The sadness of sweetness - The native anthropology of western cosmology

This paper attempts to lend a broad ''archaeological'' support to Sidney Mintz's Sweetness and Power by discussing certain major anthropological themes of the long term in the Judeo-Christian cosmology that seem particularly relevant to Western economic behavior-especially consumption issues-in the I8th century. The pleasure-pain principle of human action, the idea of an irresistible and egoistical human nature underlying social behavior, the sense of society as an order of power or coercion, and a confidence in the greater providential value of human suffering figure among these anthropological themes. It is also argued that they continue to inhabit mainstream Western social science-to the bedevilment of our understandings of other peoples.