The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai suggests in his analysis of the age of globalization that we can trace the international flow of identities and culture by following a particular good or idea. We can note each permutation and appropriation of that idea as a unique glimpse into the lives of global consumers.
While Appadurai focuses largely on mass culture and economic commodities, his method is even useful at any stage of the hierarchy, within a society-the flow of a good or idea across time or space is an elegant lens through which we can chart our own appropriations and reappropriations.
During the fall, many of these goods come to mind: crimson leaves, succulent smoky fires at dusk, a light sweater to accommodate a crisp afternoon, warm pie and, above all, languid cigarette smoke, wafting above a dimly-lit stoop or lingering in the car with the windows rolled down.
The cigarette, to my intellect, is an object of contempt. In addition to providing 1000 percent daily value of deadly carcinogens to you and those around you and propping up politically and morally bankrupt corporations, the cigarette, like studded belts or dyed hair, has been co-opted as a symbol of rebellion and individuality. It has been mass-marketed on such pretenses flooding the market with “rebels” huffing away in belligerent conformity. That’s all intellectual shite, however.
The cigarette has been so diffused by culture and economics, it has woven its way subtly and overtly into the lives of the bulk of Americans and certainly everyone overseas. If we follow the smoke through the lives of families or even ourselves, we find diverse (and telling) experiences attached.
Intelligent arguments aside, the cigarette will never lose its romance for me, and I was never much of a smoker. My entire extended family is comprised of Basic 100-sucking addicts, divorced from the bohemian elegance and shackled to the maintenance fix, forty a day. Until I hit middle school, smoking was pathetic at best, a retarded gamble at worst.
Though, as I snuck behind the dumpster around the corner from a friend’s house during the Super Bowl in 1995, I abstained from those first furtive pulls on stolen Marlboros, but I was inundated by a sense of newness, rebellion, and arrival. Merely experimenting with life, a passerby observed to his younger daughter.
The smell stuck with me, to the present day. By eighth grade, most of my friends had a habit. I tried an occasional drag here and there, with mixed results. I never once bought a pack myself, and when I stumbled in during the late evening, post coffeehouse, I could say with certainty that it really was my friends who left the stagnant remnants on my clothes.
As theater rehearsals and debate trips consumed an increasing majority of my time, I was surrounded. After-school trips to the law library, hotel lobbies in October, and drives across downtown Albuquerque were all accentuated by a friend behind the wheel, autumn air mixing gently with wisps of Camel Reds. The big moments: posturing on a stoop at Wake Forest, heartbroken over caf? au lait, non-descript cruising into Thanksgiving break-smoke wafting to the rafters.
My friend Sam would douse us in his sister’s Revlon Fire & Ice to make sure we weren’t popped by our parents, particularly given my innocence. I logged perhaps 20 cigarettes total across high school, but I was addicted to the scent, as it intertwined with each version of me and each environment, acclimated and dynamic but essentially the same. By senior year, I was manning the Shisha to our friends’ amusement at parties, or suavely offering cloves to new desultory drunks as the evening wore on.
I bought my own hookah, entertained a brief Parliament habit on the Village C patio as my independent, adult self formed during that crisp, lovely September of 2000. The hookah has since been left at the University of Chicago, where it too has interwoven into the experience of others, in ways at which I can only guess.
I offered cloves again to a girl last year, and kept smoking them for months, lingering in the rain and neatly perfuming my new apartment as the rain came down for what seemed like months.
And here I am, new house, same girl, no habit of which to speak (even the Bombay is making a hasty retreat), but as my new roommate inconspicuously rolls down the window and clicks the lighter, I am captivated, carried away, and at ease. My autumn leaves.
Ian Bourland is a senior in the School of Foreign Service and associate editor of The Georgetown Voice. Any complaints should be addressed to Bill Cleveland.
