ABSTRACT
Research on intoxication has been divided into two competing camps, with one group of researchers emphasizing its positive qualities and others its pathological nature. In producing this Handbook, we have brought together contributions from researchers, who have examined a multiplicity of intoxicant use among people of different ages, from totally different social backgrounds, in many different cultures, and at different times in history. In so doing, we hoped to have produced a compendium of contributions, which locate an understanding of intoxication and intoxicants within the relationships between culture, consumption, politics and society. This is done in an effort to highlight neither the pathological nature of intoxicant use nor the positive qualities of intoxication, but instead to situate understandings of intoxicants and intoxication within the shifting socio-cultural, political, economic and historical contexts that surround intoxicants and intoxication. In this Introduction, we discuss, not only some of the processes that the editors adopted in assembling a diverse range of researchers from different social science disciplines and who study different intoxicants, but also some of the issues faced in bringing together these researchers and their contributions during a pandemic. The Introduction also provides a road map of what the reader will find in the Handbook, including a brief summary of each of the 34 chapters, and an outline of the eight separate but inter-related themes within which the papers have been grouped.
