The literature on anthropology and alcohol studies is abundant and diverse, but it is difficult for beginners to access because of its dispersal in many, often fairly recondite, sources. An excellent recent overview is available (see Heath 2000). The most complete bibliography (Heath and Cooper 1981) has an excellent index that compensates somewhat for its being dated. In one comprehensive review-article, I gave a broad overview of what had been published through 1970, arranged in terms of topics (Heath 1975); in another, I did the same using a chronological sequence (Heath 1976). Subsequently, I used the same topical outline to review the explosive growth from 1970–80 (Heath 1987a). One anthology of reprinted papers serves as a convenient introduction to the field (Mar- shall 1979), and a few books and monographs demonstrate the variation even within major culture areas (southwestern United States: Waddell and Everett 1980; sub-Saharan Africa: Bryceson 2002; Pan 1975; Partanen 1991; Willis 2002; arctic America: Hamer and Steinbring 1980; modern Europe: Gefou-Madianou 1992).
In keeping with traditional anthropological practice, I have construed “anthropological approaches” in a holistic manner dealing with humankind as a biological organism, an animal that traffics heavily in symbols, including spoken language, a social creature that pays attention not only to history but also attempts to understand prehistory, and that shares culture with others,
even across generations. The four subdisciplines of anthropology as it is comprised in the United States—physical, linguistic, archeological, and socio- cultural—are all as relevant to the study of alcohol as they are to the study of religion. Furthermore, the literature on both fields reflects anthropology’s traditional emphasis more on non-Western, historical, and cross-cultural data than on patterns in the contemporary urban-industrial world.
It is perhaps ironic that what many people consider the primary contri- bution of anthropology to alcohol studies has to do, in large part, with relations between religion and attitudes toward drinking. It stems from work by a sociologist Robert F. Bales (1946) and is based on what we would now consider a methodologically weak thematic analysis contrast- ing American Jews (of no particular cultural background) with Irish Americans (assumed to be Catholics). My reservations about the method- ological shortcomings of Bales’s work in no way diminish my respect and appreciation for his major insight about the importance of sociocultural factors in shaping both drinking patterns and the results of drinking.
Bales even distinguished “ritual” as one of four major worldwide atti- tudes toward drinking (the others being “abstinence,” “convivial,” and “utilitarian”). He then characterized Jews, all of whom drink but whose rit- ual attitude emphasizes drinking as a means of communication with the sacred, as being virtually free of alcoholism and related problems. In stark contrast, although it is only adult males who drink among the Irish, he saw their utilitarian attitude toward drinking for satisfaction and recreation, as an aid to business or other personal and secular ends, as resulting in a high rate of alcoholism, with associated psychic and social problems. This work was important as an early empirical demonstration that the occurrence of physical and social problems related with drinking is not in direct propor- tion to the amount of drinking in all societies, although it is often said to be so. Without any specific mention that would presage the current policy controversy between “the control model” and the “socio-cultural model” of prevention (Heath 1988a), he demonstrated dramatically that the atti- tudes of individuals toward drinking, combined with alternative means of satisfaction, were far more important than sheer availability of alcohol in determining who had how many of what kind of problems.
Subsequent work, with more sophisticated sociological and historical methodologies, (Snyder 1958; Glassner and Berg 1985; Stivers 1976) has con- firmed Bales’s general point, which is now well accepted by clinicians and others, as well as by social scientists. In fact, it is now commonplace to find authors who write about alcohol, no matter what their disciplinary back- ground, noting early in their exposition that “alcoholism is a biopsychosocial disease” (Royce 1989: 98), or that understanding drinking and its outcomes necessarily involves a “complex interplay of biological, psychological, and environmental factors” (ibid.) (with “environment” standing for a huge residual category, largely, but not exclusively, sociocultural).
An ambitious effort at large-scale cross-cultural (or hologeistic) study of drinking involved detailed comparison among 139 cultures on the basis of 19 variables (such as “frequency of drinking as a religious ritual,” “quan- tity of drinking as a religious ritual,” “duration of drinking episode,” “approval of drinking,” etc.). Those variables were, in turn, correlated with other factors such as child-rearing practices, prevalence of various kinds of anxiety, sex differences, expressions of hostility, and others (Bacon et al. 1965). In their world-sample, which was based more upon availability of data rather than representativeness or randomness, few groups drank in an explicitly religious way daily, but nearly half did so monthly or more often. The amount drunk per occasion in that way ranged from none to very substantial. Religious associations played little part in the statistically significant overall conclusions, which strongly sug- gested that high quantity and frequency of drinking tend to be associated with permissive child-training, followed by demands for independence in adulthood.
In another context, I have already recently given the most nearly com- prehensive analysis of anthropology and alcohol, as they jointly relate to theory (Heath 1988b). There has, as yet, been no serious effort to examine religions and alcohol as they relate to theory, except on a piecemeal basis with a few case studies. Although many of my broad review-articles on the anthropological study of alcohol include critical assessments of vari- ous methods that have been used for research projects, there has been no systematic effort to describe appropriate methods. On a small scale, I did introduce beginners to observational methods in this connection (Heath 1981), but I am convinced that they should more often be complemented by survey, epidemiological, and other quantitative methods.
For the benefit of this readership, a more appropriate strategy than my trying to tease out the few, fragmentary, and often outdated links between anthropological theories about religion on the one hand, and alcohol on the other, would appear to be my offering a brief review of issues that may deserve a closer look. In the following sections, I will do that, under the broad rubrics of “origins and evolution,” “sacrament and sacrilege,” and “continuity and change” before turning to a few “implications for anthro- pology of religion.”