Guaraná's forgotten history

Tracking guaraná's transition from a pre-Columbian, caffeine-rich cultivar of the Sateré-Mawé people of the Lower Amazon region to an Anglo-American pharmaceutical during the late nineteenth century, this essay focuses on the historical processes of transmission, adaptation, and erasure surrounding cross-cultural therapeutic transfers. Nineteenth-century scientists, pharmaceutical firms, and health practitioners who promoted guaraná in the Northern Hemisphere - largely to treat so-called sick-headache - stripped the plant of its Indigenous cosmologies, relying on elaborate processes of mediation and reassignment to bind together researchers, providers, and patients in new codes and rituals. Scientists' reinvention of guaraná streamlined the drug's adaptation to wealthier foreign markets, where interest spiked but proved unsustainable due to the high cost of the drug, competition with cheaper, mass-produced caffeinated substances such as coffee and tea, and the rise of synthetic medicines. This essay situates the history of guaraná in Anglo-American markets in the context of colonial botanizing and knowledge transfers that expanded in the late nineteenth century with the conquest or exploration of tropical regions. Informed by medical anthropology, the analysis also approaches medicines as social objects whose exchange relies on discrete actors and forms of communication; social attitudes and practices that define appropriate standards and settings for drug consumption; and the centrality of relevant cultural frameworks in affirming the significance and even potential benefits of drug taking. Thus, the forgotten history of guaraná (a "soft drug" that has been curiously orphaned in the extensive literature on stimulants) raises broader questions about the erasures of Indigenous knowledge and botanical medicines from pharmaceutical histories and practices

Alternative medicine · Ancient history · Biology · Indigenous · Phytotherapy · Traditional medicine · Classics · History · Medicine · Phytochemistry Medicinal Plant Applications · Psychedelics and Drug Studies