Alcohol

Social Drinking in Cultural Context

Janet Chrzan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135095352
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Alcohol: Social Drinking in Cultural Context critically examines alcohol use across cultures and through time. This short text is a framework for students to self-consciously examine their beliefs about and use of alcohol, and a companion text for teaching the primary concepts of anthropology to first-or second year college students.

1

Introduction

Why is Drinking Interesting?

Wine does not intoxicate men; men intoxicate themselves.

Chinese proverb

Scene One

It’s Saturday night on campus, and you are a rising senior returning after summer break. While walking through the main walkway of your college at about 9pm you notice a girl (God, they are getting younger looking every year!) vomiting into a bush. She’s having a hard time holding herself up, keeps pitching forward into the leaves of the shrubbery and there is vomit in her hair. You shake your head and walk past, remembering how stupid you were at New Student Orientation when you were a freshman and glad you aren’t stupid enough anymore to get sick in public.

Scene Two

It’s later that night and you are pre-gaming with your friends, playing beer pong and taking shots of vodka and kahlua before you go to a house party. It’s the same group you’ve been hanging out with for the last three years – you have lots of war stories – and you are winning the beer pong game. Your house added some new rules and the losers of each round have to drink a shot of the vodka mix when they step down from the table. The living room of your house is littered with red solo cups, small clear plastic cups for shots, and the floor is sticky from a spilled bottle of kahlua. At midnight you all decide it’s time to go to the party and everyone troops outside. You realize that even though you won the game you are really feeling the booze – must have been the sympathy shots you took with the losers – you are totally dizzy and feel ill. You lean over the rail of the front porch and vomit into the bushes, glad you got that taken care of before you got to the party. Boot and rally. Grabbing another beer to wash the taste out of your mouth and closing one eye to make it easier to see, you follow your friends down the street, hoping your roommate remembers how to get to the party.

Scene Three

It’s 7pm on Initiation night at your sorority, when parents meet all the new sisters. The parents are in the living room with appetizers and glasses of alcohol-free punch, chatting while waiting for their daughters to be formally ‘presented’. The 4pm initiation ceremony was quite a surprise – your hands were bound, you were blindfolded with a scarf and a pillow case was placed over your head. You were then made to walk up and down stairs and around the chapter house for about a half hour until you were completely confused and didn’t know where you were. You finally ended up in what felt like a big room and you could hear lots of girls talking. You were pushed into position and told to stand still during the ceremony, which consisted of a lot of questions about the history of the house and then a group rendition of the chapter’s anthem. The pillow case was ripped off your head and your big sister stood in front of you with a big glass of tequila; you realized you were in the basement. All the bigs were in front of their littles in a circle, and were chanting “drink, drink, drink!” as they held the glass to their little’s mouths. Your hands were tied so you couldn’t hold the glass, but you were glad that your big let you take big breaths in between gulps of the fiery liquid. After everyone finished the drinks hands were untied and the pledges pronounced Active Members. Your big took you upstairs into her suite and she and her roommates had more drinks for their littles, so you got ready for the party while singing along to favorite songs and taking shots. When it was time to go downstairs to meet all the parents you realized your legs were wobbly and that you couldn’t walk down the stairs. Shit, you were trashed. Could your parents smell the booze on your breath? Your big sister gave you some Listerine to gargle with and then held you up when you wobbled downstairs. Shit, how were you going to make it through the ceremony, reception and dinner without your parents figuring out you were totally faced?

Student and Youth Drinking

How many of you can see yourself in those examples, or had a similar experience or two in college? Why are these episodes so believable? And finally, why do college students drink so much?

The drinking habits of students and youth have been deplored for thousands of years, providing humorous and moral tales at least as far back as the Greeks, who wrote drunken youth into comedic drama as a stock figure symbolizing callow licentiousness. Student intoxication is even credited with the creation of the legal and independent status of the university, as it supposedly arose from a drunken brawl in the twelfth century at the University of Paris. The apocryphal story involves a student riot caused by a dispute with a tavern-keeper. The students were thrown out of the tavern, but returned to destroy the business, and the riot that ensued damaged many buildings in Paris. In retaliation several students were captured and killed by the town watch. The student response was to go on strike, thereby causing economic losses to the townspeople who relied on college incomes. After two years the students returned, but only after the Pope granted the university self-governance under the protection of the Papacy. This freed the students from discipline by town magistrates and cemented the right of universities to self-governance. The perceived lack of control over student behavior and student misconduct has plagued relations between ‘town’ and ‘gown’ ever since. Many students assume that universities are safe areas free of supervisory control, or spaces of potential discipline-free transgression. At some colleges this is described as a ‘bubble’ that constructs a spatially defined zone where students are welcome to do as they please in safety and freedom. The experience of being a student in a kind of municipal ‘free zone’ can be encouraged by university police departments that often look the other way when students transgress civic rules, including public drunkenness. When the bubble penetrates nightlife zones it becomes a liminal space where time-out activities are normalized, which reinforces the belief that the college years are a period where drunken excesses are safe and normal (Sperber, 2000: 192–200; Wolburg, 2001; Chatterton and Hollands, 2003: 126–147; Grazian, 2008; Dowdall, 2009).

The belief that the college years are a time when out-of-control and intoxicated actions are acceptable has been reproduced by the media again and again, most evocatively in the movie Animal House and in television shows such as Greek, The Real World, and Jersey Shore. John Belushi’s iconic downing of a bottle of bourbon in Animal House has come to symbolize the college experience. The advertising poster for the 2008 film College featured an image of a young man vomiting into a toilet with the accompanying text “Best. Weekend. Ever.” The series Greek used a red solo cup as the logo for the show, with the cup mimicking a hot tub – with beer instead of water. The theme of fun drunkenness is reinforced with three attractive ‘co-eds’ popping out of the cupas-hot-tub, arms in the air and bodies displayed. Accompanying them in the ‘tub’ are two very preppy-looking white males, one wearing a button-down shirt and the other bare-chested, presumably naked. On the outside of the red cup are three nerdy-looking males trying to get into the cup/tub. They are on the outside and aren’t preppy, cool and white: one is fat, one is Black and one is wearing a pink inner tube that looks, from a distance, like a pink tutu. The message is crystal clear (if perhaps covered in foam): college is fun, girls are easy, and if you’re a preppy white guy you are going to have a great time. The intricacies of the college social hierarchy are perfectly on display, and it’s clear that anyone who is not attractive, fun-loving and drunk (and willing to get naked in a hot tub) isn’t welcome.

Why Anthropology and Alcohol?

I first became interested in the anthropology of alcohol when I moved from San Francisco to the East Coast. I had always considered my California peer group to be on the high end of alcohol intake because we loved cocktails and parties, and everyone drank wine with dinner. I didn’t know anyone who had problems with booze, but I knew a lot of people who drank a fair bit. But in my new city people drank more when they partied and there was more drunkenness. Whole evenings were devoted to drinking rather than to ‘having a cocktail’ and doing another activity, and this seemed common among students and townspeople. I realized that I was dealing with very different cultural norms about how alcohol fits into social life, and it seemed to be an ‘all or nothing’ activity rather than a pleasant addition to an evening with friends.

Then I was asked to teach a harm-reduction medical anthropology course on alcohol to undergraduates. As I explored the anthropological, sociological and medical literature on drinking I realized the vast diversity in drinking habits around the world, and how lucky I had been to have grown up in a Mediterranean drinking culture. While I had enjoyed alcohol during my college years, few people at my California university seemed to place as much importance on drinking as did the students I was teaching. My students were exhibiting the binge behaviors more common among Northern European cultures, and were often getting in trouble and experiencing consequences caused by intoxication. To help students situate their use historically and culturally – and to question their beliefs about how they should drink – I had them keep diaries and write ethnographies of college parties. They had to go to the party sober and experience it as if it was another culture, which probably wasn’t too difficult given that for many it was the first time they had experienced a party without being intoxicated. Their reflections about what they witnessed provided opportunities for in-class discussions about boundaries, drunkenness, acceptable behavior and keeping safe while drinking. These discussions also made crystal clear that how students drank was a product of their culture, and that most regarded alcohol as a drug and used it as such. Many had no concept that there was any other way to use alcohol or that people in other places and times had been able to enjoy alcohol in moderation without consequences. Their drinking was a product of student culture that made no sense to me, having been brought up in another culture with different drinking habits. Teaching the class cemented my understanding that drinking alcohol was a deeply cultural act with variations determined by social expectations.

Anthropology studies human beings holistically, from biology to psychology. Anthropologists usually divide this examination into four ‘fields’ of study – physical, socio-cultural, linguistic and archeological – but recognize that all four areas are important to understanding human cultural systems. Each of these fields has connections to other disciplines as well; physical anthropologists often do research in biology, public health or medicine, socio-cultural anthropologists study how belief systems and cultural structures affect individuals and societies, and linguistic anthropologists are interested in how language, images and folklore shape culture – and how culture shapes language use and perception of the world. And everyone knows that archeologists dig up old stuff: human remains, clay pots and treasure from ancient civilizations. But anthropologists also understand that their particular area is just one part of an interconnected discipline that explores how human cultures function and influence the individuals within them. Individuals are understood to have singular identities and personalities shaped by the knowledge and history of their culture. Individuals do not stand alone – they inhabit the past and create the future because they represent the embodied knowledge of prior generations and transmit these cultural practices to their children.

Drinking alcohol is both a physical and a cultural act. The physical response is well known and almost everyone can recognize when someone is drunk. Once an individual has experienced alcohol he or she understands its biological effects intimately, from the first burn upon the lips to the giddy feeling of intoxication. But drinking alcohol is also a deeply cultural act and every society has different rules for use. Anthropology acknowledges that wide cultural variations exist for almost every form of social practice, and each culture’s beliefs and forms of behavior render its rules rational. Cultures have overlapping norms of belief and behavior across multiple fields of human action that mutually reinforce the ‘rightness’ of specific ways of seeing the world and interacting with others. For instance, religious and socio-economic structures and beliefs support many different cultural practices in addition to those tied directly to religion, social structure and economics. Each culture’s rules present a reasonably holistic cultural package to those who have learned how to be human in that society. As a result, there is much variation in rules and expectations of alcohol from culture to culture – this can make drinking with someone from another culture quite an adventure. But because alcohol also has distinct and predictable physical effects there is similarity across cultures as well. Dwight Heath has spent decades studying how different cultures use alcohol, and he maintains that there are predictable rules that operate in every culture that uses alcohol:

1. In most societies, drinking is a social act, embedded in a context of values, attitudes and other norms.
2. These values, norms and attitudes influence the effects of drinking, regardless of how important biochemical, physiological and pharmacokinetic factors may also be to the experience of drinking.
3. The drinking of alcoholic beverages tends to be hedged with rules. Often such rules are the focus of exceptionally strong emotions and sanctions.
4. The value of alcohol for promoting relaxation and sociability is emphasized in many populations and most populations treat alcohol intake as an act of celebration or something appropriate for celebrations.
5. The association of drinking with any kind of specifically associated problems is rare among cultures throughout both history and the contemporary world.
6. When alcohol-related problems do occur, they are clearly linked with modalities of drinking, and usually also with values, attitudes and norms about drinking. What is normal for consumption defines the abnormal that is considered a problem. Societies that consider drunkenness shameful or disgusting usually have less incidence of intoxication.
7. Attempts at prohibiting alcohol use (like Prohibition) have never been successful except when couched in terms of sacred or supernatural rules.
8. In cultures where drinking is considered heroic, masculine or desirable it tends to be embraced. These positive evaluations may provide little defense against the risks and dangers of excessive drinking.
9. Societies in which alcohol is disallowed to the young, and in which alcohol is considered to enhance the self by conferring sex appeal or power, tend to have youth who drink too much, too fast, for inappropriate or unrealistic reasons.

Heath (2000: 196–198)

American beliefs about alcohol tend to grant it heroic status, restrict it from youth and tolerate drunken behavior. According to Heath’s observations, it is a cultural trifecta almost perfectly designed to encourage abuse among youth. And predictably, in the United States alcohol has been regarded as both a blessing and a curse. During the colonial period beer and cider were important sources of nutrients and fluids for men, women and children and were considered to be necessary beverages for all ages. The rise of Temperance changed American ideas about alcohol during the nineteenth century. While the original intent of the Temperance organizers was to encourage drunkards to reform by giving up hard alcohol (spirits), over time it morphed into a political and religious movement to outlaw production, distribution and use of alcohol entirely. Beliefs about alcohol shifted from a healthful and enjoyable beverage to a dangerous and seductive drug. That belief predominates in the United States today, even though alcohol is legal in all 50 states and bars and liquor stores are present in most cities and towns.

Re-imaging alcohol as a drug ignores many thousands of years of more positive human use. Alcohol has been an important agricultural product and a good source of calories since grain and grape were first fermented. Archeological and historical evidence suggests that alcohol was considered a food by most cultures until distilled spirits, which have a far higher alcohol content, became a common tipple. Alcohol has been incorporated into religious and secular rituals and has been used to produce, consolidate and display economic and social power. While the dangers of alcohol always have been recognized, the value of the social and nutritional functions to early agricultural societies guaranteed that alcohol remained on the table and that appropriate social rules were developed to limit its danger to individuals and communities. Because early farmers may not have produced grains in great enough quantities to allow frequent beer or wine production, and since most rural and traditional societies expect people to drink together and in public, it is possible that abuse and addiction were infrequent. Alcoholism may very well have been almost unknown in ancient societies, although the consequences of over-use and abuse would have been obvious. Early texts do not hesitate to describe the joys and dangers of drunkenness, and to assign shame to bad behavior enabled by drink.

The nature of our relationship with alcohol changed after the development of distillation, and especially when hard alcohol became an important economic trade item. For the first time in history alcohol was cheap and concentrated enough to encourage easy intoxication on a regular basis – only a few shots and the drinker could be nearly insensible. The low alcohol content of beer means that drinking a sufficient volume for extreme intoxication may overwhelm the capacity of the stomach and cause vomiting. Wine is stronger than beer, and most wine-drinking cultures have social rules about how, when, where and how much to drink. Spirits are cheap to produce, easy to store and trade, and enable fast and dangerous drinking. The Temperance Movement in the United States initially was intended to end intake of spirits, not beer and wine, because its founders perceived that hard alcohol acted differently in the body and mind than did the traditional lower-alcohol beverages.

The United States is one of a handful of countries that have implemented a secular ban on alcohol sales. Trade in alcohol has been legal since 1933 but many of the ideas encouraged by the Temperance Movement are still present and active among our people; alcohol is viewed by many as a dangerous drug and roughly 30 percent of adults choose not to drink. Prohibition (the period during which trade in alcohol was made illegal in the United States after the enactment of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1920) fueled a nation-wide cocktail culture that glorified speakeasies, jazz clubs, sophisticated nightlife and the martini. Hollywood romanticized drinking from the 1930s through the 1980s, when the neo-temperance movement once again made alcohol déclassé. But bars, nightclubs and drinking events remain an important part of American social lives and national identity, and taking a first legal drink at age 21 remains an important rite of passage. Alcohol advertising is found in every form of media, and teens and youth recognize promotional characters such as the Budweiser frogs and Captain Morgan. Even though alcohol is proscribed to those under 21, it is widely understood and accepted that teens and young adults drink illegally. Because drinking has become such an expected part of college life and because many college students are not yet old enough to legally drink, college drinking is considered to be a national problem by parents and university administrators. To college students, drinking is an easy way to have a great time with friends, meet possible romantic partners and prove maturity, all at once. Sure, there are consequences, and sometimes people get sick, or get into a fight, or f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction: Why is Drinking Interesting?
• 2. Alcohol in the Ancient World
• 3. Barbarians and Beerpots: European Drinking from the Celts to Victoria
• 4. A Short History of American Drinking
• 5. It’s Happy Hour! Modern American Drinking
• 6. Alcohol Advertising
• 7. Why Do Students Drink?
• 8. Conclusion: Why Do People Drink?
• Bibliography
• Index