Jason Hughes, Learning to Smoke: Tobacco Use in the West.(Book Review)

Jason Hughes, Learning to Smoke: Tobacco Use in the West. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 2003, 201 pp.

Hughes sets out to answer the question "Why do people smoke?" by examining the context of the use of tobacco and of the "shifting understandings" (11) of the meaning of the experience of smoking. He traces the use of tobacco in North American Native People, describing it as "a highly important, sacred, and 'male' pursuit ... characterized by a loss of control, by intoxication" (33-4). He then moves to a discussion of the history of tobacco use in Europe, with a view to setting the phenomenon in the context of scientific and cultural change, concluding that both the nature (the emergence of the cigarette and …