Guaraná

How Brazil Embraced the World's Most Caffeine-Rich Plant

Seth Garfield

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN:
  9781469671284
• Print ISBN:
  9781469671277
  9781469671260
• Subtopic: Agricultural Public Policy

In this sweeping chronicle of guaraná—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 guaraná as the pre-Columbian cultivar of the Sateré-Mawé 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, guaraná 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 to guaraná and found new uses for it. Today, it is the namesake ingredient of a multibillion-dollar soft drink industry and a beloved national symbol.

Guaraná’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 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations, Maps, and Table
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An Eye on the Past and the Present
• Chapter One. Guaraná: The Roots of History and Myth
• Chapter Two. Colonial Missions: Remaking Plants and People
• Chapter Three. Silva Coutinho’s Plant: Nineteenth-Century Science and Amazonian Geopolitics
• Chapter Four. Drug Prospects: Guaraná’s Anglo-American Boom and Bust
• Chapter Five. From Guarani to Guaraná: Forging a National Industry
• Chapter Six. Message in a Bottle: Selling Guaraná
• Chapter Seven. Growing the Pie: Transformations in Brazilian Agriculture and Diet
• Chapter Eight. Fast Times, Slow Food: Indigenizing Modernity
• Conclusion: A Brazilian Original
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index