ABSTRACT
Drinking habits have long been viewed as markers of cultural difference, especially in colonial contexts, where what one drank was often influenced by religion, ethnicity, class and gender. This chapter will give a brief overview of alcohol consumption, drinking habits and drunkenness in colonial Algeria by looking at descriptions of the consumption of two different kinds of alcohol – absinthe and wine – and the different social and ethnic groups who consumed them on a regular basis. I am interested in the question of whether there was a shared experience through alcohol across religion, ethnicity, class and gender, or whether there was a plurality of drinking styles resulting in different kinds of drunkenness. My analysis shows that descriptions of the drinking habits of equivalent classes across the different ethnic groups display greater similarities than the more accepted dichotomy of colonisers and colonised.
There is a marked difference between the colonial rhetoric surrounding the consumption of alcohol, which was often prompted by health concerns and questions of morality, and the actual everyday drinking habits of both colonisers and colonised. The consumption of a specific drink could be widely described in the colonial publications as being a strictly lower-class habit (such as absinthe drinking in Algeria), while it was in reality consumed far more broadly than this normative rhetoric suggested. This chapter will focus on the drinking habits of the various groups who consumed absinthe and wine, while the colonial rhetoric will be alluded to in order to further contextualise the manners of consumption.
