Historique
Périodique
The golden age of drinking and the fall into addiction
(L'âge d'or de la boisson et la chute dans l'addiction)
Auteur(s) :
ROTH, M.
Année
2004
Page(s) :
11-33
Langue(s) :
Anglais
Refs biblio. :
71
Domaine :
Alcool / Alcohol
Thésaurus mots-clés
ADDICTION
;
ABUS
;
ALCOOL
;
HISTOIRE
;
SOCIOLOGIE
;
PHILOSOPHIE
;
BOISSON ALCOOLIQUE
Thésaurus géographique
ETATS-UNIS
Note générale :
Janus Head, 2004, 7, (1), 11-33
Résumé :
This article surveys the discursive turns of a conventional historical trope: the change in the valence of alcohol (and drugs) from happy to miserable. This change is commonly told as the story of a golden age of drinking and a fall into addiction (although there is a confused relationship in many of the stories between a condition called medical alcoholism and the social behavior of drunkenness). This fall is variously dated from the fifteenth to the late nineteenth centuries (both the conceptualization and the fact of alcoholism). Is this real historical change or only nominal change? Was alcoholism unknown in previous ages or has it always been around? Certain material factors (supply, absence of alternative drinks) may have impeded the visibility of alcoholism. The theory of nominal change is involved with factors like conspiratorial behavior, the conditions of scientific knowledge (i.e., the structure of investigation itself), the baffles of categorization (heavy drinking was hidden within gluttony for mast of history). Real change involves various facets of modernity and industrial capitalism: individualism and privacy, temperance, respectability, and rigid class formation, etcetera. But this shift is also a movement across class lines, from middle to lower-class drinkers. (Author's abstract.)
Affiliation :
USA