Social and Cultural History Research Papers

Introduction The volume in which this essay sits explores the long and social relationship between humans and alcohol, but, of course, no one really orders a pint of alcohol to drink. As Michael Dietler (this volume, Chapter 8), Lewis Daly (this volume, Chapter 9), and Asher Rosinger (this volume, Chapter 10) make clear, people have created a huge range of fermented beverages over time, with very different tastes, qualities, and uses. We also know that humans have not routinely drunk alcoholic beverages from their hands, nor (with the notable recent exception of the beer bottle and can) do they tend to drink from storage or serving vessels. Yet, by focusing on the manufacture of, trade in, and physical and psychological effects of alcoholic beverages, scholars can sometimes appear to imply that, in lived experience, alcohol drinking looked something like this: Moreover, intoxicating drinks are not, of themselves, inherently pleasurable. Learning to like wine, beer, tea and coffee, and how much and how best to drink them, has long been part of growing up, in Britain as elsewhere. The taste for, and effects of, alcoholic drinks is a continually evolving and contingent process-as much over the short lifespan of an individual life as it is for human societies over aeons of time. (Burnett, 1999; Courtwright, 2001; Herring et al., 2013; Withington & McShane, 2014) As we reach for a more nuanced and materialized social history of human drinking practices , physicist and gender theorist Karen Barad has usefully refocused our attention on the performativity of matter in social situations. She proposes a contestation of the excessive power granted to language to determine what is real [and of] the unexamined habits of mind that grant language and other forms of representation more power in determining our ontologies than they deserve. (Barad, 2003: 802)

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