Hi Sidsel! Nice to see you on this LSG! Your interesting post recalled to me my own long struggle with the relationship between "culture" and "drinking". When I fell into the task of cross-cultural analyst for the old WHO 3-country study (Mexico, Scotland, Zambia--we added our U.S. data later), I vainly (perhaps in both senses of the term) sought to find or define some general framework for understanding the relationship between "culture" and "drinking patterns." To my surprise, nothing in the cross-cultural & anthro literature provided that. And so I began to think along two lines: (1) how might the meanings, norms, and even problems associated with drinking in a particular culture form some sort of "coherent logic unto itself" and (2) how might the meanings, etc. be linked or integrated with larger aspects of culture? These, of course, represent two very different kinds of answers to the culture & alcohol question, but nothing stops them from being linked in a wider theory. I learned, BTW, that an older tradition of interest in "national character"--something that might actually have been *useful* in my quest--had fallen out of favor decades earlier. Anyhow, the best I ever managed to come up with was my "Differential Access/Universal Moderation" (DA/UM) model--which derived particularly from the strong connection between drinking and the *ascribed statuses* of age and gender in Zambia & Mexico vs. the more or less universal legitimate access to drinking (among adults) in Scotland (and the U.S.) but with a covering norm of use in moderation (which Mexican & esp. Zambian drinkers did not evidence). The DA/UM model is essentially a "logic of drinking" model [#(1), above] in that it asked about two different normative approaches to the social control of drinking (DA and UM)--asked, that is, what their implications for normative structuring, cultural definition, social control, etc. might be. The model also may provide an analytical framework for examining *the transition* between these two social control structures--i.e., framing drinking in a larger process of modernization that takes society from the ascribed-status structures of traditional societies to the universalist/achievement structures of modern societies. Drinking's problematic cultural status--it struck me--may well have much to do with the incommensurability of traditional and modern structural arrangements, and drinking's normative structural ties to both (something I noted, incidentally, in my review of Colson and Scudder's book in *CDP*). Anyhow, all this your note recalled to me about the intriguing, and thoroughly unsolved mystery, of the ties (if any!) between drinking and culture. Ron Roizen, Berkeley, CA -------FORWARD, Original message follows------- Date: FROM: ID: Subject: Response to Sidsel Eriksen -------FORWARD, End of original message-------