Dear "caric",
Temperance movements were certainly trying to convince mainstream
culture that something banalized was actually strange and dangerous.
But the thing is that, in the short run, or even in the medium term,
they succeeded in the U.S. (And, for some substances, also in the long
term -- consider the cultural position of opiates now compared to the
late 19th century.)
In my view, it is a misreading backwards from now and your
particular life experience to see temperance movements as always
marginal in US society. Even today, there are parts of the US (e.g.,
Alabama) where abstainers are in a majority among adults. There was a
time when temperance was viewed as a progressive and high-status cause,
before it became seen (in Hofstadter's time) as rural, reactionary, and
down-market. Read the interesting account of the historical
fluctuations between generations in whether wet or dry sentiment was
dominant on American college campuses, written in 1938 by a college
temperance worker, and later republished: Harry S. Warner, Alcohol
trends in college life: historical perspectives, pp. 45-80 in George
Maddox, ed., The Domesticated Drug: Drinking among Collegians, New
Haven: College & University Press, 1970.
Robin
-----Original Message-----
From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society
[mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2005 10:17 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: what can alcohol/drug historians learn from the social
sciences?
One doesn't have to be a cultural anthropologist to view alcohol as a
normal part of society. Having grown up in a hard-drinking part of
upstate New York, attended college at big-partying liberal arts school,
and pursued graduate work at UNC-Chapel Hill, I was not even aware that
alcohol could be considered a "foreign and pernicious agent" until I
began studying the temperance movement as part of my research on 19th
century popular culture. Now that I'm teaching at a university where
the campus parties start on Wednesday and continue through Friday when
students go home for the weekend, I have severe doubts that I am the
only one who thinks this way.
Since learning about temperance movements, it has always struck me that
temperance organizations are much more marginal to the dominant forms of
self-understanding in societies like the U. S. than alcohol.
Speculating for a moment, part of this marginality might be because
temperance organizations like the Washingtonian societies were seeking
to convince mainstream culture that something that most people perceived
as "normal" and "good" was actually strange and dangerous. In lit crit
language, temperance organizations often seek to convince people that
something they viewed as "self" was actually "other."
Quoting Maria Swora <[log in to unmask]>:
> Ron,
>
> Speaking as a sociocultural anthropologist and an MPH, I can sum up
> the difference this way. Public health, while not medicine, is
> aligned with medicine and therefore is very interventionist. Cultural
> anthropology is NOT interventionist, and as Heath himself wrote, likes
> to position itself as a "gadfly" annoyingly questioning everyone's
> presuppostions. I think that has lessened in recent years as
> anthropology has moved away from structuralism, and is in some kind of
> post-poststructuralist period. Does sociology have such theoretical
> fads? I find myself rolling my eyes at the table of contents of many
> anthropology journals. By the way, I've published five papers, and
> only one in an Anthropology journal. The rest are in
> multidisciplinary journals like Narrative Inquiry, and Mental Health,
Religion, and Culture.
>
> My greatest interest is in the anthropology of religion and
spirituality.
>
> Nazdrowia
>
> Maria
>
> Ron Roizen <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> David: The tendency for cultural anthropology to view alcohol as a
> normal and interesting functional part of a cultural system and for
> public health to view it, instead, as a foreign and pernicious agent
> is a longstanding strain in social science perspectives on alcohol.
> The memorable place in the literature where the public health (problem
> maximizers) perspective duked it out with the anthropological (problem
> minimizers) perspective was an exchange between Robin R. and Dwight
Heath:
>
> 1. Room, R., "Alcohol and Ethnography: A Case of Problem Deflation,"
> Current Anthropology 25:169-178, 1984 -- which is available at
> http://www.bks.no/room.htm.
>
> 2. Heath, D B 1984 Reply to Room. Current Anthropology 25(2):180-181.
>
> Robin made frequent reference to Heath's work in his paper.
>
> Ron
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alcohol and Drugs History Society
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Fahey
> Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2005 9:31 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: what can alcohol/drug historians learn from the social
> sciences?
>
> Dan's point about gambling research reminds me that most of us--social
> scientists and others--study drinking, drugs, or whatever as a
> social/medical/legal PROBLEM. For certain disciplines--maybe
> anthropology is an appropriate example--drinking, drugs, or whatever
> may be studied as part of NORMAL life and not as a problem. Some
> scholars, for instance, study alcoholic drink as part of historical
> research on food or of leisure behavior or of social ritual or of
business enterprise.
>
> David Fahey
>
> At 09:30 AM 3/29/2005, you wrote:
> >Not that I can answer for social sciences, but I convened a group
> >here at Brock of "addiction" scholars--a couple psychologists, a
> >sociologist, and few others--and have found this tremendously useful
> >for my own work and perspectives. Especially in the area of different
> >conceptions of addiction, and also in research methodology. Also,
> >about half of these scholars research gambling, so the issues we deal
> >with converge and diverge in very interesting and useful ways.
> >
> >Dan Malleck
> >
> >At 06:59 PM 3/28/2005, you wrote:
> >>I benefited greatly from the responses to my last question, so I
> >>feel emboldened to ask a broader and more controversial question:
> >>what can alcohol/drug historians learn from the social sciences? The
> >>old, sad joke is that historians are a generation or two out of date
> >>in their borrowings from the social sciences. What do ADHS social
> >>scientists think? What would they recommend historians read?
> >
> >Dan Malleck, PhD
> >Assistant Professor, Community Health Sciences Brock University 500
> >Glenridge Ave St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1
> >905 688-5550 ext 5108
>
>
> Maria G. Swora, Ph.D. MPH
> Department of Sociology
> Benedictine College
> Atchison, Kansas 66002
>
> Don't believe everything you think.
>
>
> ---------------------------------
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