Americas. While some have attempted to explain the cultural and religious significance of this cactus and drug, Alexander S. Dawson offers a completely new way of understanding the place of peyote in history. In this provocative new book, Dawson argues that peyote has marked the boundary between the Indian and the West since the Spanish Inquisition outlawed it in 1620. For nearly four centuries ecclesiastical, legal, scientific, and scholarly authorities have tried (unsuccessfully) to police that boundary to ensure that, while indigenous subjects might consume peyote, others could not. Moving back and forth across the U.S.–Mexico border, The Peyote Effect explores how battles over who might enjoy a right to consume peyote have unfolded in both countries, and how these conflicts have produced the racially exclusionary systems that characterizes modern drug regimes. Through this approach we see a surprising history of the racial thinking that binds these two countries more closely than we might otherwise imagine.
Alexander S. Dawson is Associate Professor of History at SUNY Albany. He is the author of Indian and Nation in Revolutionary Mexico, First World Dreams: Mexico Since 1989, and Latin America since Independence.
"Alexander S. Dawson follows the history of the 'most purely intellectual' of drugs across centuries and borders and also challenges our conceptions of authenticity and cultural appropriation. He shows how the study, consumption, and spiritual meanings of peyote have been central to the constructions of indigeneity and racial difference in both Mexico and the United States. This empirically rich book will challenge readers to think critically about connections and divergences in the history of Mexico and the United States."—Pablo Piccato, Columbia University
"The Peyote Effect is 'drug history' at its best in that it not only tells the story of a particular drug, but in doing so it makes an enormous contribution to our knowledge in other areas. The story Dawson tells—a comparative history of peyote in the United States and Mexico—is ultimately a history of modern orientalism and how Indians continue to play a primary role in defining what being 'American' or 'Mexican' cannot be. This is in many ways a quite brilliant book."—Isaac Peter Campos, author of Home Grown: Marijuana and the Origins of Mexico's War on Drugs
320 pp.6 x 9
9780520285422$95.00|£80.00Hardcover
Sep 2018