Cross-cultural studies of alcohol use

A major contribution of anthropology to alcohol studies is the description and analysis of the range of variation in drinking and its outcomes among diverse populations. Various kinds of cross-cultural comparisons are helpful for understanding the relationships among variables and for testing hypotheses about how alcohol use relates to other aspects of culture. Transcultural studies, small-scale comparisons of a few cultures, are reviewed. Also summarized are those hologeistic studies--in which associations between specific traits are statistically evaluated for a large worldwide sample of cultures--that have yielded theoretically significant models emphasizing anxiety, social structure, dependency, and power as basic motivations for drinking or drunkenness or both.