Drunken Comportment

A Social Explanation

by Craig MacAndrew and Robert B. Edgerton

Book cover: Drunken Comportment

Extent: 214 pages

Publisher: Percheron Press

Subjects: Anthropology, Social Sciences 

Series: Foundations of Anthropology

Language: English

Paperback (Published)

(November 2003)

ISBN: 9780971958760

Price: $32.50

Out of stock

From the Foreword to the Percheron Press Edition: ‘[O]ne of only a few books that can truly be said to have had a major impact on our understanding of alcohol use and its outcomes.’


When Aldine originally published this book in 1969, the emerging multidisciplinary field of alcohol studies was dominated by biology, chemistry, physiology, and other “hard sciences.” As such, writes Dwight Heath in his new foreword, the work challenged the prevailing wisdom in the authors’ use of historical, ethnographic, and cross-cultural data and their analysis of drinking behavior as an anthropological and sociocultural phenomenon.

  • By (author) Robert B. Edgerton
  • By (author) Craig MacAndrew

From the Foreword to the Percheron Press Edition "[O]ne of only a few books that can truly be said to have had a major impact on our understanding of alcohol use and its outcomes." From the reviews "[P]robably the most original contribution ever to come from anthropological research on alcohol." John J. Honigmann in Social Forces "[A] happy blending of good psychology and anthropology." Nancy Oestreich Lurie in American Anthropologist "[A]rguably the best-recognized conceptual contribution from the ethnographic literature to alcohol studies in general." Robin Room in Social Science and Medicine