Joumal of Substance Abuse, 2, 353-367 (1990)EDITORIAL REVIEW

"Problem Deflation" and the EthnographicRecord: Interpretation and Introspection in

Anthropological Studies of Alcohol

Mac MarshallUniversity of Iowa

A controversy that has continued over the past 5 years concerning whetherethnographic studies of alcohol systematically "deflate" alcohol-related problemsis discussed and critiqued. This debate harbors some fundamentally significantmatters that have important implications for the future of alcohol and culturestudies . These matters concern the epistemological basis of ethnography, andthe reliability of ethnographic research methods. Drawing upon data from Truk,Federated States of Micronesia, these issues are explored in detail . It is suggestedthat the presence or absence of "alcohol problems" in ethnographic accountsis largely a result of particular interpretations made at specific historical momentsin the changing, open-ended systems that anthropologists study. It is concludedthat by alerting us to likely biases in the ethnographic record, Room hasperformed a signal service to the anthropology of alcohol.

"rare are ethnographers who question aloud (or in print) whether the)' got itright, or whether there might be yet another, equally useful wa)' to study,characterize, display, read, or otherwise understand the accumulated fieldmaterials" (Van Maanen, 1988, p. 51).

I first went to Truk in 1969. Early on I had some profound experiencesinvolving Trukese drinking and drunkenness (Marshall, 1990) that eventuallyled me to conduct anthropological studies of alcohol there. Over the courseof 20 years I conducted three different periods of research in Truk, observingthe significant changes that swept over the islands. During that time my viewson whether alcohol use is problematic in Truk altered. This led me toreexamine some of my earlier conclusions about Trukese drinking and drun­ken behavior (e.g., Marshall & Marshall, 1990; Marshall, in press), and nowthis same awareness has prompted me to join in a dialogue initiated by RobinRoom.

A first draft of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Kettil Bruun Societyfor Social and Epidemiological Research on Alcohol during June, 1988, in Berkeley, CA.Subsequently, it was given before the Interdisciplinary Seminar in International Health at theUniversity of Iowa. I appreciate critical comments from Genevieve Ames, David Curry, andMargery Wolf.

Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Mac Marshall, Department ofAnthropology, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242.

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354 M. Marshall

In 1984, Room published a major article in Current Anthropology, focusingon possible biases in the ethnographic study of alcohol. The article's formatincluded published reactions by 16 alcohol researchers from five differentcountries, which ranged from laudatory to highly critical, with a final rebuttalby the author. Room intended his piece " to open a dialogue" on severalimportant issues in the anthropology of alcohol, yet as this discussion hascontinued in the literature over the last 5 years, it has become more narrowlyfocused and more polemical than might be hoped.

My goals in this paper are to broaden the discussion and to purge polemicfrom a debate that raises issues of fundamental importance to alcohol andculture studies. My approach is first, to outline the major controversial issues,second, to discuss the course the argument has taken, third, to critique thedebate as it has ensued, and fourth, to examine the issues under controversyby using data I gathered in Truk, Federated States of Micronesia. Like Room,I view this as part of an ongoing exchange in which I hope other studentsof alcohol will become involved.

THE CHALLENGE TO ANTHROPOLOGY

Room concluded his Current Anthropology article by observing that "an­thropologists tend to minimize the seriousness of drinking problems in thetribal and village cultures under discussion" (1984a , P: 170). He believedthat this "disparity between the ethnographic and other alcohol literaturesreflects a systematic bias in the modern ethnographic literature against thefull recognition of alcohol problems in the cultures under study" (1984a, p.170). Room labelled this bias "problem deflation," noting that "problemamplification" is also a potential bias in alcohol studies. The terms "deflation"and "amplification" were used to cover both methodological and interpretivematters, and Room suggested that both mechanisms had affected ethnographicstudies of alcohol use.

Having thus identified the central concern, in the remainder of his articleRoom explored "the contention that there is a systematic tendency in themodern ethnographic literature on alcohol towards 'problem deflation'"(1984a, p. 171). In endeavoring to support his hypothesis, he first pointedto anthropology's historically strong functionalist cast, in which tribal societieswere viewed "as organic and autonomous wholes and [there was] a focus onthe immanent positive supports for the status quo" (1984a, P: 171). Anthro­pologists' alleged "problem deflation" was held to be inherent in the func­tionalist perspective which dominated the discipline .

Room believed that ethnographers' methodological focus on village societiesand "the study of the everyday" made them "likely to witness all or mostof the pleasures of drinking but to miss some of the problems-particularlythe life-threatening problems that are the focus of attention of the epide­miologist" (1984a, p. 172). As a result, Room argued that ethnographicmethods may have led anthropologists to underestimate the problems relatedto drinking. Moreover, he feared that these same methodological blinders

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might have led ethnographers "to underestimate abstention from drinkingand negative attitudes towards drinking, particularly when . . . [these] areprivate matters rather than public and symbolic statements" (1984a, P: 172).But ethnographers' possible "problem deflation" was not the only method­ological risk Room saw in alcohol studies. He also noted that those who useepidemiological methods risk "problem amplification."

Room suggested in Current Anthropology that the authors of much of themodern ethnographic literature were members of what he called "wet gen­erations," with liberal attitudes toward libation and "with no previous historyin alcohol studies" (1984a, P: 173). He argued that these persons' perceptionsand values may have influenced the data they gathered and their interpretationof those data. Room related this idea about the "wet generations" to whathe called "the dialectic of expatriation": a reaction on the part of 20th­century anthropologists to field situations in which "the rhetoric for discussionsof drinking" was phrased in terms of the legacy of 19th-century missionaryefforts "with which they [the anthropologists] were professionally as well asculturally out of sympathy" (1984a, P: 175).

Finally, Room notes that the "governing image" in North America ofalcoholism as a disease "is at its heart a culture-bound syndrome," and that"the ethnographic literature on alcohol reveals little sensitivity to the potentialculture-boundedness of alcoholism concepts" (1984a, P: 176). Consequently,Room feels that "the disease concept has served in ethnography . . . as avehicle and rhetoric for ignoring or depreciating alcohol-related problemsthat do not fit the concept. Alcohol-related problems other than alcoholismsimply disappear from view" (1984a, p. 176).

THE ENSUING DEBATE

As is typical of the commentaries in Current Anthropology, Room's articleelicited a wide range of response. A clear majority of the commentatorsagreed that he was addressing important issues; however, nearly everyoneoffered corrections or clarifications. Of those who responded, Heath adoptedthe most critical stance. Perhaps unfortunately, Heath's rejoinder has set thetone for much of the discussion that has occurred since. For example, Heathwrote that

It would be easy to excuse some minor inaccuracies on the part of an authorwho is untrained and inexperienced in both ethnography and epidemiologyand to agree that some of his points are valid and relevant even if theemphasis seems strange. But the cumulative effect of neglecting such criticismscould be a dangerously misleading characterization of what researchers doand a gross misrepresentation of their contribution to our understanding ofthe interaction of alcohol and human behavior (1984, P: 181).

This statement was followed by a series of quite scathing remarks as Heathsought to counter some of Room's points. For instance, Heath claimed that

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"misunderstandings occur in virtually every paragraph," and that Room"seems to have as little understanding of the ethnographic enterprise as hedoes of epidemiology." Heath also wonders "to what extent Room is awarethat cultural differences extend beyond the languages that people speak. . . .[since he] seems oblivious of [an] important finding" from a major cross­national survey study administered by the World Health Organization inwhich he played a major role .

In the 5 years since Room's article reached print, a debate has continuedbetween Heath and Room over the possible biases in ethnographic reportsand other anthropological studies of alcohol use (Heath, 1985, 1986, 1987,1988a , 1988b, 1989; Room, 1984b, 1988). While Heath has labeled thisdiscussion "a supposed controversy" (1986, P: 116), and Room has soughtto play it down as a "side-issue" (1984b, p. 303), I think there are somefundamentally significant matters under dispute that have important impli­cations for the future of alcohol and culture studies. These matters concernthe epistemological basis of ethnography, and the reliability of ethnographicresearch methods. As such, they reflect a wider controversy that has swirledwithin anthropology over the past decade. After highlighting Heath's andRoom's debate, I shall draw upon some of my own ethnographic data toexplore these core issues in the anthropology of alcohol in more detail.

Heath has argued against the need for and effectiveness of alcohol controlpolicies, declaring that the anthropological record and other data from alcoholstudies indicate that most drinking by most people most of the time isnonproblematic. In one of his many pieces surveying the anthropologicalliterature on alcohol, Heath (1986) sets up an opposition between anthro­pologists (who focus on belief and behavior and give attention to normal aswell as deviant patterns of drinking) and "most others" (who tend to focuson alcoholism or habitual drinking associated with problems of one sort oranother). He claims that members of these two opposed camps subscribe todifferent models as guidelines for "lessening the deleterious effects of drinking:"the "sociocultural model" in the former case, and the "distribution-of-con­sumption model" in the latter instance.

According to Heath, anthropologists and others who have employed thesociocultural model "have in fact rarely made prescriptive (or proscriptive)recommendations with respect to the manipulation of drinking practices"(1986, p. 117). On the other hand, those who use the distribution-of-con­sumption model are said to believe in the universal applicability of Leder­mann's log-normal curve of per capita alcohol consumption which predictsthat as total consumption increases in a population so, too, does the averageconsumption. Uncritical acceptance of the Ledermann curve hypothesis, saysHeath, has led alcohol control advocates to seek ways for reducing overallconsumption in general populations "even though ... [Lederrnann's prop­osition] has been discredited by numerous well-documented exceptions" (1985,P: 28). From Heath's perspective advocates of the sociocultural model viewalcohol use in most human societies as nonproblematic and as not requiring"restrictive regulations." By contrast, "most other" alcohol researchers are

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portrayed as proponents of the distribution-of-consumption model who seealcohol associated with many different kinds of personal and social problems,and who seek ways to reduce overall consumption via controls in order todiminish these problems.

Heath recently has carried this theme further, arguing that "rather thanfocusing on the deleterious consequences suffered by a few excessive long­term users" anthropologists have dealt with drinking as an activity thatgenerally has "beneficial effects" (1987, P: 103). From this point of viewanthropologists focus on normal behavior-"on the majority, who drinkmoderately or with impunity"-while researchers in "other fields" concentrateon deviant or pathological behavior-"often among institutionalized individ­uals" (1987, p. 105). Having underscored what he sees as an oppositionbetween anthropologists and "all the rest," Heath returns to issues raised byRoom in Current Anthropology:

As an international spokesperson for increasing legislative control of alcoholuse, he [Room] appears unimpressed by frequent exceptions to the generalrule that problems occur in populations in direct proportion to average percapita consumption of alcohol ; he doubts that people can judge whetherdrinking causes them problems. . . . he deplored functional interpretationsas biased against the identification of problems. . . . In the same article. . .he warned against the opposite tendency, "problem amplification," which isencouraged by a loose coalition (including alcoholics, treatment and healthprofessionals, et al.) who benefit from making alcohol appear more harmfulthan it is. . . . An especially disconcerting aspect of the antialcohol coalitionis their readiness to ignore or distort data for their political ends (1987, P:113).

Later in the same article Heath grants that alcohol is "often implicated ina variety of physical, social and economic damage" in some populations, yethe expresses a mixture of surprise and dismay that "policymakers prefer toignore the clear benefits of moderate drinking and seem displeased that we[anthropologists] do not endorse their view of a worldwide pandemic ofalcohol-related problems" (1987, p. 114).

Heath has continued his disagreement with the advocates of social controlsover alcohol-related problems, making his position on the matter clear bythe title he chose for a recent article: "Alcohol control policies and drinkingpatterns: An international game of politics against science." In that paperHeath unleashed some very strong charges: (1) that authoritative professionalsoften misrepresent research findings about drinking patterns and their out­comes so as to favor alcohol controls as part of national or internationalpolicies (what he calls the "politicization of science"); (2) that advocates ofthe distribution of consumption model repeatedly offer it as if it were theobvious and logical conclusion, even in the face of contrary evidence ; (3) thatthe postulated link between quantity of consumption and alcohol problemshas become a near axiom in the minds of many, including those in international

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agencies such as the World Health Organization, despite contradictory evi­dence; (4) that equivocation and distortion of science for popular or politicalpurposes is common in alcohol studies (as it is in such fields as medicine andnutrition); and (5) that this purported ignoring and misusing of scientificfindings weakens the position of alcohol researchers, since the general publicmay wonder why anyone should pay attention to scientific methods and data.

Soon after his article appeared in Current Anthropology, Room expandedon some of his points in a piece that appeared in the Annual Review ofPublicHealth. There he noted that a "substantial revolution" has occurred in publichealth approaches to alcohol, primarily a "recognition that dealing withalcoholism is not by itself an adequate response to the public health andpublic order problems related to drinking" (1984b, p. 294). Room then wenton to offer a useful review of "three competing traditions" representing"diametrically opposed positions on the relation of alcohol controls and alcoholproblems: that alcohol controls had no effect; that they had perverse effects;and that they had positive effects" (1984b, pp. 301-302).

The first of these, which posited that alcohol controls had no effect, wasshown to be "empirically wrong" by the early 1970s, leaving two remaining"competing traditions." These are the same two noted by Heath, namely,the sociocultural or integrationist position and the distribution-of-consumptiontheory, known also as the single-distribution theory, "the constant proportiontheory, and, more polemically, the "neo-Prohibitionist" position .. ." (Room,1984b, p. 303).

In a succinct but thorough summary of the weaknesses of and supportsfor the distribution-of-consumption theory, Room notes the problems withLedermann's proposition. He observes that as a result of "successive wavesof statisticians" riding into the fray during the 1970s, substantial consensushas been reached (a) that Ledermann's data bases and statistical reasoningwere inadequate, and (b) that there was no theoretical reason why the meanand the proportion of heavy drinkers had to covary in a log-normal distribution(even though this does appear to be an empirical regularity (1984b).1

Room believes the argument over the distribution of alcohol consumptionin general populations to have been "a large red herring" that has divertedattention away from the central policy question at stake: "whether changesin alcohol controls can affect the rates of alcohol problems-and in whichdirection" (1984b, P: 304). Confounding this argument, says Room,

... and lending heat to their tone . • . have been strong .concerns withanother level [other than the empirical onej-s-concerns about the relativejustice and ethics of alcohol controls and other prevention strategies. Thepolitical arguments against alcohol controls tend to emphasize the burden ofcost or inconvenience that such controls place on unproblematic drinkers,and to assert a priori that control would have no effect on alcoholics any-

I Specifically. Room noted that "the arguments have not shaken the central empirical findingthat. in the absence of rationing or other individual-level controls. the distribution of consumptionamong drinkers is unimodal, positively skewed. and roughly lognormal" (1984b, pp. 303-304).

Ethnographic Studies of Alcohol

way.... The argument is usually pitched in terms of the interests andbehavior of the individual drinker, rather than in terms of collective interests... (1984b, p. 304).

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Noting "that there has been a heavy ideological overlay on much of theliterature about alcohol controls," Room examines some of the many empiricalstudies on the effects of alcohol controls that have appeared in recent years(1984b, p. 306). Dividing these studies into two major types-time seriesanalyses and "before-after" investigations-Room reviews the available evi­dence which he concludes "is thus by now compelling that alcohol controlscan affect the rates of alcohol-related problems, and that they often particularlyaffect the consumption patterns of high-risk drinkers" (1984b, P: 310).

A CRITIQUE OF THE DEBATE

There are numerous weaknesses in Room's Current Anthropology article,many of which were indicated by those whose commentaries accompanied it.To begin with, while functionalism once was the dominant paradigm inanthropology, it has not held that position for at least the past quartercentury. It is thus inappropriate to suggest that modern anthropological studiesof alcohol deflate alcohol-related problems because of a disciplinary func­tionalist bias. At the same time, it must be granted that a great deal of thepre-1960 literature that comprises "the ethnographic record" on drinkingpractices in different societies and populations (e.g., that contained in theHuman Relations Area Files) was published during the heyday of functionalismand is oriented to ways in which different practices contribute positively tothe maintenance of the whole in homeostatic equilibrium. As anthropologistshave specialized in alcohol studies over at least the past 20 years, many havewritten about the negative problems associated with alcohol use (e.g., Colson& Scudder, 1988; Marshall & Marshall, 1990; Shkilnyk, 1985; Spradley, 1970).Room notes this trend and warns of a possible future risk of "problemamplification" in anthropological studies (1984a, p. 178).

Historically, most anthropologists headed off to the backwaters of theplanet to conduct fieldwork among tribal populations or in out-of-the-waypeasant villages. But as the world has been increasingly drawn together bythe dramatic changes in transportation and communication technologies wehave witnessed during this century, and as urban migration has become aglobal phenomenon, so has the focus of anthropological concern shiftedapace. Urban anthropology is today a recognized subspecialty within thediscipline, and well over half of contemporary anthropological research occursin settings other than tribes or peasant villages. This shift in the locus ofanthropological fieldwork, which notably has included an explosion of an­thropological research in modern industrial societies such as the U.S., hasrequired anthropologists to expand their methodological repertoire (not tomention their theoretical stances). In these new fieldwork settings anthro­pologists no longer study "whole societies" as if they were independent, self-

360 M. Marshall

contained entities. Moreover, we no longer focus only on "the study of theeveryday," now giving attention as well to events and behaviors that are notso commonplace. Thus, Room's suggestion that ethnographic field methodsmay predispose anthropologists to observe and record only the pleasures ofdrinking and to miss or ignore the problem side of this pastime is notsupported when we look at the nature of the discipline today. The involvementof anthropologists in multidisciplinary research projects, and the acquisitionby many anthropologists of formal training in cognate fields underscores thispoint.

Room's claim that most anthropologists who have studied alcohol aremembers of a "wet generation" also is difficult to sustain. While that ap­pellation might apply to many of those who contributed to the ethnographicliterature on drinking before 1970, the great majority of us working in thefield today were born during or after World War II, and as Bennett (1984)has pointed out, the temperance movement and Prohibition have had littledirect effect on our attitudes toward alcohol per se. Perhaps we might becharacterized more appropriately as members of a "damp generation."

Finally, it is a caricature to suggest that anthropologists have failed tograsp "the potential culture-boundedness of alcoholism concepts," and thatwe have ignored or depreciated alcohol-related problems that do not fit thedisease model. Again, it may be granted that some of those who producedethnographic articles about drinking ancillary to other research interests, andwho were largely unfamiliar with the alcohol studies literature, might havebeen guilty of this. But most specialists in alcohol and culture-who havebeen around now for close to 20 years-certainly have not been so naive.

Given these problems with Room's characterization of anthropology, andits purported tendency to "problem deflation," there 'are also difficulties inHeath's effort at refutation. Heath puts great stock in "facts," the more soif these can be labeled "scientific facts," and he worries over why publicpolicy surrounding alcohol controls so often fails to take account of thegreatest. anthropological fact concerning this matter: that most drinkers inmost societies in which alcoholic beverages are used do not apparently sufferfrom alcohol-related problems most of the time. But as one who has beeninvolved in policy-oriented studies himself, Heath is well aware that symbolic,moral, and political considerations nearly always outweigh "data" in the policy­making process. Under such circumstances, "facts are an irrelevance, andthose who insist on discussions of rational considerations are if anything anannoyance [to policy-makers]" (Room 1978, p. 270). Heath might better haveemphasized that one of anthropology's strengths is precisely that its practi­tioners routinely investigate symbolic, moral, and political considerations aspart of ethnographic studies.

A second difficulty is Heath's assumption that by studying normal drinkingbehavior anthropologists are at once distinguished from those in other dis­ciplines whose focus is on deviant or pathological behavior. Words such as"normal" and "pathological" always depend upon a frame of reference, and,presumably, Heath intends that the anthropological focus on normal drinking

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be understood to involve an emic, societally specific and culturally relativiststance. While such a stance may be useful for investigating many sorts ofquestions, drinking behaviors that may be considered normal in a particularsociety simultaneously may be viewed as problematic from another perspec­tive.! Related to this, some anthropologists today have set out explicitly tostudy problem drinking or drinking problems (see, e.g., Ames & Janes, 1987;Bennett, Wolin, Reiss, & Teitelbaum, 1987; Klee & Ames, 1987; Stall, 1989),with a result that the division Heath attempts to establish between "anthro­pology" and "the rest" is blurred considerably. Finally, the basic tenet ofthe distribution-of-consumption model that the distribution is unimodal (sug­gesting that alcoholic drinking lies at one end of the continuum of normaldrinking and that it is not distinguished by a distinctive pattern [Room, 1978,p. 278]), further confounds Heath's effort to set up an opposition betweenstudies of normal and deviant drinking.

There are some other weaknesses in Heath's position. For example, heavers that Room "appears unimpressed by frequent exceptions to the generalrule that problems occur in populations in direct proportion to average per­capita consumption of alcohol" (1987, p. 113). One immediately wants toknow how frequent these "frequent exceptions" are, but leaving that aside,why should Room be impressed by exceptions to a general rule if the generalrule remains just that? Anthropologists have an unfortunate tendency toassume that once an exception to any rule or generalization has been foundwe have somehow undermined or even "disproved" its validity. Heath also"tars" procontrol advocates by associating them with "those who make alcoholappear more harmful than it is," and by then labeling the whole lot as "theanti-alcohol coalition" (1987, p. 113). It must be emphasized that to beprocontrol is not necessarily to be anti-alcohol; to advocate temperance isnot to seek prohibition. Finally, Heath's (1988a) accusations of the misre­presentation of research findings, the equivocation or distortion of data, andthe ignoring of and misuse of scientific findings for political ends by thosewho favor alcohol controls are very serious charges indeed. If he has theevidence to back these up, then he needs to lay it before us in an unequivocalmanner.

A VIEW FROM TRUK

When I wrote Weekend Warriors during the summer of 1977 I had beeninvolved in the anthropology of alcohol for approximately 4 years. That bookwas based upon my first field study of drinking in 1976, although I hadrecorded some incidents surrounding alcohol use on Namoluk Atoll duringmy doctoral research there between 1969 and 1971. In addition, I haddevoted considerable time between 1973 and 1976 to historical and archival

2 This was Rodin's (1984, p. 185) point regarding my original study of Trukese drinking(Marshall, 1979), and this provides part of the basis for my reexamination of whether or notTrukese drinking is problematic.

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research on the introduction of alcohol to Micronesia. While I had organizedand offered a course on "Alcohol and Culture" before I wrote WeekendWarriors, I had a limited grasp of the alcohol literature. At that time I didnot consider myself an "alcohol researcher" or a specialist in alcohol anddrug studies in anthropology. This is pertinent to the stance I adopted towardTrukese drinking and drunkenness in Weekend Warriors.

My argument for why Trukese young men so often participated in fightswhen drunk was essentially a functionalist one: Drunkenness and its associatedfighting were viewed as a modern-day substitute for traditional warfare. Whilethe argument was embellished with historical, symbolic, case study and "cross­cultural" data, and was held up against several major theories from thealcohol studies literature, Room's (1984a) observation about a functionalistbias in ethnographic studies of drinking haunts me. In seeking to comprehendwhy Trukese tolerated the rowdy drinking and reckless violence of theiryoung men I did look for ways to explain how this behavior contributedpositively to the maintenance of Trukese society and culture. I justified thisexplanation (to myself, at least) on grounds that it was an emic account inthe spirit of Geertzian "thick description," and that it paid homage at theold anthropological shrine of cultural relativism.

My tendency to see alcohol use in Truk in 1976 as generally nonproblematicand to describe drunken brawling by young men as "normal" flew in theface of the conventional wisdom that surrounded Trukese drinking. Lawenforcement officials, health care personnel, missionaries, social workers, andassorted others who passed through the islands all reported alcohol abuse tobe a major-even frightening-problem in Truk , One of my goals in WeekendWarriors was to delve more deeply into Trukese alcohol use, and when I haddone so I felt the need to correct the prevailing stereotype outsiders heldof "the fearsome Trukese drunk." I felt that the stereotype rested onmisinformation about what was actually occurring in Trukese drinking boutsfrom the Trukese point of view. I wanted to debunk what I perceived as anoveremphasis on the problems associated with alcohol use in Truk. With thisin mind I ended my Preface with a classic anthropological "value-neutral"stand:

In writing this book one of my primary goals has been to provide anexplanation of Trukese drinking and drunkenness that may assist the Trukesein evaluating the nature of the alcohol problem in their islands. Should theyconclude that a problem in fact exists, then I hope this book will contributein some smalI way toward finding a solution (MarshalI, 1979, p. x).

Only in the Postscript to the book (1979, pp. 133-136) did I again seriouslyaddress the question of whether drinking was a problem in paradise.

I set up a dichotomy in the Preface between alcohol abuse ("socially disruptivebehaviors associated with the consumption of beverage alcohol") and alcoholism("physiological or psychological dependency on ethanol which mayor maynot be accompanied by socially disruptive behaviors"), and by these definitions

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I felt I could assert that very few Trukese drinkers were alcoholics, althoughTruk was bedeviled by a great deal of alcohol abuse. In the Postscript toWeekend Warriors I returned to this issue and concluded that:

By now the implications of my study for alcohol treatment programs in Trukshould be obvious. Few if any young men in Greater T'rukese Society drinkin an addictive manner that could be labeled alcoholism. Although some adultsin Truk are clearly addicted to ethanol, they do not come from the ranksof unemployed youth; rather they are to be found among the employed adultmen. The ostentatious, obnoxious drunken comportment of Trukese youngmen is today inextricably interwoven with basic Trukese beliefs about strength,courage, and manhood. No amount of preaching about the evils of drinkwill be sufficient to wean young men from the gin bottle. We can state withtotal confidence that uninformed and misguided attempts to develop alcoholtreatment programs for Trukese young men presumed to be suffering eitherfrom severe alcohol abuse or from addictive alcoholism will prove to beunmitigated failures (1979, p. 136).

I now think that I underplayed the extent of alcohol-related problems inTruk because I did not find evidence for much "alcoholism" of the sortdiscussed under the rubric of the disease model of alcoholism. In this senseI am guilty of Room's charge that the disease concept served for someethnographers "as a vehicle and rhetoric for ignoring or depreciating alcohol­related problems" that did not fit the concept. While it was certainly notthe case that alcohol-related problems other than alcoholism simply disap­peared from view in Weekend Warriors, the violence and disruption thatsurrounded drunkenness was presented as a normal part of everyday life andthe process of male maturation in Truk, Alcohol abuse was presented asmostly nonproblematic.

By 1979 I felt I had exhausted my research interest in alcohol in Truk,and I began to look around for other topics to pursue. I still did not countmyself an "alcohologist." But 1979 proved a turning point for several reasons .First, that summer I was invited to direct a 2-year nationwide policy-orientedstudy of alcohol !,Jse and abuse in Papua New Guinea, to begin on December31st. Second, the Alcohol & Drug Study Group was founded that autumnat the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, and Idiscovered numerous other anthropologists who shared my nascent interests.Third, I began to read more widely in the alcohol studies literature.

When I returned to the U.S. from Papua New Guinea early in 1982, myattitudes toward the anthropology of alcohol had changed in some funda­mental ways. 1 now saw it as a viable specialty within the discipline, andidentified myself as one with this specialization. I saw the anthropology ofalcohol as an exciting cross-disciplinary research area with intellectual puzzlesto be worked out and with serious practical issues to be addressed. I recognizedthat the quality of ethnographic data on alcohol use was uneven at best, andsometimes very poor. I realized that the anthropology of alcohol was an areaof likely future growth, and I made it the focus of my career.

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This transformation in how I saw myself in relation to alcohol studies wasaccompanied by a growing sophistication in (or at least appreciation of) thecross-disciplinary literature. The more I read, the more conferences I at­tended, and the more I thought and taught about alcohol and culture, theless satisfied I was with anthropology's traditional stance on the subject. Likeothers of the "damp generation," I drew more heavily on a diverse meth­odology (retaining and refining ethnography, while amplifying and comple­menting it by other techniques for data collection; see, e.g., Marshall, inpress). Like others of the "damp generation," I also felt it important, wheneverpossible, to bring an anthropological perspective to bear on alcohol-relatedproblems. My own movement to this point of view' was triggered by thepragmatic demands of the applied research I was hired to do in Papua NewGuinea.

This brings me full circle back to Truk, where things were also changing.A few months after the manuscript of Weekend Warriors was completed, apolitical referendum was held on Moen Island, Truk, concerning whether ornot the legal sale and consumption of alcoholic beverages should be allowedto continue. As a result of the overwhelmingly positive vote on this referenduma new prohibition law took effect in Truk in January 1978. I dismissed thisaction at the time as something that would be short-term and which wasunlikely to seriously affect Trukese drinking patterns. I was dead wrong onboth counts.

By 1984, continued correspondence with friends in Truk concerning theprohibition law had convinced me of the desirability of a "before-and-after"study to investigate the impact of this locally instigated effort at alcoholcontrol. I was especially intrigued because I had learned by then that impetusfor the referendum had come from organized groups of Trukese women,who do not consume alcohol and who emphatically viewed men's drinkingas a problem. I also learned that Trukese women had actively and raucouslydemonstrated on three different occasions when male political leaders at­tempted to repeal prohibition. I obtained a research grant and returned toTruk during summer 1985 to investigate this situation which has beendescribed in detail elsewhere (Marshall & Marshall, 1990). This restudycontributed further to my change in attitude toward the anthropology ofalcohol.

In part this was a consequence of hearing other voices-in this case, thevoices of women. Even if the argument could be sustained that drinking waslargely nonproblematic for Trukese men (and I no longer contend that), itquickly became very clear in 1985 that men's drinking was problematic forwomen, and often for children as well. It became necessary to rethink Trukesealcohol use from a feminist perspective. To have failed to do so would havebeen to offer a skewed view of Trukese society in which the opinions andattitudes of half the population went unrepresented.

Whereas in Weekend Warriors alcohol use in Truk is presented as essentiallynonproblematic, in Silent Voices Speak the position is taken that excessivedrinking has led to many kinds of problems in Truk-social, economic, and

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political, as well as physical (although I do not have the clinical data to provethis last contention). This change in my perspective resulted both from changesin me (discussed above) and changes in Trukese society. As others haveobserved, a recurrent problem for ethnographic fieldworkers is "The refusalof communities to remain motionless before and after their portraits aresketched . . ." (Van Maanen, 1988, P: 39).

These changes do not suggest that we completely discount reports in theethnographic record. But they mean we should recognize that such reportsdo not consist of immutable social "facts" forever true, but rather, of particularinterpretations made at specific historical moments in the changing, open­ended systems that we study.

CONCLUSIONS

It has become a truism that anthropological data can be interpreted inmultiple ways and scripted from various points of view (e.g., Van Maanen,1988). Using the "confessional tale" genre (Van Maanen, 1988), I have triedto lay bare some of the reasons why my own thinking has shifted fromviewing alcohol's impact on Trukese society as nonproblematic to seeing itas implicated in a variety of social problems. Such a rethinking is not unique.

Colson & Scudder (1988) comment that had they written about GwembeTonga drinking based on their 1956-1957 research, they would probablyhave portrayed it as "nonproblematic and contributing to overall socialintegration" (1988, pp. 18-19). Given their continued fieldwork in Zambia,however, and the major social changes that occurred there between the mid­1950s and 1982, they came to "see drinking as frequently destructive" (1988,p. 19). The apparent reality of Gwembe drinking, the researchers' interpre­tation of that reality, and the testimony of Gwembe persons themselvesconcerning alcohol's impact in their society all changed profoundly in thespan of three decades.

Beckett (1984, p. 179) also noted that his approach to Aboriginal drinkingin Australia moved from a "nonchalant" stance in which he "ignored ar­guments from addiction, dismissed the few acute alcoholics as aberrant, andtook no account of the long-term physical consequences of heavy drinking,"to a position in which "my attitude to their drinking is no longer so non­chalant." Likewise, Honigmann (1980) provided a revealing discussion of theways his attitudes toward drinking in the Northern Canadian communitiesin which he worked altered over time. He emphasized how the same bodyof data might be interpreted from different perspectives to yield quite differentethnographic portraits, and he urged anthropologists to be cognizant of "thesignificance of such freedom in interpretation for understanding ethnographicreports" (1980, p. 268).

This is, of course, by now familiar to anyone who has kept abreast ofdevelopments in anthropology over the past 15 years as interpretive, socialconstructionist, and reflexive perspectives have taken center stage. We nowrecognize that "ethnographic facts" must be viewed as interpretations based

366 M. Marshall

upon the predilections, trammg and experiences of the ethnographer at aparticular moment in time. To pretend otherwise is to misrepresent our dataand to pervert the meaning of science as it applies to the social and culturalanthropological enterprise. Keeping this in mind, we may do well to reevaluatethe ethnographic record on alcohol use, paying particular attention to suchthings as whether the writer took a functionalist position, stressed culturalrelativism, was familiar with the alcohol studies literature, and so forth. Sucha reevaluation would permit us to place ethnographic contributions to alcoholstudies within their historical and institutional contexts, and to assess their"authority" as part of the scientific record of human life (Sangren, 1988).

By alerting us not only to potential biases in contemporary research, butalso to likely biases in the ethnographic data bank of which we are so proud,Room has thus performed a signal service to the anthropology of alcohol.At the same time that we approach the ethnographic record with new caution,however, we must be careful not to become so wary that we cease to placeany faith in the veracity and utility of this information, which is one ofHeath's points. Whatever its shortcomings, the ethnographic record remainsanthropology's major contribution to alcohol studies. It provides an essentialcomponent of and a necessary check on our efforts to understand the humanencounter with beverage alcohol.

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Bennett. L.A. (1984) . CA comment on Alcohol and ethnography: A case of problem deflation?[by Robin Room]. Current Anthropology, 25. 179-180.

Bennett, L.A., Wolin, SJ.• Reiss, D., & Teitelbaum, M.A. (1987). Couples at risk for transmissionof alcoholism: Protective influences. Family Proms, 26, 111-129.

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