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