Multicultural contexts and alcohol and drug use as symbolic behaviour

Abstract

Diverse forms of cultural contact, from living together in the same society to tourism, are considered in terms of what they mean for substance use. In a multicultural society, ethnicities are partly assigned and partly constructed, and can also be a performance in front of an audience of others. Alcohol or drug use or nonuse often becomes an ethnic marker, which helps to sustain differentiations in patterns. Drinking and drug use patterns in immigrant communities are thus not simply a matter of acculturation to some “mainstream”. Cultural diffusion may flow in both directions. In the modern world, mass tourism has also become a vehicle for cultural contact and transmission of drinking and drug use, although tourists’ behaviour is often different from their behaviour back home. Studies of psychoactive substance use in multicultural contexts need to take account both of the symbolism of the use, particularly in the context of the performance of ethnicity, and of the influence of power and status relations on the ethnic performance and its reception.