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Author: Stuart Walton
Publisher: Three Rivers Press (CA)
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781400049769
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An examination of intoxicants from alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco to opiates, amphetamines, and hallucinogens. Looks at why intoxication has always been part of the human experience.
Author: Edward Slingerland
Publisher: Little, Brown Spark
Published: 2021-06-01
Total Pages: 341
ISBN-13: 0316453374
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →An "entertaining and enlightening" deep dive into the alcohol-soaked origins of civilization—and the evolutionary roots of humanity's appetite for intoxication (Daniel E. Lieberman, author of Exercised). While plenty of entertaining books have been written about the history of alcohol and other intoxicants, none have offered a comprehensive, convincing answer to the basic question of why humans want to get high in the first place. Drunk elegantly cuts through the tangle of urban legends and anecdotal impressions that surround our notions of intoxication to provide the first rigorous, scientifically-grounded explanation for our love of alcohol. Drawing on evidence from archaeology, history, cognitive neuroscience, psychopharmacology, social psychology, literature, and genetics, Drunk shows that our taste for chemical intoxicants is not an evolutionary mistake, as we are so often told. In fact, intoxication helps solve a number of distinctively human challenges: enhancing creativity, alleviating stress, building trust, and pulling off the miracle of getting fiercely tribal primates to cooperate with strangers. Our desire to get drunk, along with the individual and social benefits provided by drunkenness, played a crucial role in sparking the rise of the first large-scale societies. We would not have civilization without intoxication. From marauding Vikings and bacchanalian orgies to sex-starved fruit flies, blind cave fish, and problem-solving crows, Drunk is packed with fascinating case studies and engaging science, as well as practical takeaways for individuals and communities. The result is a captivating and long overdue investigation into humanity's oldest indulgence—one that explains not only why we want to get drunk, but also how it might actually be good for us to tie one on now and then.
Author: Benjamin Breen
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2019-11-22
Total Pages: 288
ISBN-13: 0812296621
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Eating the flesh of an Egyptian mummy prevents the plague. Distilled poppies reduce melancholy. A Turkish drink called coffee increases alertness. Tobacco cures cancer. Such beliefs circulated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an era when the term "drug" encompassed everything from herbs and spices—like nutmeg, cinnamon, and chamomile—to such deadly poisons as lead, mercury, and arsenic. In The Age of Intoxication, Benjamin Breen offers a window into a time when drugs were not yet separated into categories—illicit and licit, recreational and medicinal, modern and traditional—and there was no barrier between the drug dealer and the pharmacist. Focusing on the Portuguese colonies in Brazil and Angola and on the imperial capital of Lisbon, Breen examines the process by which novel drugs were located, commodified, and consumed. He then turns his attention to the British Empire, arguing that it owed much of its success in this period to its usurpation of the Portuguese drug networks. From the sickly sweet tobacco that helped finance the Atlantic slave trade to the cannabis that an East Indies merchant sold to the natural philosopher Robert Hooke in one of the earliest European coffeehouses, Breen shows how drugs have been entangled with science and empire from the very beginning. Featuring numerous illuminating anecdotes and a cast of characters that includes merchants, slaves, shamans, prophets, inquisitors, and alchemists, The Age of Intoxication rethinks a history of drugs and the early drug trade that has too often been framed as opposites—between medicinal and recreational, legal and illegal, good and evil. Breen argues that, in order to guide drug policy toward a fairer and more informed course, we first need to understand who and what set the global drug trade in motion.
Author: Mark Forsyth
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2018-05-08
Total Pages: 256
ISBN-13: 0525575383
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →From the internationally bestselling author of The Etymologicon, a lively and fascinating exploration of how, throughout history, each civilization has found a way to celebrate, or to control, the eternal human drive to get sloshed “An entertaining bar hop though the past 10,000 years.”—The New York Times Book Review Almost every culture on earth has drink, and where there’s drink there’s drunkenness. But in every age and in every place drunkenness is a little bit different. It can be religious, it can be sexual, it can be the duty of kings or the relief of peasants. It can be an offering to the ancestors, or a way of marking the end of a day’s work. It can send you to sleep, or send you into battle. Making stops all over the world, A Short History of Drunkenness traces humankind’s love affair with booze from our primate ancestors through to the twentieth century, answering every possible question along the way: What did people drink? How much? Who did the drinking? Of the many possible reasons, why? On the way, learn about the Neolithic Shamans, who drank to communicate with the spirit world (no pun intended), marvel at how Greeks got giddy and Sumerians got sauced, and find out how bars in the Wild West were never quite like in the movies. This is a history of the world at its inebriated best.
Author: John O'Brien
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-06-13
Total Pages: 194
ISBN-13: 1351604988
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book provides an illuminating perspective on alcohol use, drawing on approaches from both anthropological research and historical sociology to examine our ambivalent attitudes to alcohol in the modern West. From anthropological research on non-Western, non-modern cultures, the author demonstrates that the use of alcohol or other psychoactive substances is a universal across human societies, and indeed, has tended to be seen as unproblematic, or even a sacred aspect of culture, often used in a highly ritualised context. From historical sociology, it is shown that alcohol has also been central to the process of state formation, not only as a crucial source of revenue, but also through having an important role in the formation of political communities, which frequently are a source of existential fear for ruling groups. Tracing this contradictory position occupied by alcohol over the course of history and civilisation, States of Intoxication sheds light on the manner in which it has produced the very peculiar modern perspective on alcohol.
Author: Stuart Walton
Publisher: Harmony
Published: 2002
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780609610442
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →“Who will ever relate the whole history of narcotica? It is almost the history of ‘culture,’ of our so-called higher culture.” —Friedrich Nietzsche, 1882 With Nietzsche’s question as his objective, Stuart Walton begins Out of It: A Cultural History of Intoxication—a heterodox and throughly engaging examination of intoxicants, from the more everyday substances of alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco to the illicit realm of opiates, amphetamines, and hallucinogens. More than a mere catalog of intoxicants, however, Walton’s book is a smart, wry look at why intoxication has always been a part of the human experience—from our earliest Stone Age rituals to the practices of the ancient Greeks and Romans, right on through the Victorian era and ending with a flourish in modern times—and more significantly, why the use of intoxicants is, and will continue to be, an essential part of being human. Using gastronomy as an example, Walton illustrates that just as the study of food history was relatively unheard of until the 1970s, so too “intoxicology” has yet to be recognized as a richly warranted field of study. Though intoxication may not be considered as essential to human existence as food, and carries the unjust stigma of criminality, Walton proposes that it is “an integral part of Western civilization, and that we would do better to accept and celebrate that fact instead of making it a matter of criminal sanctions and repression.” The conclusions Walton draws cut across the grain of today’s prevailing attitudes and fuel an important and often neglected debate, ultimately establishing that intoxication is not only a fundamental human right but, in fact, a biological imperative.
Author: Kawal Deep Kour
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9780367417703
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This volume unearths the emerging pattern of consumption of opium in colonial Assam and the creation of drug-dependency in a social context. Please note: Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the Hardback in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Author: Fiona Hutton
Publisher: Springer Nature
Published: 2020-01-25
Total Pages: 348
ISBN-13: 3030352846
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book considers the global discourses and debates about ‘intoxication’, engaging in critical academic discussion around this concept. The problems in defining intoxication are considered, alongside the meanings of intoxication and how these meanings often differ across diverse drug using populations. The way that intoxication has been engaged with over the centuries has affected how particular groups are perceived and responded to, resulting in punitive responses such as drug prohibition, alongside harsh treatment of those who are seen to transgress societal norms and values. Therefore, this collection seeks to unsettle dominant discourses about intoxication and to consider this concept in new, critical ways. Ways of being intoxicated are also defined in this book in their broadest sense; from ‘energy drinks’ and other legal drugs, to recreational use of illicit drugs such as ecstasy, to ‘problematic’ drug use.
Author: Ronald K. Siegel
Publisher: Inner Traditions / Bear & Co
Published: 2005-03-29
Total Pages: 390
ISBN-13: 9781594770692
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel draws on 20 years of groundbreaking research to provide countless examples of the intoxication urge in humans and animals. Presenting his conclusions on the biological and cultural reasons for the pursuit of intoxication, Siegel offers recommendations for curbing the negative effects of drug use in Western culture by designing safe intoxicants.
Author: Roderick Phillips
Publisher: UNC Press Books
Published: 2014
Total Pages: 381
ISBN-13: 1469617609
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →"In this innovative book on the attitudes toward and consumption of alcohol, Rod Phillips surveys a 9,000-year cultural and economic history, uncovering the tensions between alcoholic drinks as healthy staples of daily diets and as objects of social, political, and religious anxiety. In the urban centers of Europe and America, where it was seen as healthier than untreated water, alcohol gained a foothold as the drink of choice, but it has been regulated by governmental and religious authorities more than any other commodity. As a potential source of social disruption, alcohol created volatile boundaries of acceptable and unacceptable consumption and broke through barriers of class, race, and gender. Phillips follows the ever-changing cultural meanings of these potent potables and makes the surprising argument that some societies have entered "post-alcohol" phases."--Jacket.
