A FASCINATING anthropological study into the consumption of alcohol and how it affects people has asked some interesting questions about the way we handle the problem behaviour associated with heavy drinking.
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British-based anthropologist Dr Anne Fox, who wrote the study into behaviour in Australia’s night life, argues Australians have automatically accepted alcohol releases inhibitions and this becomes an excuse for the carnage.
Much of our Anglo-Celtic approach to controlling alcohol as such is about prohibition; creating new laws for limiting sales, use or age.
The historical framework that built so much of this enforced control was based on the idea that alcohol itself was the evil; the behaviour the consequence.
Dr Fox certainly doesn’t condone excessive drinking, but she notes that in multiple cultures she studied, heavy drinking was not accompanied with violence, aggression or other antisocial behaviour. Instead, she argues it is the wider culture that determines behaviour while drinking, not the drinking per se. She argues the inhibition factor is more of an excuse for antisocial behaviour inherent in individuals before the alcohol unleashes their worst.
While it is worth noting that the study was commissioned by an alcohol company, it also raises some far broader and more challenging questions about how much our culture contributes to the issues with problem drinking.
“The way to tackle the real underlying causes of antisocial behaviour,” Dr Fox said, “is to address the cultural reinforcers of violence, misogyny, and aggressive masculinity in all its cultural expressions – from schoolyards to sports fields, politics and pubs, movies and media.”
Her idea that you must influence culture if you want to change behaviour may not conclusively solve all the woes associated with excessive drinking or in exceptional cases of aberrance, but it does cast a new perspective on an old problem.
Others have argued the cultural shift towards drink driving as being unacceptable did far more than the threat of booze buses. You may now be fined for smoking around children in certain places, but it is the social pressure of not doing what has a harmful effect on others that is the more powerful influencer.
By this thinking, social disgrace around excessive drinking and, particularly, the antisocial behaviour it produces, may do more than new fines, CCTV and further straining police resources. But cultural shift is hard won in a nation even as young as 200 years when it is built on a culture of drinking.