ABSTRACT
The chapter shows that drinking occasions and the alcohol consumption that takes place in them, have historically been highly ritualised, which provide the social control that minimises harmful effects and produces the beneficial effects of consumption. It is argued that ritual is the original basis to civilising processes, maintaining interdependencies, prior to state formation processes. Thus, small-scale societies can be highly civilised, in the sense of demonstrating high levels of social and self-restraint in relation to alcohol, as has been argued in the anthropological research on alcohol. It is argued that there is a universal, underlying sameness beneath the apparent variation of in drinking occasions cross-culturally, which is rites de passage as identified by Arnold Van Gennep and Victor Turner, and ‘gift-relations’, as identified by Marcel Mauss. These structure the liminality that is a feature of the rites that mark transitions, that alcohol consumption tends to occur in, and also generate identity, through their role in producing ‘communitas’.
