Negative Space: sociology
- Alcohol In Its Cultural Context
- Alcohol helps strengthen the societies that use it. It facilitates social interaction, and allows individuals within the group to make observations and perform tasks that they would otherwise be forbidden to do.
- Benevolent Repression: Popular Culture, Social Structure, and the Control of Drinking
- Joseph Gusfield focuses on the repression of prohibition, and the perspective that allows it. What is this “personal liberty” that the opposition speaks of?
- Collegium for Research in Interactive Technologies
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The Internet and computers provide—require—a new way of looking at documents and at the world. Cooperative Computing in the 1990s and Computers, Telecommunications, and Western Culture. From the World Conference on Computers in Education, Birmingham, England, 1995.
- Conclusions
- Mac Marshall summarizes that alcohol is popular for parties all over the world, that men have more problems than women, and that modern societies produce more significant amounts of pathological behavior than pre-industrial societies. Oh, and prohibition never works.
- Cooperative Computing in the Nineties
- Opportunities for Academic Computing Services
- Cross-Cultural Implications
- It has been widely held that cultural studies offers means by which members of different cultures may interact without prejudice. With the advent of global computer networks, it may also become important to facilitate cultural interaction while retaining cultural integrity. Otherwise, “culture shock” may easily become a domestic disease.
- Culture Shock
- What effects can a global Internet have on an individual’s sense of culture, and what can societies do about it?
- Drugs and Behavior
- From animals to humans, everyone in nature seems to want to do drugs, and left alone they seem to do it in moderation. Only humans create laws encouraging more dangerous and more concentrated drugs.
- Drugs, Society and Behavior 87/88
- William B. Rucker and Marian E. Rucker have collected a range of articles, essays, and even a satire or two, that shed light on our society’s multiple-personality-like treatment of various drugs.
- Forms and Pathology of Drinking in Three Polynesian Societies
- Edwin M. Lemert writes that the use of kava provided a pattern for alcohol consumption throughout Polynesia. As in other societies, it tended to be limited to use by men.
- From Symbolic Exchange to Commodity Consumption: Anthropological Notes on Drinking as a Symbolic Practice
- Marianna Adler’s portion “draws on historical accounts of drinking in British society in an effort to shed light on the symbolic nature of drinking in modern Western societies.”
- General Nature
- The personality changes in addicts can be attributed to their desire to hide their addiction from their friends and family, and a belief that no one will believe that their addiction is not merely a matter of not enough willpower. The prejudices of society against addicts tends to drive addicts into a mode of life that society then claims is caused by their addiction.
- Influence of Public Understanding
- Peter Goldberg and Erik J. Meyers go over some of the crazy public response to drug war mania. Of course, some of this is probably parents lying to surveyors, especially if by “national survey” they mean one performed by the federal government.
- Perspectives on Drinking and Social History
- Despite its obvious silliness, prohibition has at times been, and continues to be, a popular response to recreational drug use. Why, and how?
- Problem-Drinking and the Integration of Alcohol in Rural Buganda
- Michael C. Robbins finds among the Buganda the same as among Europeans and Americans, that when societies drink to get drunk, they will have an alcohol problem, and when they drink to be friendly, they don’t. Watch out for those “Irish, mestizos, Irish-Americans, and Italian-Americans”.
- The Role of the Drunk in a Oaxacan Village
- Philip A. Dennis writes about the drunk as a holy fool; I suspect it’s a theme as old as entertainment.
More Information
- Drugs in American Society•
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Has a “distinctive emphasis on the sociological perspective, explaining the drug phenomenon using sociological concepts supported by recent data from a wide range of sources.”
