Alcohol Flows Across Cultures

Drinking Cultures in Transnational and Comparative Perspective

Waltraud Ernst

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138302051
• eBook ISBN: 9781351400725
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This book maps changing patterns of drinking. Emphasis is laid on the connected histories of different regions and populations across the globe regarding consumption patterns, government policies, economics and representations of alcohol and drinking.

Its transnational perspective facilitates an understanding of the local and global factors that have had a bearing on alcohol consumption and legislation, especially on the emergence of particular styles of 'drinking cultures'. The comparative approach helps to identify similarities, differences and crossovers between particular regions and pinpoint the parameters that shape alcohol consumption, policies, legal and illegal production, and popular perceptions.

With a wide geographic range, the book explores plural drinking cultures within any one region, their association with specific social groups, and their continuities and changes in the wake of wider global, colonial and postcolonial economic, political and social constraints and exchanges.

1 Introduction: Alcohol flows across cultures

Drinking cultures in transnational and comparative perspective

Waltraud Ernst

Drink wine and look at the moon

and think of all the civilisations

the moon has seen passing by.

Attributed to Omar Khayyám,
Rubáiyát (11th/12th century CE)

Interest in alcohol research has grown steadily over the last decade or so. International and interdisciplinary conferences, such as those organised by the Alcohol and Drugs History Society and the Drinking Studies Network, for example, have attracted an ever-rising number of delegates from a wide range of disciplines, including health policy studies, sociology, anthropology, geography and history. Specialist journals and blogs on alcohol and drinking have become well-established academic publication outlets, testifying to the increasing attention being paid to alcohol in relation to more general concerns in the fields of health, medicine and substance use and abuse, on the one hand, and a newly emerging engagement with the historical, social and cultural roles and meanings of alcohol and drinking, on the other. The fact that the World Health Organization (WHO) has identified alcohol abuse as a global challenge to mental and physical health, and the concomitant increase in research funding for alcohol-related projects, has been instrumental in enhancing academic and popular attention to this subject area.

Given current concerns about alcohol-related health issues and the ensuing monetary and social costs, drinking has become framed as a medical, social and economic problem that requires public health intervention and related state-supported initiatives. As the Director-General of the WHO put it in 2018:

Far too many people, their families and communities suffer the consequences of the harmful use of alcohol through violence, injuries, mental health problems and diseases like cancer and stroke. … It’s time to step up action to prevent this serious threat to the development of healthy societies.¹

However, despite evidence that alcohol is implicated in family violence and crime, and concerns that it wreaks havoc on nations’ health and welfare systems around the globe, the production and consumption of both commercially manufactured and home-made alcohol continues to flourish in many countries.² What is more, drinking is a boon to many governments as they benefit from tax levies imposed on the production, import, export and consumption of legally produced alcoholic beverages.³ National and international capital, too, gains from and continues to be a big player in the global field of alcohol production and trade.⁴

Consumers on their part may or may not be aware of and concerned about the adverse fiscal impact of alcohol on national health, welfare and police budgets, or be fretting about national and international companies accumulating high profits from drinkers’ enjoyment of or addiction to beer, wine and strong liquor. However, they will most certainly be familiar with tropes depicting alcohol as a beneficial relaxant and enjoyable social stimulant, as well as imbibed age-old wisdom about drinking as a precursor of ill health, domestic upheaval, violence and crime. As in other cultures, in western countries, awareness of the manifold attributes of alcohol and of varied socially acceptable drinking etiquettes has been enshrined in ancient philosophy as well as in public lore. For example, Dionysos and Bacchus, the gods of wine and ecstasy in ancient Greek and Roman territories, were depicted both to venerate and caution against certain aspects of wine consumption, as is testified in a comic play attributed to the Athenian poet Eubulus (4th cent. BCE), who let his Dionysos deliberate:

I mix three kraters only for those who are wise.

One is for good health, which they drink first.

The second is for love and pleasure.

The third is for sleep, and when they have drunk it those who are wise wander homewards.

The fourth is no longer ours, but belongs to arrogance.

The fifth leads to shouting.

The sixth to a drunken revel.

The seventh to black eyes.

The eighth to a summons.

The ninth to bile.

The tenth to madness, in that it makes people throw things.⁵

Alcohol is a substance that has been enjoyed, cursed and battled with in many cultures and, arguably, throughout history. However, as signalled by current WHO campaigns, only more recently has drinking been identified as a global problem seen to require more medical attention and concerted, global public health intervention. This is not to say that alcohol had not previously been seen as a medical and public health problem. Of course it had, within both orthodox and heterodox medical systems and lay beliefs about what is needed for a good and healthy life. As the recommendation for health complaints of porter, brandy and other alcoholic beverages during earlier centuries attests, alcohol was considered beneficial to well-being if it was prescribed by medical practitioners or self-medicated in quantities considered as moderate within any one cultural and historical context. The detrimental effects of over-consumption were well known and documented in relation to conditions such as the epidemic of gout that was seen to pain the higher orders of society in Georgian England, for example.⁶

Scientifically and medically founded pleas for “temperance” and policies of control and prohibition are certainly not new phenomena, but were common in many regions of the world, including areas colonised by western countries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁷ Furthermore, periodic and permanent abstinence from alcohol has been part of religious, moral and medical injunctions in both western and non-western cultures. Neither medical ideas on healthy and excessive drinking, nor religion-fuelled demands for state-supported prohibition policies, are therefore novel. However, the elevation of alcohol to a number one global health hazard, that is seen to be equalled only by obesity and sugar consumption in rich countries, has located drinking firmly within the sphere of public health interventions and the socio-medical approaches that underpin them. It has also thrown into stark relief the current relevance attributed to individual and communal drinking behaviours. Alongside religious and moral commandments, medicine and public health have become dominant precepts.

It is somewhat surprising that, despite the topicality of alcohol and the identification of problem-drinking as a global phenomenon, historical research has remained largely Euro- and Anglo-centric in its regional scope.⁸ There have been some notable exceptions to the Anglo-European gaze, such as the recent upsurge of studies on South America and South Asia.⁹ On the whole, however, there is a dearth of work on the history of alcohol and drinking cultures in non-western countries, and in Islamic cultures in particular. Western preconceptions about particular communities’ attitudes towards alcohol, as well as the continued post-colonial peripheralisation of major areas of the world in favour of regions defined as part of the “centre”, are arguably to blame for lack of engagement with the newly posed “alcohol question” on a truly globally informed scale. Persistent Orientalist misconceptions on the part of researchers based in western and recently westernised countries suggest that particular communities and areas of the world could be considered “dry” on account of their religion or cultural outlook.¹⁰ Religious discourses and official anti-alcohol policies espoused by the powers that be in Islamic countries, for example, can seem to justify and further solidify such views. Yet, there is a difference between religious and official discourses about alcohol, on the one hand, and private and particular communities’ narratives and experiences of drinking, on the other. As in the cases of prohibition policies fuelled by Christian fundamentalism in “dry” areas of the United States, and the Scandinavian “wet” Gothenburg model of a state alcohol retail monopoly, in countries ruled by Islamic clergy or royal houses, too, parts of the populace resisted or ignored doctrines that interfered with their private or communal tastes. Home brewing, moonshining and illegal trade were and are widespread in all kinds of cultures and political systems. The moon in Omar Khayyam’s poem has not only seen civilisations pass by but has also glimpsed people engaged in illicit alcohol production and illegal drinking.

It is important that histories of alcohol and drinking do not reify western essentialist-reductive assumptions about non-western communities, or regard religious dogma and national state policies as valid indicators of people’s actual beliefs and practices. In regard to Middle Eastern and North African countries, in particular, the lack of more nuanced studies dealing with official and religious discourse – as well as private practices among both elite groups and the urban and rural poor – is especially astounding in view of existing evidence of well-established drinking cultures before and since the rise of Islam from the seventh century CE. Wherever religious or state power exists, with its associated discourse of control, there is not only resistance (as Foucault has told us), but also a plethora of persistent private practices and of more or less openly exhibited lingering traditions and customs that evade, adapt or survive alongside the dictates of discursive hegemony. The injunctions against alcohol in the Quran and in its interpretations (tafsir) are testimony of dogmatic elucidation and plurality of exegesis, as well as the difficult task faced by clergy in their attempts to oust converts’ and prospective believers’ age-old traditions, ideas and practices of alcohol consumption. Furthermore, drinking was tolerated in some areas under Muslim rule in the Middle East, such as Persia [nowadays Iran], where the social and uplifting role of drinking was extolled at different periods of the Islamic Golden Age (c. eighth to fourteenth century CE). The poet, philosopher and mathematician Omar Khayyám (1048–1131 CE) eulogised wine in his Rubáiyát. In a series of verses Khayyám elegantly wed it with different shades of sentiment and meaning, identifying some of the core experiences of life as well as drinking.

Drink wine.

This is life eternal.

This is all that youth will give you.

It is the season for wine, roses and drunken friends.

Be happy for this moment.

This moment is your life.¹¹

Yet, he also evoked a sense that neither wine nor life were always palatable and pleasant.

Today is the time of my youth

I drink wine because it is my solace;

Do not blame me, although it is bitter it is pleasant,

It is bitter because it is my life.

Two centuries later, the poet and Sufi mystic Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207–1273 CE) echoed some of Khayyám’s contemplations

Lo, in thy glass the crimson wine

With such a rosy glow doth shine

That, like a rose, ’tis time to pass

From hand to hand the wine-bright glass.¹²

Whether these poets’ views on wine are taken in a literal or metaphorical way, they attest to the varied meanings with which the drinking of wine was imbued at two different periods when Islam flourished in Persia. They may represent elite thinking or a minority’s particular view of the world; but even if this is so, they still demonstrate that a religion such as Islam and any particular official restrictions do not necessarily and always penetrate into, and fully subsume, a people’s imaginations and social practices. Alcohol and drinking are not only multifaceted social, economic and cultural phenomena but are also marked by plurality of views and practices, in their officially sanctioned as well as their illegal versions.

Whilst a focus on less frequently researched regions of the world allows us to glean insights that expand our horizon beyond the Anglo-European world, it is also conducive to a more comprehensive understanding of the interconnections, crosscurrents and frictions between official policies and social traditions in western cultures. How do consumers at different times and places reconcile religious injunctions with personal predilections and wider social pressures? How do they circumvent official measures and resolve any potential cognitive dissonance between official mores and private practices? And, last but not least, how could insights derived from globally informed and culturally astute analyses of ideas and behaviours inform alcohol policies in specific countries across the world?

The chapters in this book highlight areas of analysis and geographical locations that have not been well covered in existing literature, especially hitherto neglected geopolitical and cultural spaces, such as Islamic and post/colonial contexts. Of course, they cannot purport to be analytically and globally comprehensive, but the themes tackled have relevance beyond the boundaries of individual countries. Existing writing on alcohol and drinking has been largely inward looking and self-contained by a focus on particular nations. However, this book is not intended to provide a collection of writing on a wide range of countries that are explored separately alongside each other. The challenge is to look outwards and trace how colonies and European countries were intertwined, with metropolitan features of alcohol production, trade and consumption providing blueprints but also sitting more or less happily alongside previously established practices. Emphasis in each chapter is therefore on interconnections between metropoles and peripheries, or on the entwining of local alcohol production, trade and consumption patterns with other geopolitical and cultural spaces beyond the confines of specific nation states. The boundaries of alcohol flows are seen as permeable and fluid, rather than as clearly demarcated by national boundaries or by ascribed, or prevalent, cultural customs.

The methodologies that lend themselves best to the mapping of global connections in the flow of alcohol across regions and cultural communities are based on frameworks such as transnational, or translocal, histories, and connected history, as well as on approaches that concern themselves with networks, flows and the circulation of ideas and practices.¹³ These kinds of methodological approaches allow a nuanced assessment of policies, substances, actors and behaviours as multiply determined and versatile in nature. For example, analysis of the changing dynamics of alcohol’s political, social and cultural importance in colonial and post-colonial situations may focus on one particular beverage (wine or beer) to show the interactions of local, regional and global structures, processes and peoples, and thus highlight the social history, or the “social life of things”, and the multiple agents connected with a specific substance.¹⁴

Furthermore, in contrast to many of the quantitative and epidemiological studies that have hitherto dominated academic studies of alcohol, both the concepts and the methodologies employed here are multi-disciplinary in outlook. Issues of representation underline, or are at least considered in, most contributions, highlighting the role of the media and the imaginary in the flow of ideas about alcohol and drinking, as well as their impact on the production and trade of particular beverages. Even so, the economics and production of alcohol and the policies and politics relating to them are not forgotten, even when the emphasis tends to be on consumption and representations. The relationship between the manufacture of alcohol and patterns of consumption (and the portrayal of alcohol in advertisements and films) is an important aspect of the rise of drinking and shifts in particular drinking behaviours. Therefore, analyses that foreground consumption and representations of alcohol still need to be interwoven with considerations of the wider economic and political ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Alcohol flows across cultures: drinking cultures in transnational and comparative perspective
• 2. The same drink? Wine and absinthe consumption and drinking cultures among French and Muslim groups in nineteenth-century Algeria
• 3. Drinking and production patterns of wine in North Africa during French colonisation, c. 1830–1956
• 4. Drinking dis-ease: Alcohol and colonialism in the international city of Tangier, c. 1912–1956
• 5. Between promotions and prohibitions: The shifting symbolisms and spaces of beer in modern Turkey
• 6. Good hope for the pilsner: Commerce, culture and the consumption of the pilsner beer in British Southern Africa, c. 1870–1914
• 7. “A hotbed of sins” or “just like home”? Drinking cultures in colonial Qingdao (1897–1914)
• 8. Filched fungi? Bioprospecting and the circulation of “Chinese yeast”, c. 1892–1933
• 9. Gariahat Whisky: Bootlegged cosmopolitanism and the making of the nationalistic state, Calcutta c. 1923–1935
• 10. “Lurvenbrow”: Bavarian beer culture and barstool diplomacy in the global market, 1945–1964
• 11. Twenty-first-century transnational neo-temperance
• Index