David and Maria --
David's question reminded me of something the historian
Allan Mitchell said in the summing-up session of the 1984 Berkeley conference on
the Social History of Alcohol. So I went back and found it, on p. 287
of S Barrows et al., eds., The Social History of Alcohol: Drinking
& Culture in Modern Society (Berkeley: Alcohol Research Group, 1987)
(thanks to the ministrations of the court reporters who so fascinated many of
the historians at the conference):
"What struck me as remarkable about the conference was the fact that
historians and sociologists have been able to co-exist through so many sessions,
although I must confess that initially I was rather annoyed at a certain image
of the relationship between historians and sociologists that was proejcted in
some quarters. It was suggested that the historians are like scholarly oxen who
plod ahead in the mud, pulling along an elegant carriage in which sits a merry
band of brilliant sociologists. Thus the historian's function is to do the
heavy work, and the sociologist's function is to comment on the progress of the
voyage. But as the conference has gone on I have, as they say in
California, mellowed. And I have come to see the accuracy and the justice
of this image, because it emphasizes the leading role played by historians, and
the essential frivolity of sociologists!".
To David's question: Gusfield is certainly a good place to
start, but presumably needs little introduction, since temperance historians
have been using his work as a whetstone for several decades. Gusfield can be
seen as a founder of sociological constructivism (which sometimes used to be
called historical social constructionism), although it went on after him into a
radical cul-de-sac from which most have now retreated to a more
Gusfield-like "soft" constructivism.
Then Harry Levine brought the Foucault/Rothman
perception of the post-Enlightenment shift of gaze into the alcohol/addiction
field, in turn becoming a whetstone for the historians Roy Porter
and Jessica Warner (although I agree with Peter Ferentzy that Harry's basic
point about the timing of the shift in popular conceptions stands).
And Mariana Valverde came along and did another Foucauldian synthesis on
addiction in Diseases of the Will.
What is notable about this is that sociology
in particular, and maybe social sciences in general, took a "historical turn"
along with a "cultural turn" 20 or more years ago, so that the traffic
between history and sociology has become much denser and more
two-directional.
Somewhat in contrast to Maria, I would say that the place
for historians to look for social science borrowings, presumably they are
looking mostly for theory, is outside the alcohol and drug field entirely.
This tends to be true, anyway, for where social science graduate students
look. For better or for worse (worse, sometimes, though this is not
Foucault's fault), social
science dissertations still rely a lot on Foucault, although it seems that each
one I read chooses another fragment of Foucault as their baseline. These
days, Bourdieu is receiving more attention, though mostly his
Distinction.
In
sociology, alcohol and drugs have mostly been academically classed
under "deviance" (née "social problems"), but deviance theory seems to have
run out into the sand. The one rivulet still running strong is
constructivism. More hopeful territories for ransacking for
theoretical gems might be sociologies/anthropologies of leisure & tourism,
of the professions, of possession/dissociation, of youth cultures,
of marginalization/stigma, of globalization, of the structuring and
regulation of markets. This is a quick listing of some of the subtopics in
academic bookstores (besides the historical ones) I find myself lingering
over.
Robin
I recommend anything by Joseph Gusfield, Steve Kunitz, and Dwight
Heath. Mary Douglas' edited volume is very good. Mac Marshall is another
author to hunt down. There's a couple of things on the use of
hallucinogenic drugs in ritual. Look also to some of Walter Becker's early
work, like "Becoming a Marijuana Smoker."
Social scientists also need to be historically informed. You can't
have good anthropology or sociology without a historical perspective, and
unfortunately, many social scientists are out of step in that regard.
I think about C. Wright Mills' sociological imagination. That is the
ability to see the relationship between personal life and social conditions, and
between history and biography.
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?
Maria G. Swora, Ph.D. MPH
Department of Sociology
Benedictine
College
Atchison, Kansas 66002
Don't believe everything you
think.
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