Drinking Dilemmas

Space, culture and identity

Thomas Thurnell-Read

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317395607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Drinking and drunkenness have become a focal point for political and media debates to contest notions of responsibility, discipline and risk; yet, at the same time, academic studies have highlighted the positive aspects of drinking in relation to sociability, belonging and identity. These issues are at the heart of this volume, which brings together the work of academics and researchers exploring social and cultural aspects of contemporary drinking practices. These drinking practices are enormously varied and are spatially and culturally defined. The contributions to the volume draw on research settings from across the UK and beyond to demonstrate both the complexity and diversity of drinking subjectivities and practices. Across these examples tensions relating to gender, social class, age and the life course are particularly prominent. Rather than align to now long-established moral discourses about what constitutes 'good' and 'bad' drinking, sociological approaches to alcohol foreground the vivid, lived, nature of alcohol consumption and the associated experiences of drunkenness and intoxication. In doing so, the volume illuminates the controversial yet important social and cultural roles played by drink for individuals and groups across a range of social contexts.

Chapter 1
An introduction to drinking dilemmas

Space, culture and identity

Thomas Thurnell-Read

This book explores the social and cultural significance of alcohol, its consumption and its various effects and impacts at a time when alcohol is said to cost the British National Health Service £2.7 billion a year (The NHS Information Centre 2011) and to annually account for 3.3 million deaths globally (WHO, 2014). Yet, the chapters that comprise this volume do not position alcohol as exclusively negative. Throughout the volume, we see drinking as a means of forging personal identity, solidifying friendships and finding release from the pressures and anxieties of modern life.

The volume, therefore, follows in the footsteps of the influential Mary Douglas (1987) in refusing to view drink solely as a ‘problem’ through the lens of pathology and anomie. Instead, we note at the outset that ‘drunkenness also expresses culture in so far as it always takes the form of a highly patterned, learned comportment which varies from one culture to another’ (Douglas, 1987, p. 4). Much alcohol is consumed as part of what Douglas termed ‘constructive drinking’, where drinking is a constructive force far too embedded in the very fabric of social life – in its rituals, celebrations and binding social ties – to be reduced purely to its many real, but by no means automatic, negative outcomes. We therefore acknowledge, and indeed are drawn to, the beneficial cultural and social aspects of drinking and note how they invariably reflect an adherence to rule-bound and historically embedded social interaction.

In recent years, drinking and drunkenness has become a common focal point for political and media debates to contest notions of responsibility, discipline and risk. These debates have rapidly coalesced around the ‘binge drinking’ narrative which emerged little over a decade ago yet has so far proved to be a resilient rhetorical anchor around which debates have gathered (Plant & Plant, 2006; Nicholls, 2009). Alcohol has proved to be a handy scapegoat and one which has been used to explain away far more complex social and cultural changes in modern British society and beyond. Work in the social sciences has therefore necessarily sought to challenge the ‘blame it on the booze’ narrative which reduces context and causation to a simplistic model of alcohol as ‘demon drink’. Important contributions to the field have shown that these concerns and the legislative responses to them, while at the forefront of our minds, are not new and, indeed, have a long historical lineage (Nicholls, 2009; Yeomans, 2014).

To these debates, social science perspectives have brought necessary insights. Indeed, we might suggest that the most clear and pressing issues relating to alcohol, drinking and drunkenness have at their core the tension between ‘personal troubles’ and ‘public issues’ that is deeply sociological in nature (Mills, 1959). For many years, alcohol and its various roles in specific social contexts have been present but rarely addressed directly within the sociological literature. Thus, we see the pub and drunkenness feature in Clarke and Critcher’s (1985) neo-Marxist analysis of the tumultuous emergence of modern leisure in Britain. In Paul Willis’ (1977) classic Learning to Labour, there are young working-class men for whom it was the pub more than the school in which the required standards of masculinity were learnt in readiness for a life of labour. And yet it is only recently that sociology and other closely related disciplines, human geography in particular, have built a sustained and still growing body of literature addressing alcohol and the associated issues of drunkenness and intoxication.

The expansion of what became known as the night-time economy during the 1990s is perhaps the single greatest catalyst for the emergence of valuable work across sociology, criminology and geography. Chatterton and Hollands’ (2003) study, which Hollands reflects on in Chapter 2, particularly captured the concerns of an increasing number of academic researchers seeking to situate the individual amongst a fraught post-industrial restructuring of many British cities as commercial and leisure-driven spaces. This changing urban environment – with its themed pubs, drinking circuits and the looming prospect of late/all-night openings – provided the backdrop for increasingly detailed studies of the classed and gendered divisions at work in Britain’s night-time economy (Hollands, 1995). So too did risk, control and regulation emerge as key themes of the literature. Several studies of ‘bouncers’ (Monaghan, 2002; Hobbs, Hadfield, Lister & Winlow, 2003) explored the use of embodied capital and violence in controlling the night-time economy, and a more general mapping of the governance and regulation of drinking and drinking spaces demonstrated the competing forces at work in controlling night-time leisure on the British high street (Hobbs, Lister, Hadfield, Winlow & Hall, 2000).

In a study that would set the tone for others that followed, Tomsen (1997) explored the pleasures of ‘the big night out’. What to one person is the fun and excitement of playful transgression is to another the very quintessence of chaos, mayhem and wanton abandon. As a field of study, alcohol studies in general and the sociology of alcohol in particular has needed to be aware of such relativity. The hysteria of media coverage and the hand-wringing of political and policy discussions were, clearly, missing the point; the apparent disorder and chaos were in fact highly desirable and represented for many drinkers a sense of cathartic fun and release. More recently, Fiona Measham has, across a range of studies and collaborations, defined and explored in great detail the ‘new cultures of intoxication’ where advanced drunkenness and this associated loss of control appear to be an integral and a desired feature of particularly younger drinker’s engagement with alcohol (Measham & Brain, 2005). The tensions between the pleasures and dangers of the night-time economy, where both exuberant and destructive violence prove alluring and alarming (Winlow & Hall, 2006) mean that at the heart of many studies from this period is an important acknowledgment that the drinking cultures of the British night must be understood as contested and contingent. Without seeking to understand the many different actors involved in constructing and contesting the night we remain doomed to view the topic through a narrow lens of moral finger pointing.

Expanding on these insights, a number of key studies sought to understand how alcohol, drinking and drunkenness offer a source of identity, albeit a problematic one, in the face of changes in economic, social and political climate. The fun and camaraderie of drinking spaces was shown to provide, for many young men in particular, a sense of surety in a time of transition and uncertainty predicated by neo-liberal capitalism, globalisation and changing gender relations (Nayak, 2003; Blackshaw, 2003; Winlow & Hall, 2009; Smith, 2014). In these studies, specific drinkers and their drinking have been set within a broad and considered social milieu and have shown how understanding drink and its role in people’s lives requires a link from the individual to the array of broad economic and social transitions and changes that have come to define the final decade of the 20th century and the opening decades of the present century. That drunken excess might offer catharsis to the impositions made upon the individual in late modernity remains, if not taboo, than a plausible explanation that academics have had to handle with tact. This breadth of scale, helping locate the individual and subjectivities within a far wider appreciation of historical and global shifts, is another example of where sociology and social science perspectives on alcohol have made valuable contributions. In many of the chapters in this volume, we see drinking practices understood within a bigger contextual picture of urban renewal (Hollands, this volume), neoliberal era and post-industrial anxiety (Smith, this volume; Thurnell-Read, this volume) and even the legacies of institutional racism (Charman, this volume) and war and civil conflict (Bonte, this volume).

Perhaps the most prominent contribution of sociology to the study of alcohol has been to explore and explain how gender permeates nearly every facet of drinking and, most strikingly, how societies respond with great variance to the drinking of men and of women. Elizabeth Ettorre’s (1997) ground-breaking work on women and drinking exposed this deep gendering of drinking and did much to highlight how the ‘problem’ of drink is levied far more heavily upon women who drink than men. Indeed, where alcohol could serve to stigmatise the female drinker, for men it has been shown to be a significant resource in reproducing dominant codes of masculinity and, as an influential paper by the New Zealand sociologist Hugh Campbell (2000) detailed, the drinking of alcohol is performed and sustained in public drinking spaces which are shaped by formal and informal gender segregation. Gender continues to be central to much sociological research (for example, see Staddon, 2015) and is a direct or indirect theme of many of the chapters in this volume.

Why drinking dilemmas?

Despite recent advances, academic studies of alcohol still frequently struggle to reconcile the individual, social and cultural pleasures and benefits of drinking and drunkenness with concerns for health and well-being, public order and social policy. These ‘drinking dilemmas’ provide a fruitful site for academics to contribute to policy, media and health lobby discourses on the (un)acceptable functions of alcohol in modern society. One dilemma stems from challenging the common-sense notion of negative impacts of alcohol (Hollands, this volume), and then, against the weight of public perception and policy rhetoric, continuing to research and identify the many positive outcomes of drinking. Many studies in the area have sought to understand, if not necessarily sympathise with, individuals whose drinking practices are widely condemned and stigmatised. The media-led moral panic against binge drinkers, and before them ‘lager louts’, should not blind us from seeking to understand why so many might find either excitement or solace in drinking heavily.

There is not one drinking dilemma but many, and they are interconnected. These dilemmas involve tensions relating to gender, social class, age and the life course, and mean that the contested role of alcohol and drunkenness in contemporary debates about place, identity and sociality are at the heart of the volume. Why, in the face of evidence and advice (Yeomans, 2013) are many people still motivated to drink, often to excess? The boundary between acceptable and unacceptable drinking clearly bends and shifts in accordance with the social class, gender and age of the drinker. Thus, we see plans for those receiving social welfare benefits to be paid on preloaded store cards blocked from being used to purchase alcohol (Chorley, 2014) at the same time as research has revealed a link between heavy drinking and working in professions with cultures marked by high pressure and long hours (Badham, 2015). What use is talk of ‘sensible drinking’ when such disparities exist in how gender, social class, age and ethnicity refract how drinking and drunkenness are understood and perceived by others and by wider society?

Drinking practices are diverse and are spatially and culturally defined. It is this plurality from which many dilemmas stem. News stories about drunken excesses and violence, at least when they relate to drinkers of a particular social class, have become an easy currency for tabloid newspapers, and on social media a new era of self-publicity has made any clear distinction between public and private drinking hard to sustain. Thus, there are also huge variations in the visibility of certain drinkers and styles of drinking, meaning the night-time economy has received sustained media, policy and academic attention whereas drinking within the home (with a few notable exceptions, Holloway, Jayne & Valentine, 2008; Jayne, Valentine & Holloway, 2011) remains conspicuously absent.

Dilemmas also exist for the discipline of ‘alcohol studies’ and for the role of sociology and other social and cultural perspectives within it. Many of the contributions to this volume are not from sociologists. Indeed, geography is particularly well represented and demonstrates the notable valued, though relatively recent, contribution of geographical approaches to the study of alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. As Jayne and Valentine (this volume) rightly point out in closing this volume, a wealth of at times brilliant academic work has remained too insular and compartmentalised within disciplinary boundaries. Such work has also largely failed to reach out for dialogue with policy and health science disciplines that, of course, are also guilty of the same.

It is intended that this volume shows how sociological perspectives on drinking are a platform, or forum, which many disciplines with related concerns can relate to and foster dialogue within. Beyond sociology and geography, the collection ought to be of interest to a broad range of disciplines, including the health sciences, urban planning, leisure and tourism, youth work, gender studies and cultural studies. The scale and scope of these insights is important; both sociology and geography have made important contributions to the field in their ability to consider alcohol within the personal, group and community level as well as more broadly across national and global media, and policy and commercial contexts. Sociology has proved strong in highlighting how deep social divisions relating to gender, social class and sexuality shape and are in turn shaped by our understanding of alcohol and when, where and how it is consumed. From the minutiae of daily life and personal subjectivities through communities and to national, historical and global forces, sociological approaches to alcohol have, perhaps more than other disciplines, offered the potential to be an interface, an interdisciplinary forum through which dialogue can take place.

The subthemes of the collection – space, culture and identity – indicate the key concerns of the sociology of alcohol but these are concerns shared across disciplinary boundaries. We therefore tip our hats to our geography colleagues for highlighting the importance of space and place in understanding alcohol, drinking and drunkenness. This volume sees drinking explored across a diversity of spaces: from both online and offline spaces (Ross, Atkinson and Sumnall, this volume); the extreme metal club mosh pit (Riches, this volume); the township shebeen (Charman, this volume); and the Beirut neighbourhood street (Bonte, this volume); to the parks and bedrooms of suburban Manchester (Wilkinson, this volume). Across all contributions we see the legacy of Mary Douglas (1987) in understandings of the inescapably cultural nature of alcohol and drinking. Drink is also a canny modifier of identity and social relations with its promise of extended youth (Smith, this volume) or a reassuring return or continuation of locality and community (Thurnell-Read, this volume). It opens up our bodies and allows us to assert our identity and belonging in new ways (Riches, this volume) and it can also leave its traces in pain, grief and stigma (Valentine, Templeton and Velleman, this volume).

The structure of the book

Following this introduction, in Chapter 2 Robert Hollands revisits and reflects on his involvement in research into alcohol and the night-time economy spanning 20 years. We see how, as previously noted, the field of alcohol studies has changed significantly ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 An introduction to drinking dilemmas: space, culture and identity
• 2 Revisiting urban nightscapes: an academic and personal journey through 20 years of nightlife research
• 3 The symbolic value of alcohol: the importance of alcohol consumption, drinking practices and drinking spaces in classed and gendered identity construction
• 4 Beer and belonging: Real Ale consumption, place and identity
• 5 Illegal drinking venues in a South African township: sites of struggle in the informal city
• 6 'Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die': alcohol practices in Mar Mikhael, Beirut
• 7 'A force to be reckoned with': the role and influence of alcohol in Leeds' extreme metal scene
• 8 'Never, ever go down the Bigg Market': classed and spatialised processes of othering on the 'girls' night out'
• 9 Young people's alcohol-related urban im/mobilities
• 10 Parenting style and gender effects on alcohol consumption among university students in France
• 11 Growing up, going out: cultural and aesthetic attachment to the night-time economy
• 12 'There are limits on what you can do': biographical reconstruction by those bereaved by alcohol-related deaths
• 13 Drinking dilemmas: making a difference?
• Index