This thesis describes the place of alcohol in the lives of people from Rarotonga, Cook Islands. It incorporates historical and ethnographic analyses to provide the broad context of drinking by people aged from their teens to late thirties. / The historical component of this study describes specific accounts of alcohol consumption, and situates these with regard to changes that occurred in Rarotonga from the early 19th century. Prior to contact with Papa’a (Europeans), people of Rarotonga neither produced nor consumed alcoholic beverages. Thus, the use of alcohol was a phenomenon intimately bound up with global exploration, proselytisation and trade. I trace historical changes in the distribution of power, resources, religious practice, and social discourse, and show how alcohol practice, distribution, and trade was linked to these changes from missionary contact onward. / This history informs the ethnography of contemporary drinking practices. Individual and group practices and understandings of alcohol are described. I also describe the contribution of state policy, commercial interests, government institutions, and religious organisations to the place of alcohol in Rarotonga. Alcohol is a transformative substance that changes the comportment of drinkers. But its effect is ambiguous, and recognised as such. ‘Drunken’ behaviours are often explained as originating in concerns and desires that pertain in sobriety. Thus, the status of alcohol consumption as an explanation for specific behaviours is equivocal, and contested. / Drinking is a means by which relationships between friends, kin and strangers are initiated and/or maintained. The particular significance of alcohol to the maintenance of (drinking) relationships is not only due to social constructions of meanings and practices associated with drinking; pharmacological effects of alcohol increase the social salience of drinking. Drinking both alters bodies and alters relationships between drinkers. In this sense, it embodies social meanings and understandings of drinking practice. / Finally, I suggest that in Rarotonga, the association of drinking with emotional experience and behaviour is also, in part, attributable to the ‘embodied’ experience of alcohol. The form of emotional experience, and the form of embodied experience of alcohol, are similar. These are associated with one another through analogy (and so by the social construction of each) by embodied experience.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/245787 |
| Creators | Koops, Vaughn |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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