ABSTRACT
The chapter examines the nature of informal social control in drinking occasions. It notes a long-term trend involving a movement from ritual to reflexivity, whereby external social control of drinking by highly ritualised contexts is replaced by internal social control by reflexive social actors in a more individualised society, who nonetheless partake in pseudo-rituals. One of the main consequences of modernisation is the displacement of the grand rituals that once structured social life. Alcohol along with other psychoactive substances was frequently an important feature of such occasions. The chapter examines the ways in which rituals structured the drinking occasion through the concept of ‘rites of passage’ and ‘liminality’, as developed by Victor Turner. While ritual frequently involves a loosening of normal social rules, it is also scripted with strong rules about what is in proportion. Anthropological literature has emphasised that such ritualisation has a dampening effect on potential harms arising from alcohol consumption, as well as being culturally constructive. Nonetheless, such rituals are also a feature of conservative, traditional and hierarchical societies. It is noted that in contrast, modernity is characterised by deritualisation. Indeed, the grand rituals that marked various transitions in biographies, time and the community, which historically involved alcohol, are decreasing in importance. While ritual loses its force, pseudo-rituals remain, in the form of the ‘liminoid’, as described by Victor Turner. Such ritual-like occasions are more banal, extended, individualised, based on choice and consciously bringing about a memorable experience. In this process, the reflexive relation of an individual to themselves has replaced the force of external social controls in ritual. Drinking becomes the focus of self-regulation and a performance of one’s relation to self and world.
