This volume is an important contribution to our understanding of culture
and alcohol in the United States. Its appearance is also a milestone in
the history of alcohol studies in American anthropology. Over the last
six years, the volume's editors, initially along with Miriam Rodin, have
served as the coorganizers of the Alcohol and Drug Study Group of the
American Anthropological Association (AAA). In this capacity, they have
organized sessions at the AAA and other meetings, greatly strengthened
the research network with a regular and informative newsletter, and
painstakingly promoted the publication of anthropological work on al-
cohol and drugs. Appearing just as the responsibility for the Study
Group is passed on to others, this book is a fitting emblem of the care
and energy with which its editors have built an institutional nexus for
alcohol and drug anthropology in North America. The contents of this
volume offer a uniquely wide sampling of the diversity of cultural
patterns that make up the American experience with alcohol. The
collective portrait the editors have assembled extends in several
dimensions: through time and history, across such social differ-
entiations as gender, age-grade, and social class, and through such
major social institutions as the church and the family. Clearly the
dominant dimension of variation in the material that follows, however,
is ethnicity. The book offers us a sampler of unprecedented richness of
the different experiences with alcohol of American ethnoreligious
groups.
