ABSTRACT
This volume is designed to amplify the claim that anthropologists have a distinctive perspective on drinking. According to Dwight Heath 1 few anthropologists before the 1970s would set out deliberately to study patterns of thought and action concerning drink. In spite of this lack of concentration on the subject they had nevertheless written a great deal on alcohol. This was because whatever other concerns inspired their ethnographic project they could not avoid taking note of the importance of drinking in the lives of the people they lived among. The record they thus constituted was based on “felicitous by-products of field research”. In consequence, anthropologists have a frankly different focus on alcohol. They do not necessarily treat it as a problem. In effect, Dwight Heath's earlier review of the anthropological literature on alcohol up to 1970 shows the anthropologists bringing their own professional point of view to bear interestingly upon the same materials studied by specialists on alcohol abuse. The research of the latter is inevitably focused upon pathology. Their research on drinking has been instituted precisely because of grave problems; their assumptions and methods are problem-oriented. Dwight Heath argued that the anthropologists' evidence suggests that the medical and sociological research exaggerates the problems. In concentrating on the excess and abuse of alcohol, they are tending to express a strong bias of western culture and one which Joseph Gusfield has shown 2 to be particularly entrenched in America. From the wider comparative standpoint of anthropology, “problem drinking” is very rare and alcoholism seems to be “virtually absent even in many societies where drunkenness is frequent, highly esteemed and actively sought”. 3 Even in the United States where there is so much concern about alcohol abuse, the most pessimistic estimate is that alcohol-related troubles afflict fewer than 10 percent of those who drink.
