Vermeer's Hat

Brook uses the definition of transculturation offered by early 20th-century Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who saw it as the way that aspects of one cultural group move to and become adopted by another—so much so that the adoptive culture no longer considers the element as foreign. The primary example Brook considers is the process by which smoking tobacco moved through the world, from one culture to another.

One feature of transculturation is the loss of the meanings placed on the cultural feature by its originators. Europeans first encountered the use of tobacco when they observed the Indigenous peoples of the Americas. While for Indigenous tribes, tobacco was often a part of spiritual practice, smoking mostly lost this association when it was taken up by Europe, and later, by China. There were however a few exceptions: For instance, in Tibet, smoking made its way back into religious association, as a formidable Tibetan deity began to be depicted smoking from a human femur. Instead of a religious practice, smoking became an aesthetic one: Europeans displayed wealth through increasingly elaborate storage vessels for tobacco; in China, smoking became almost an art form, with complex rituals that were markers of social standing.