High Points: The Historical Geography of Cannabis
Cannabis, including hemp and its psychoactive counterpart,
has a long but largely overlooked historical geography. Situating the topic
within varied perspectives such as world-systems theory, Foucauldian
biopolitics, and the moral economy of drugs, Dr. Warf will chart its diffusion
over several millennia, noting the contingent and uneven ways in which it was
enveloped within varying social and political circumstances. He will explore
the plant’s early uses in East and South Asia, its shift to the Middle East,
and resultant popularity in the Arab world and Africa. The discussion will also
review the expansion of cannabis under colonialism, including deliberate
cultivation by Portuguese and British authorities in the New World as part of
the construction of a pacified labor force, and will offer an overview of
cannabis’s contested history in the United States, in which a series of early
20th-century moral panics led to its demonization; later, the drug enjoyed
gradual liberalization.
Dr. Barney Warf is a professor of Geography with the Department of
Geography & Atmospheric Science at the University of Kansas. Dr. Warf is a
human geographer with wide-ranging interests. He has consciously sought to
position himself within the discipline at the intersections of traditional
economic geography and contemporary social theory.
A copy of Dr. Warf’s paper “High Points: An Historical Geography of Cannabis” published in the October 2014 issue of the Geographical Review is available here.