Hi Sidsel!  Nice to see you on this LSG!  Your interesting
post recalled to me my own long struggle with the
relationship between "culture" and "drinking".  When I
fell into the task of cross-cultural analyst for the old
WHO 3-country study (Mexico, Scotland, Zambia--we added
our U.S.  data later), I vainly (perhaps in both senses of
the term) sought to find or define some general framework
for understanding the relationship between "culture" and
"drinking patterns."  To my surprise, nothing in the
cross-cultural & anthro literature provided that.  And so
I began to think along two lines:  (1) how might the
meanings, norms, and even problems associated with
drinking in a particular culture form some sort of
"coherent logic unto itself" and (2) how might the
meanings, etc. be linked or integrated with larger aspects
of culture?  These, of course, represent two very
different kinds of answers to the culture & alcohol
question, but nothing stops them from being linked in a
wider theory.  I learned, BTW, that an older tradition of
interest in "national character"--something that might
actually have been *useful* in my quest--had fallen out of
favor decades earlier.  Anyhow, the best I ever managed to
come up with was my "Differential Access/Universal
Moderation" (DA/UM) model--which derived particularly from
the strong connection between drinking and the *ascribed
statuses* of age and gender in Zambia & Mexico vs.  the
more or less universal legitimate access to drinking
(among adults) in Scotland (and the U.S.) but with a
covering norm of use in moderation (which Mexican & esp.
Zambian drinkers did not evidence).  The DA/UM model is
essentially a "logic of drinking" model [#(1), above] in
that it asked about two different normative approaches to
the social control of drinking (DA and UM)--asked, that
is, what their implications for normative structuring,
cultural definition, social control, etc.  might be.  The
model also may provide an analytical framework for
examining *the transition* between these two social
control structures--i.e., framing drinking in a larger
process of modernization that takes society from the
ascribed-status structures of traditional societies to the
universalist/achievement structures of modern societies.
Drinking's problematic cultural status--it struck me--may
well have much to do with the incommensurability of
traditional and modern structural arrangements, and
drinking's normative structural ties to both (something I
noted, incidentally, in my review of Colson and Scudder's
book in *CDP*).  Anyhow, all this your note recalled to me
about the intriguing, and thoroughly unsolved mystery, of
the ties (if any!) between drinking and culture.  Ron
Roizen, Berkeley, CA
 
 
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 Subject:  Response to Sidsel Eriksen
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