Full Description
First published in 1987, Constructive Drinking is a series of original case studies organized into three sections based on three major functions of drinking. The three constructive functions are: that drinking has a real social role in everyday life; that drinking can be used to construct an ideal world; and that drinking is a significant economic activity. The case studies deal with a variety of exotic drinks
Contents
1: Introductory; 1: A distinctive anthropological perspective; 2: A decade of development in the anthropological study of alcohol use: 1970-1980; 2: Drinks construct the world as it is; 3: Passage to play: rituals of drinking time in American society; 4: Longshore drinking, economic security and union politics in Newfoundland; 5: Sekt versus Schnapps in an Austrian village; 6: Varieties of palm wine among the Lele of the Kasai; 7: Vin Santo and wine in a Tuscan farmhouse; 8: Competitive beer drinking among the Mambila; 3: Drinks construct an ideal world; 9: Symbolic action in Alcoholics Anonymous; 10: The Kava ceremonial as a dream structure 1; 11: Holding time still with cups of tea; 12: Maigret's Paris, conserved and distilled; 4: Alcohol entrenches the alternative economy; 13: The alternative economy of alcohol in the Chiapas highlands; 14: Alcohol monopoly to protect the non-commercial sector of eighteenth-century Poland; 15: Alternative mechanism of distribution in a Soviet economy
