Miranda Black

Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Social Sciences

First Advisor

Dean, Erin

Keywords

Anthropology, Medicine, Alcohol, Disease

Area of Concentration

Anthropology

Abstract

Chronic alcohol addiction is a condition which manifests in social behaviors as well as biological consequences. Excessive drinking has not always been interpreted with the negative connotations which it bears today. Alcohol has existed in prehistoric cultures not only as a leisurely commodity but as a relic of religious, medicinal, and social rituals. This thesis concerns the role of alcohol use in the United States, focusing on how it came to be stigmatized and how the cultural phenomenon of medicalizing alcohol addiction alleviated, altered, but also in some ways re-invented stigmatization of the alcoholic. Through waves of social myth-making and with the influence of the medical institution, alcohol addiction began to assume the form of a pathological illness. The metaphor is largely represented by the widely-accepted "disease model" of alcoholism, which concretizes the metaphor via linguistic diagnosis, and promotes legal, social, and cultural repercussions. This thesis explores the making of this metaphor, the anthropological and medical approaches to studying alcohol and alcohol addiction, and the pragmatic limitations of a culturally-reductive disease model.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida Libraries, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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