ABSTRACT
Accounts from many countries demonstrate how the experiences, behaviors, meanings, and significance of drunkenness and responses to degrees of drunkenness are firmly located in time and place. This chapter considers, from an interdisciplinary perspective, competing and contrasting understandings of drunkenness alongside an overview of historical and contemporary debates on its definitions and measurements. The central focus throughout this chapter, as in this book in general, is on the experiences and behaviors related to acute alcohol consumption, variously referred to as drunkenness, intoxication, binge drinking, extreme drinking, or heavy episodic drinking, and on how historically these terms have been defined and understood-rather than on chronic, daily, or dependent drinking. As we shall come to see, the reason why such behaviors are being studied is as salient a question as what is studied or how.
