Breaking the Ashes: The Culture of Illicit Liquor in Sri Lanka

2. Without One’s Right Mind: Agency, Intoxication, and Addiction

2 Without One’s Right Mind: Agency, Intoxication, and Addiction “Alcohol causes a distortion or metamorphosis. The drinker changes into a different person,” Indrani commented. As this dynamic mother of five who had spent over a decade working in the Middle East suggests, observers often feel that ingesting alcohol alters people’s physical responses, cognition, and affective state. Intoxicated people all over the world display similar observable behavioral changes. Despite—and because of—these biological commonalities , drinkers act in socially shaped ways and their behaviors take on culturally specific meanings. In this chapter I examine issues of personhood, agency, and self-control that underlie the discourse on altered states of consciousness in Naeaegama. A number of questions arise when discussing alcohol-induced transformations . One question concerns what sorts of behaviors alcohol affects. Most scientists and laypeople agree that consuming sufficient quantities of alcohol can impair motor control. Drinking can cause visible and audible changes in people’s physical behavior—staggering and slurred speech, for example. More controversially, many people see alcohol as an ego-altering substance. Describing Alaskan bar patrons, novelist Dana Stabenow evocatively suggests, “They were all drinking their misery away, and their good sense with it” (2002, 29). This leads to a second question: whether alcohol ’s perceived mental effects are learned or biologically caused. Research indicates that alcohol consumption can lead to“heightened affectivity”and emotional fluctuations (Pernanen 1991, 208). But some scholars suggest that in social drinking contexts, the mood may come more from the setting and one’s expectations of enjoyment than from a chemical effect (Fekjaer 1993). Arguing against a purely associational influence on mental states, Without One’s Right Mind 47 Pernanen (1991, 212) points out that beverages such as tea, coffee, and milk never acquire the same reputation as alcohol does. Whatever the operating mechanism, alcohol clearly influences behaviors. As MacAndrew and Edgerton assert,“Alcohol is not simply an inert placebo”(2003, 169). Herein lies its power to signify. In the late 1960s, bucking a determinist mainstream, MacAndrew and Edgerton (2003 [1969]) made a strong and influential argument for the importance of learning in alcohol-related behavior. They state that alcohol provides a cheap, usually legal, fast-acting, controllable, relatively undamaging , and transient alteration in motor control. By drinking, individuals can induce physical impairments that show they have entered an altered state of consciousness. These easily recognizable signs cue bystanders that a person is intoxicated. Given this straightforward system of signals, MacAndrew and Edgerton suggest,“It remains for societies but to ‘declare’ that [alcohol’s] ingestion produces an involuntary and thus an uncontrollable moral incompetence as well” (2003, 171). Cross-culturally, communities recognize special arenas of sociability for the inebriated. In these“time-out” settings, behavioral norms and accountability may be set aside—briefly and within publicly recognized limits (MacAndrew and Edgerton 2003, 168). Since behavioral patterns vary cross-culturally, MacAndrew and Edgerton argue that drinkers learn—and usually follow—social rules governing drunken comportment. Incorporating new cultural and medical data, scholars continue to ask how much of drunken behavior can be attributed to the physical effects of alcohol, and how much is learned social behavior dependent on conditioning and context. Simply answered, both the substance and the situation play crucial roles in shaping the actions of drinkers and their interlocutors. Different circumstances show different degrees of chemical and cultural influence. For example, passing out from excess alcohol consumption is almost entirely biological. At the other extreme, rituals of swirling, sniffing, sipping, or gulping liquor depend largely on cultural norms. In the ambiguous middle ground, aggressive or tearful behavior may reflect both learned expectations and alcohol’s physiological mood-altering power. Therefore understanding intoxicated actions requires a theoretical framework that recognizes the role of culturally guided behavior while simultaneously accounting for biology’s part in altering mental states. A third and related question around alcohol-induced transformations concerns the effect of altered states of consciousness on an individual’s identity. Understanding a drinker who is not quite“himself”requires a theory that encompasses mind, body, and society. Gregory Bateson (1972, 315) 48 Breaking the Ashes suggests that starting from the occidental concept of self based in Cartesian dualism can cause problems for both drinkers and scientists. Cartesian dualism , which posits a sharp distinction between mind and matter, brain and body, self and environment, creates a lack of understanding of how the...