Symbolic mediation and commoditization: a critical examination of alcohol use among the Haya of Bukoba, Tanzania.
Low-alcohol-content fermented beverages are thoroughly enmeshed in the social, economic, commensal, and cosmological spheres of life among most peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. This paper describes and analyzes the role of alcoholic beverages as symbolic mediators and commodities among the Haya of northwest Tanzania. Data gathered during field research in 1985-86 are employed to describe the ways in which the Haya portray excessive drinking and the indigenous strategies they use to address frequent drunkenness when it is perceived as a health problem. A central feature of the paper contrasts the role of a cultural schema of four levels of intoxication in processes of symbolic mediation and commoditization, thereby contributing to critical medical anthropological analysis.
Carlson
R G
RG
Dayton-Columbus AIDS Prevention Research Project, School of Medicine, Wright State University, OH 45435.
D000428:Alcohol Drinking / Q000208:ethnology / Q000523:psychology* / Q000639:trends; D000435:Alcoholic Intoxication; D000884:Anthropology, Cultural; D001515:Beer / Q000191:economics*; D005260:Female; D005638:Fruit; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008519:Medicine, Traditional; D013636:Tanzania