One more thing:  Let's not forget that national prohibition in the U.S. was
championed
by the Anti-Saloon League--and one of its enduring legacies may well have
been the
the discrediting of drinking-out in the mainstream American symbolic
complex.

I'd supply the citation for the old paper in Contemporary Drug Problems
that quantitied
the shift from out- to in- drinking before and after Prohibition by
tabulating relative sales
of beer in kegs and bottles--but it isn't handy.  Anybody else got it?

N.B.:  "U.S." added to first sentence below:
----------
> From: Ron Roizen <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: public or private drinking
> Date: Wednesday, January 20, 1999 9:44 AM
>
> When the WHO-directed Scotland, Zambia, Mexico, and (tag-along) U.S.
> cross-cultural surveys were conducted
> in 1979 (was it?) I was quite struck by the broad similarities in
> drinking-pattern and drinking-problem frequencies between the U.S. and
> Scotland and by two striking differences:  (1) Scots drank at pubs/U.S.
at
> home and (2) Scots showed a marked differences in beverage preferences by
> gender (men drank beer, women sherry) whereas the U.S. did not show
strong
> gender-based preferences.  This led to some interesting exchanges between
> Bruce Ritson, head of the Scottish project, and myself.  Both cultural
> differences could be read as a greater separation of the masculine and
> feminine realms in relation to drinking in Scotland.  By extension, these
> two findings suggested greater persistence of a
> (gender-) status-based traditionalism in Scottish drinking norms and
> practices.
>
> I also remember sitting next to a fashion salesman on a European flight
in
> this period, too.  We got into a conversation about differences between
> European and American fashion sensibilities.  He said (as I recall) that
> lower middle class Europeans spent more on fashion (relatively) because
> they preferred to entertain "out" (at a restaurant or pub) because their
> homes were less suitable status vehicles.  Americans, on the other hand,
> spent more on furnishings for their homes--and tended to entertain in
them.
>
> Drinking-in vs. drinking-out should, one would think, imply lots of broad
> corollary differences in drinking's cultural "locations" and meanings,
> culture-specific arrays of drinking problems, etc.  But the WHO project
was
> strongly tethered to policy-related ambitions that left little room for
> pursuing "interesting" "sidelight" findings such as these.  Nevertheless,
> I'm sure some tables illuminating the drink-in/drink-out divide in
Scotland
> and the U.S. can still be found on the shelves at the Alcohol Research
> Group in Berkeley or in Bruce Ritson's group.
>
> Ron Roizen