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Beer and belonging: real ale consumption, place and identity

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posted on 2017-09-19, 13:43 authored by Thomas Thurnell-ReadThomas Thurnell-Read
The role played by alcohol and its consumption in the creation of personal, group and national identity has received considerable academic attention. A central feature of this has been the recognition that, in addition to the many potential negative personal and social outcomes of heavy drinking, the consumption of alcoholic drinks invariably involves significant articulations of personal identity, collective belonging and, as Mary Douglas and her co-authors (1987) have established, the construction and perpetuation of culture itself. We must acknowledge, therefore, that alcoholic drinks exhibit remarkable symbolic power. Indeed, some even take on totemic positions in relation to national culture, history and identity; Roland Barthes (1972, 67) famously asserted that the performance of drinking wine ‘is a national technique which serves to qualify the Frenchman, to demonstrate at once the performance, his control and his sociability’ (Barthes 1972, 67). More recently, Marion Demossier (2010, 29) has used her extensive study of wine production and consumption in France to explore how ‘through wine consumption, individuals compete and construct their identity and relate to concepts of what it means to be French, exploring the relationship between regions and the nation’.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Communication, Media, Social and Policy Studies

Published in

Drinking Dilemmas: Space, culture and identity

Pages

45 - 61

Citation

THURNELL-READ, T., 2015. Beer and belonging: real ale consumption, place and identity. IN: Thurnell-Read, T. (ed.). Drinking dilemmas: space, culture and identity. Abingdon: Routledge, pp.45-61.

Publisher

© Routledge

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2015

ISBN

9781138931145;1138931144;9781315679914

Book series

Sociological futures;

Language

  • en