Alcohol is a special form of embodied material culture and the most widely used
psychoactive agent in the world. It has been a fundamentally important social, economic …

Why do many societies moralize apparently harmless pleasures, such as lust, gluttony,
alcohol, drugs, and even music and dance? Why do they erect temperance, asceticism …

This book focuses upon the debate about quantitative and qualitative research which took
root in the 1960s, although many of the central themes go back centuries. The basic terms of …

What is 'addiction'? What does it say about us, our social arrangements and our political
preoccupations? Where is it going as an idea, and what is at stake in its ongoing …

Now in its third edition, this textbook serves to frame understandings of health, health-related
behavior, and health care in light of social and health inequality as well as structural …

First published in 1987, Constructive Drinking is a series of original case studies organized
into three sections based on three major functions of drinking. The three constructive …

The practice of drinking alcoholic beverages has several characteristic important social roles
in traditional small-scale societies, particularly in terms of political economy. Cross-cultural …

Global environmental change and recent worldwide infectious-disease outbreaks make the
ecological perspective of medical anthropology more important a field of study than ever. In …

Joseph R. Gusfield has been for decades the most creative, penetrating, and far-sighted
sociologist of alcohol's ambiguous place in American society. Combining in his work the …

The main purpose of this book is to describe the variety of drinking occasions that exist
around the world, primarily in modern, industrialized countries. As such, it celebrates the …