Alcohol and sociology

Abstract

Knowledge of the nature of New Zealand drinking behaviour is uncertain and ill-defined and yet the subject of much generalisation and stereotypy in popular and scientific accounts. Hackneyed stereotypes have ranged from that of the drinker as drunken sinner, as proposed by temperence groups, to that of alcohol as a thoroughly sensible lubricant for the mechanisms of social life, as proposed by brewers. The national drinking culture has long been affected by the polemical propaganda of such partisan groups as these, and may only now be beginning to move toward a relatively unambiguous set of standards and ideas. Moral values regarding alcohol use have been and still are uncertain and comparative, with the pronouncements of various established churches being diplomatic equivocations rather than clarificatory statements. This uncertainty is manifest in unstable drinking attitudes and behaviours (see Bollinger, 1967).