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His mother became medicine: Drinking problems, ethical transformation and maternal care in central Uganda
Abstract
Excessive alcohol consumption often appears as an issue of great concern for the friends and family members of drinkers in Uganda, where per capita consumption rates among drinkers are among the highest in the world. In many cases, these families seek care for their loved ones in small shops run by herbalists, in the shrines of spirit mediums, in the pews of churches, or in one of several newly established inpatient rehabilitation centres. Yet, acts of intervention come not only from living family members or friends, but also from an array of spiritual beings who may arrive uninvited and outside intentional therapeutic contexts. In this article, we consider a case in which a mother's spirit intervenes in the life of her son, first by possessing his body and then by continuing to dwell there in ways that make it impossible for him to drink. This case highlights the importance of forces experienced as non-self in life-transforming processes, and demands that we give attention to a moment in a person's life when the work of care is achieved through an act of physical force.
In critical disability studies and crip theory, a key intervention has been to challenge Cartesian dualism by using terms such as bodyminds, body-minds, mind/bodies, and other hybrids. While the concept of ‘bodyminds’ integrates physical and cognitive experiences and challenges dualistic thinking, it has been criticized by scholars for prioritizing Eurocentric notions of the mind and subjectivity over other understandings of bodily normality and difference. Drawing on ten years of ethnographic research in Tanzania, this article argues that the concept of ‘bodyminds’ remains rooted in a Eurocentric framework that overlooks the relational and communal understandings of disability prevalent in Tanzania. We build on Sylvia Wynter’s critique of “the figure of Man” to show how dominant disability discourses and practices often overemphasize secular and biological definitions of disability, marginalizing alternative ways of being human. Our ethnographic research highlights the diverse and relational experiences of disability among our Tanzanian interlocutors by thinking with Swahili concepts like “mitandao ya jamii” (social relationships), utofauti (difference), and kawaida (normality). We conclude by urging scholars to expand frameworks of bodily non-normativity beyond Eurocentric models and toward a more inclusive comprehension of ideas and experiences of normality and difference.
This article explores the relationship between schizophrenia, divine encounters, and therapeutics based on ethnographic research in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Contributing to a long history of single‐subject ethnographies in psychological anthropology, this article narrates the events leading up to the diagnosis and the emerging life worlds post‐diagnosis of an interlocutor I call Dhruv. I depart from symbolic constructions of the divine to an affective divine, a kind of force that enters and alters embodied existence. Following scholars who call for theories that move beyond Western metropolitan epistemologies, I draw upon the Bhagavad Gita , a poetic scripture from the Hindu tradition, as a form of psychological theory to contend how an encounter with the divine might be too much to bear, even traumatic. In doing so, the article offers an alternative entry point to the commonly held assumption of the therapeutic efficacy of divine encounters and religious sites in India.
The focus on human intention and action in anthropological studies of hope has made it difficult to attend to the aspects of a hopeful life that lie outside a hoping person's purpose and control. This article brings the concepts of porous and dividual personhood into conversation with the fast‐growing literature on hope to explore how spiritual forces shape the hoping person and the practices of hope for a good life in North China's Xia County. The lived experience of my Chinese interlocutors calls attention to the fact that hoping persons are often entangled in extended relationships with spiritual forces as well as other humans. An extended relational framework allows us to attend more carefully to the contingency and complexity of hope, and brings a more nuanced lens to personhood, one that rejects the Enlightenment idea that persons are autonomous, bounded agents, fully in charge of their own worlds.
Critics of narcology—as addiction medicine is called in Russia—decry it as being "backward," hopelessly behind contemporary global medical practices in relation to addiction and substance abuse, and assume that its practitioners lack both professionalism and expertise. On the basis of his research in a range of clinical institutions managing substance abuse in St. Petersburg, Eugene Raikhel increasingly came to understand that these assumptions and critiques obscured more than they revealed. Governing Habits is an ethnography of extraordinary sensitivity and awareness that shows how therapeutic practice and expertise is expressed in the highly specific, yet rapidly transforming milieu of hospitals, clinics, and rehabilitation centers in post-Soviet Russia. Rather than interpreting narcology as a Soviet survival or a local clinical world on the wane in the face of globalizing evidence-based medicine, Raikhel examines the transformation of the medical management of alcoholism in Russia over the past twenty years.
Raikhel's book is more than a story about the treatment of alcoholism. It is also a gripping analysis of the many cultural, institutional, political, and social transformations taking place in the post-Soviet world, particularly in Putin's Russia. Governing Habits will appeal to a wide range of readers, from medical anthropologists, clinicians, to scholars of post-Soviet Russia, to students of institutions and organizational change, to those interested in therapies and treatments of substance abuse, addiction, and alcoholism.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this article looks at changing discourses and practices in the field of mental health care in Uganda. In particular, it analyzes two psychotherapeutic institutions designed to treat drug- and alcohol-addiction, and their accessibility and affordability for people from different class backgrounds. The first center is a high-class residential facility near Kampala which offers state-of-the-art addiction therapy, but is affordable only for the rich. The second center, a church-funded organization in Northern Uganda, cares mainly for people from poor, rural families who cannot afford exp/tensive treatment. Comparing the two centers provides important insights not only into the temporalities of mental illness, substance abuse and mental health care, but also into broader socio-economic dynamics and understandings of suffering in contemporary Uganda. The term 'class-based chronicities' refers to the way both the urgency with which people seek treatment (when has someone suffered enough?) and the length of treatment they receive (when is someone considered 'recovered'?) are highly class-dependent. On a theoretical level, the article shows how psychotherapeutic models operate as philosophical systems which not only impact on treatment practices, but also produce different addiction entities and addiction-related subjectivities. As such, it contributes to an emerging anthropology of addiction.
This book is started with the main question, how come some people in the USA believe in an invisible being, that is God. How has belief in God come to influence people’s lives? How has God come to be really present in human life? Almost 100 percent people in the US, believe in God according to a Gallup Poll (Luhrmann, 2012: xi). In addition, religious enthusiasm for American has grown increasingly rapidly. Throughout the 20th century, American churches and congregations have developed remarkably (Luhrmann, 14). Even Luhrmann gives an example about the paradoxical things. Many people thought that the hippie vision would bring radical revolutionaries movement that threated the right wing. As a contrary, Christian Hippies play significant roles in making religion to be able publicly accepted (even though there were on drugs) (Luhrmann 16-17)
In conjuring up acts of violence, many Westerners readily picture guns or other unyielding weapons that allow one person to use force against another — including projectile force (via bullets) or, even more, ‘weapons of mass destruction’, which have an enormous capacity to produce a great deal of violence with a minimum of effort. When we consider such acts of violence, many of us likewise readily picture strangers as their perpetrators. The government-funded initiative, Drug Abuse Resistance Education (D.A.R.E.) — which is now administered by local police departments in 49 countries — takes as its earliest goal the socialization of young children into fearing strangers as potential perpetrators of drug-motivated violence.1 Through the program, police officers entering elementary school rooms instruct five-year-old children to shun strangers who might abduct them for unspeakable purposes. Other programs target even younger children for this lesson (Holcombe et al. 1995).
As a response to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s critique of my essay “Fetishes are gods in the process of construction,” this paper enters into critical engagement with anthropological proponents of what has been called the “ontological turn.” Among other engagements, I note that my own reflections on Malagasy fanafody, or medicine, are informed by just the sort of self-conscious reflections my informants make on epistemology, something that anthropologists typically ignore. After making note of the arguments of Roy Bhaskar that most post-Cartesian philosophy rests on an “epistemic fallacy,” I further argue that a realist ontology, combined with broad theoretical relativism, is a more compelling political position than the “ontological anarchy” and theoretical intolerance of ontological turn exponents.
This review traces the literatures in cultural anthropology and neighboring disciplines that are focused on addiction as an object of knowledge and intervention, and as grounds for self-identification, sociality, and action. Highlighting the production of disease categories, the staging of therapeutic interventions, and the ongoing work of governance, this work examines addiction as a key site for the analysis of contemporary life. It likewise show-cases a general movement toward accounts of addiction that foreground complexity, contingency, and multiplicity.
In this paper we suggest that it is important for the anthropology of Christianity and the anthropology of religion more generally to develop a comparative phenomenology of spiritual experience. Our method is to distinguish between a named phenomenon without fixed mental or bodily events (phenomena that have specific local terms but are recognized by individuals by a broad and almost indiscriminate range of physical events); bodily affordances (events of the body that happen in social settings but are only identified as religious in those social settings when they afford, or make available, an interpretation that makes sense in that setting); and striking anomalous events. We demonstrate that local cultural practices shift the pattern of spiritual experiences, even those such as sleep paralysis and out-of-body experiences that might be imagined in some ways as culture free, but that the more the spiritual experience is constrained by a specific physiology, the more the frequency of the event will be constrained by an individual’s vulnerability to those experiences. We will call this the “cultural kindling” of spiritual experience. © 2014 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved.
Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores life in and around a Luo-speaking village in western Kenya during a time of death. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of sociality and pervades villagers' debates about the past, the future and the ethics of everyday life. Central to such debates is a discussion of touch in the broad sense of concrete, material contact between persons. In mundane practices and in ritual acts, touch is considered to be key to the creation of bodily life as well as social continuity. Underlying the significance of material contact is its connection with growth – of persons and groups, animals, plants and the land – and the forward movement of life more generally. Under the pressure of illness and death, economic hardship and land scarcity, as well as bitter struggles about the relevance and application of Christianity and ‘Luo tradition’ in daily life, people find it difficult to agree about the role of touch in engendering growth, or indeed about the aims of growth itself.
The social, political, and cultural consequences of attempts to cheat death by freezing life.
As the planet warms and the polar ice caps melt, naturally occurring cold is a resource of growing scarcity. At the same time, energy-intensive cooling technologies are widely used as a means of preservation. Technologies of cryopreservation support global food chains, seed and blood banks, reproductive medicine, and even the preservation of cores of glacial ice used to study climate change. In many cases, these practices of freezing life are an attempt to cheat death. Cryopreservation has contributed to the transformation of markets, regimes of governance and ethics, and the very relationship between life and death. In Cryopolitics, experts from anthropology, history of science, environmental humanities, and indigenous studies make clear the political and cultural consequences of extending life and deferring death by technoscientific means.
The contributors examine how and why low temperatures have been harnessed to defer individual death through freezing whole human bodies; to defer nonhuman species death by freezing tissue from endangered animals; to defer racial death by preserving biospecimens from indigenous people; and to defer large-scale human death through pandemic preparedness. The cryopolitical lens, emphasizing the roles of temperature and time, provokes new and important questions about living and dying in the twenty-first century.
ContributorsWarwick Anderson, Michael Bravo, Jonny Bunning, Matthew Chrulew, Soraya de Chadarevian, Alexander Friedrich, Klaus Hoeyer, Frédéric Keck, Eben Kirksey, Emma Kowal, Joanna Radin, Deborah Bird Rose, Kim TallBear, Charis Thompson, David Turnbull, Thom van Dooren, Rebecca J. H. Woods
Consoling Ghosts is a sustained contemplation of relationships with the dying and the dead as inspired by conversations with emigrants from Laos and Cambodia. Emigrants’ thoughts and stories often refer and defer to spirits, from the wandering souls of the seriously ill to the dangerous ghosts of those who died by violence, and from restless ancestors displaced from their homes to adjudicating spirits of Southeast Asian landscapes. Langford considers how and why such spirits become implicated in remembering and responding to violence, whether the bloody violence of war or the more structural violence of minoritization and poverty. What is at stake, she asks, when spirits break out of their usual semiotic confinement as symbolic figures for history, heritage, or trauma, in order to haunt the corridors of hospitals and funeral homes? Why does it seem that spirits are both those who most required to be consoled and those who offer the most powerful possibilities of consolation? Emigrants’ theories and stories of ghosts, Langford suggests, implicitly question the metaphorical status of spirits, challenging, in the process, both contemporary bioethics of dying and dominant styles of mourning. Emigrants’ perspectives expose the theological assumptions that underwrite both contemporary management of death and prevalent theories of biopolitics, foreclosing recognition of the social existence of ghosts. Ultimately, she suggests, an alternative ontology of ghosts enables different relationships to death and the dead.
The first phase of anthropology's turn toward ethics called our attention to freedom, evaluative reflection, and projects of intentional self-cultivation. While the inclusion of such moments of intentionality and freedom provided a helpful corrective to overly determinist frameworks for the study of morality and social life, we lost sight of other aspects of ethical life and personhood that are less easily controlled. Drawing on an ethnographic case that might otherwise be considered exemplary of a Foucauldian “care of the self,” this article draws on texts from Africanist anthropology and Franciscan theology to explore how members of a community of Ugandan, Kenyan, and Tanzanian Franciscan nuns living and working at a residential home for orphans and children with disabilities in central Uganda understand and engage with the uncertain potential of moral transformation. [ethics, personhood, ontology, Christianity, Africa]
This article examines sonic and social aesthetics of a cultural movement in Uganda whose innovative ritual strategies articulate a counter-narrative to religious hostilities and adversarial discourses of ritual healing in the country and the region. The Jjajja Ndawula Community takes a distinctive approach to the production of ideas about wellness and the reproduction of social relations to support wellness. They articulate a commitment to practices of ecumenical community presently quite rare in Uganda, crossing both ethnic and religious boundaries in favor of direct emphasis on mutual aid and good living. In particular, this study is concerned with the new sound these ritual strategies establish for a brand of social conviviality that emerges from an older and broader ritual healing repertory called kusamira. © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
PART I: CHARISMATIC TRANSFORMATIONS The Rhetoric of Transformation in Ritual Healing Embodiment as a Paradigm for Anthropology A Handmaid's Tale The Affliction of Martin PART II: NAVAJO TRANSFORMATIONS Ritual Healing and the Politics of Identity in Contemporary Navajo Society Talk to Them So That They Understand The Sore That Does Not Heal Words from the Holy People PART II: MODULATIONS OF EMBODIMENT Somatic Modes of Attention Shades of Representation and Being in Virtual Reality
What is the work that miracles do in American Charismatic Evangelicalism? How can miracles be unanticipated and yet worked for? And finally, what do miracles tell us about other kinds of Christianity and even the category of religion? A Diagram for Fire engages with these questions in a detailed sociocultural ethnographic study of the Vineyard, an American Evangelical movement that originated in Southern California. This movement is known worldwide for its intense musical forms of worship and for advocating the belief that all Christians can perform biblical-style miracles. Setting the miracle as both a strength and a challenge to institutional cohesion and human planning, this book situates the miracle as a fundamentally social means of producing change—surprise and the unexpected used to reimagine and reconfigure the will. Jon Bialecki shows how this configuration of the miraculous shapes typical Pentecostal and Charismatic religious practices as well as music, reading, economic choices, and conservative and progressive political imaginaries.
This article explores the intellectual history of dreaming practices in the eastern African kingdom of Buganda. Whereas Muslim dissenters used their dreams to challenge colonial authority following the kingdom's late nineteenth-century religious wars, political historians such as Apolo Kaggwa removed the political practice of dreaming from Buganda's official histories to deplete the visionary archives from which dissenters continued to draw. Kaggwa's strategy, though, could only be pressed so far. Recently unearthed vernacular sources show that Christian activists, such as Erieza Bwete and Eridadi Mulira, continued to marshal their dreams and literacy to imagine competing visions of Buganda's colonial monarchy. Earlier scholars had argued that modernity and literacy would displace the political function of dreams. This article, by contrast, proposes that sleeping visions took on new, more complicated meanings throughout the twentieth century. Literacy offered new technologies to expound upon the political implications of dreams and a vast repository of symbols to enrich interpretative performances.
In this article, I ask how anthropology can adopt a decolonial approach that incorporates and acknowledges the critical scholarship of Indigenous thinkers whose work and labour informs many current trends in Euro-Western scholarship, activism and socio-political discourse. I also query how to address ongoing structural colonialism within the academy in order to ensure that marginalised voices are heard within academic discourses.
Moral Laboratories is at once an engaging ethnography and a groundbreaking foray in the anthropology of morality. It takes us on a journey into the lives of African-American families caring for children with serious chronic medical conditions, foregrounding the uncertainty that affects their struggles for a good life. Challenging depictions of moral transformation as only possible in moments of breakdown or in radical breaches from the ordinary, it offers a compelling portrait of the transformative powers embedded in ordinary existence. From soccer fields to dinner tables, the everyday emerges as a potential moral laboratory for reshaping moral life. Mattingly offers vivid and heart-wrenching case stories to elaborate a first person ethical framework, forcefully showing the limits of third-person renderings of morality. In so doing, she deals with a complex history of philosophical and anthropological thinking on ethics in an accessible and immediately relevant way.
This deeply insightful ethnography explores the healing power of caring and intimacy in a small, closely bonded Apostolic congregation during Botswana's HIV/AIDS pandemic. Death in a Church of Life paints a vivid picture of how members of the Baitshepi Church make strenuous efforts to sustain loving relationships amid widespread illness and death. Over the course of long-term fieldwork, Frederick Klaits discovered Baitshepi's distinctly maternal ethos and the "spiritual" kinship embodied in the church's nurturing fellowship practice. Klaits shows that for Baitshepi members, Christian faith is a form of moral passion that counters practices of divination and witchcraft with redemptive hymn singing, prayer, and the use of therapeutic substances. An online audio annex makes available examples of the church members' preaching and song. Correction: The author wishes to correct a mistranslation of a Setswana proverb that appears on page 5 of the text. The proverb is rendered as "Jealousy is cooked together with the voice; when the voice emerges, jealousy is left behind." In Setswana, the saying is "Lefufa le apeetswe le lentswe, lentswe la butswa ga sala lefufa." The correct translation is: "Jealousy is cooked together with a stone; when the stone is fully cooked, jealousy remains behind." As difficult as it is to bake a stone, jealousy is even harder to cook away. The significance of the proverb is as related in the text, namely that there is no way to remove jealousy from persons or relationships. The author regrets having misconstrued the low-toned Setswana word "lentswe" (stone) as the high-toned "lentswe" (voice) in this instance.
Dreams that Matter explores the social and material life of dreams in contemporary Cairo. Amira Mittermaier guides the reader through landscapes of the imagination that feature Muslim dream interpreters who draw on Freud, reformists who dismiss all forms of divination as superstition, a Sufi devotional group that keeps a diary of dreams related to its shaykh, and ordinary believers who speak of moving encounters with the Prophet Muhammad. In close dialogue with her Egyptian interlocutors, Islamic textual traditions, and Western theorists, Mittermaier teases out the dream's ethical, political, and religious implications. Her book is a provocative examination of how present-day Muslims encounter and engage the Divine that offers a different perspective on the Islamic Revival. Dreams That Matter opens up new spaces for an anthropology of the imagination, inviting us to rethink both the imagined and the real.
"For me this was one of the best ethnographies I have read for many years.". Social Anthropology/Anthropologie sociale "...[a]thoughtful and creative book... [It] is an excellent resource and it is a good read: theoretical without being overwhelming, anthropological without being off-putting, serious but amusing. In sum, it is a rare and valuable contribution.". African Studies Quarterly "While not a light book, this is one for anyone seeking ethnographic understanding based on an equatorial African setting not to overlook...A short review can hardly do justice to the care behind the book or the local flavor it conveys: the accuracy of its translations, the sensitivity and empathy behind its life histories, the candor about research tactics and dilemmas...It is one warmly to be welcomed.". Anthropos "One of the richest ethnographies of African social life of recent years... As do the best ethnographies, this book communicates the wonder of its authors at touching and being touched deeply across difference.". JRAI "In addition to [its] broad examination of the intertwining of Africans' experiences of AIDS and associated social changes, [an important] theme ...is[its]extended and sophisticated treatment of morality as an integral aspect not only of the AIDS epidemic, but also of every dimension of the social responses it has produced.". African Studies Review "The originality of this book lies in its careful exploration of touch and contingency, drawing on Michel de Certeau and Emmanuel Lévinas. The sensitive ethnography and judicious use of other sources make for superb anthropology...Here is a book that provides inspiration as well as beautifully crafted documentation of efforts to maintain the flow of life in specific difficult historical circumstances.". Mortality Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork, the book explores life in and around a Luo-speaking village in western Kenya during a time of death. The epidemic of HIV/AIDS affects every aspect of sociality and pervades villagers' debates about the past, the future and the ethics of everyday life. Central to such debates is a discussion of touch in the broad sense of concrete, material contact between persons. In mundane practices and in ritual acts, touch is considered to be key to the creation of bodily life as well as social continuity. Underlying the significance of material contact is its connection with growth - of persons and groups, animals, plants and the land - and the forward movement of life more generally. Under the pressure of illness and death, economic hardship and land scarcity, as well as bitter struggles about the relevance and application of Christianity and 'Luo tradition' in daily life, people find it difficult to agree about the role of touch in engendering growth, or indeed about the aims of growth itself. © 2010 Paul Wenzel Geissler and Ruth Jane Prince. All rights reserved.
The anthropology of ethics has become an important and fast-growing field in recent years. This book argues that it represents not just a new subfield within anthropology but a conceptual renewal of the discipline as a whole, enabling it to take account of a major dimension of human conduct which social theory has so far failed adequately to address. An ideal introduction for students and researchers in anthropology and related human sciences. • Shows how ethical concepts such as virtue, character, freedom and responsibility may be incorporated into anthropological analysis • Surveys the history of anthropology's engagement with morality • Examines the relevance for anthropology of two major philosophical approaches to moral life.
This subtle and powerful ethnography examines African healing and its relationship to medical science. Stacey A. Langwick investigates the practices of healers in Tanzania who confront the most intractable illnesses in the region, including AIDS and malaria. She reveals how healers generate new therapies and shape the bodies of their patients as they address devils and parasites, anti-witchcraft medicine, and child immunization. Transcending the dualisms between tradition and science, culture and nature, belief and knowledge, Langwick tells a new story about the materiality of healing and postcolonial politics. This important work bridges postcolonial theory, science, public health, and anthropology.
Winner of the 2011 African Studies Association Herskovits Award Beyond the Royal Gaze shifts the perspective from which we view early African politics by asking what Buganda, a kingdom located on the northwest shores of Lake Victoria in present-day Uganda, looked like to people who were not of the center but nevertheless became central to its functioning. Drawing on insights from a variety of disciplines-history, historical linguistics, archaeology, and anthropology-Neil Kodesh argues that the domains of politics and public healing were intimately entwined in Buganda from the sixteenth through the early nineteenth centuries. Drawing on extensive fieldwork conducted throughout Buganda, Kodesh demonstrates how efforts to ensure collective prosperity and perpetuity-usually expressed in the language of health and healing-lay at the heart of community-building processes in Buganda. Kodesh's work offers a novel approach to the use of oral sources and opens up new possibilities for researching and writing histories of more distant periods in Africa's past. Beyond the Royal Gaze will appeal to students and scholars of health and healing, political complexity, and the production of knowledge in places where limited documentary evidence exists. © 2010 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia. All rights reserved.
The Pastoral Clinic takes us on a penetrating journey into an iconic Western landscape-northern New Mexico's Española Valley, home to the highest rate of heroin addiction and fatal overdoses in the United States. In a luminous narrative, Angela Garcia chronicles the lives of several Hispano addicts, introducing us to the intimate, physical, and institutional dependencies in which they are entangled. We discover how history pervades this region that has endured centuries of material and cultural dispossession, and we come to see its heroin problem as a contemporary expression of these conditions, as well as a manifestation of the human desire to be released from them. Lyrically evoking the Española Valley and its residents through conversations, encounters, and recollections, The Pastoral Clinic is at once a devastating portrait of addiction, a rich ethnography of place, and an eloquent call for a new ethics of care.
This essay examines the relevance of the concept of biopower and its four seminal figures (the hysterical woman, the Malthusian couple, the masturbating child, and the perverse adult) to our understanding of current formations of late liberal power. Through the example of a far north Australian creek’s attempt to persist in being, this essay argues that new figures and tactics of geontological power are displacing prior biopower ones. It further argues that this displacement demands a radical questioning of queer modes of critical thought.
The paper examines cooperative labor and its relationship with beer drinking rituals in South Africa's Transkei. The analysis is placed within a historical context and the evolution of both cooperative labor and beer drinking in response to specific political, ecological, and socioeconomic circumstances. This facilitates a critique of the conventional approach to work parties and the standard typology of cooperative work in Africa and has important implications for one of anthropology's major concerns over the past decade-the study of commodities and consumption.
The modern ethnographic literature on alcohol tends to underestimate problems due to drinking. This "problem deflation" probably reflects a concurrence of various assumptions, methods, and theoretical orientations. Functionalist assumptions direct attention more to the gains than to the losses involved in drinking. The pleasures of drinking are more easily observed, given the ethnographer's focus on the everyday and the social, than the private pains and the rarer events-casualties, chronic disease mortality, etc.-that are the focus for epidemiologists; the ethnographer may also be less likely to notice abstention. English-speaking and North European researchers have dominated the literature, and those who came to maturity in the last half-century were reacting against the moralism of the later temperance movement and committed to a middle-class ideal of "moderate drinking." Ethnographic studies published before 1930 are more likely than later ones to report "extreme" male insobriety and regular drunken b...
CONTRIBUTORS: Daphna Birenbaum-Carmeli Philippe Bourgois John A. Brett Caroline B. Brettell Donna M. Goldstein Matthew C. Gutmann Michael Harris Daniel Hoffman Jill E. Korbin J. S. La Fontaine Leonard B. Lerer Lynn M. Morgan Susan Niermeyer Maria B. Olujic Mary Picone Elizabeth F. S. Roberts Carolyn Sargent Nancy Scheper-Hughes Meira Weiss Linda M. Whiteford