The Male Suburban Pub-goer and the Meaning Structure of Drinking

Abstract

This article is based on the data of the Suburban Pub Research Project, collected through participant observation, interviews and tape-recorded group discussions. Suburban pubs were regarded as an appropriate focus of study, because many developments in the post-war history of Finland are crystallized in the emergence of suburbs and changes in drinking practices. The most important factor in these developments has been the profound change in the structure of production, 'The Great Migration' from the countryside to the cities. This, in turn, brought about great changes in the living conditions and a period of flux in the Finnish culture. This study focusses on one particular working-class pub. We shall investigate the role the local pub plays in the suburb-dweller's way of life. What we are concerned with are the meanings of drinking. The meanings of the use of alcohol are so important that people in different cultures of alcohol consumption - a concept unknown outside Finland - even become intoxicated in different ways. Might we then deny the physiological effects brought about by alcohol or push them aside as an inessential object of study? The answer is something of a paradox. Alcohol does generate effects within the human metabolism, but it does not convey meanings to the human consciousness. Not even hallucinogenic drugs can - in my opinion - do anything but disturb the functioning of the central nervous system. The contents of hallucinations depend on the total experience of one's life. Here we have the distinction between natural and social sciences. Opposed to the concept of effect, meaning is a product of the human mind. It is the ideal label that human praxis presses on natural substance. Analytically, we can distinguish two aspects of the concept of meaning. Firstly: the form of the alcoholic effect on human metabolism, when transformed into contents of consciousness, depends on the distinctions that human praxis has made on the continuum of sensory experience. Secondly: we cannot have an adequate understanding of drinking if considered as mere ingestion of alcohol, regardless of the position and meaning drinking has in the practices of everyday life. To use the concepts of linguistics: the experience of intoxication is a signifier, on to which that which is signified, the meaning structure of drinking, is attached in the human mind. Naturally the two aspects, the experience of intoxication and the cultural meanings of drinking, are in a reciprocal relationship with each other.