fi elds has connections to other disciplines as well; physical anthropologists
often do research in biology, public health or medicine, socio-cultural anthropologists
study how belief systems and cultural structures affect individuals and
societies, and linguistic anthropologists are interested in how language, images
and folklore shape culture – and how culture shapes language use and perception
of the world. And everyone knows that archeologists dig up old stuff:
human remains, clay pots and treasure from ancient civilizations. But anthropologists
also understand that their particular area is just one part of an interconnected
discipline that explores how human cultures function and infl uence
the individuals within them. Individuals are understood to have singular identities
and personalities shaped by the knowledge and history of their culture.
Individuals do not stand alone – they inhabit the past and create the future
because they represent the embodied knowledge of prior generations and
transmit these cultural practices to their children.
Drinking alcohol is both a physical and a cultural act. The physical response
is well known and almost everyone can recognize when someone is drunk. Once
an individual has experienced alcohol he or she understands its biological
effects intimately, from the fi rst burn upon the lips to the giddy feeling of intoxication.
But drinking alcohol is also a deeply cultural act and every society has
different rules for use. Anthropology acknowledges that wide cultural variations
exist for almost every form of social practice, and each culture’s beliefs and
forms of behavior render its rules rational. Cultures have overlapping norms of
belief and behavior across multiple fi elds of human action that mutually reinforce
the ‘rightness’ of specifi c ways of seeing the world and interacting with
others. For instance, religious and socio-economic structures and beliefs support
many different cultural practices in addition to those tied directly to religion,
social structure and economics. Each culture’s rules present a reasonably
holistic cultural package to those who have learned how to be human in that
society. As a result, there is much variation in rules and expectations of alcohol
from culture to culture – this can make drinking with someone from another
culture quite an adventure. But because alcohol also has distinct and predictable
physical effects there is similarity across cultures as well. Dwight Heath
has spent decades studying how different cultures use alcohol, and he maintains
that there are predictable rules that operate in every culture that uses
alcohol: