Realising that “drinking alcohol is one of the most socially meaningful and richly symbolic activities in [British] culture”, Vaughan of Mind Hacks offers a short introduction to what could be an interesting topic; the cultural ‘benefits’ of binge drinking.
There’s more to alcohol than getting pissed but you’d never know it from the papers. In a period of public hand wringing over ‘binge drinking culture’, our understanding of the ‘culture bit’ usually merits no more than an admission that people do it in groups and this is often implicit in the work of psychologists.
[…] In the UK at least, the social meaning of booze is often hidden behind the ordinariness of day-to-day consumption.