Towards new knowledge complexes for critical geographies of alcohol,drinking,drunkenness

Abstract

This response engages with the commentaries of Gordon Waitt, Anna De Jong, Samantha Wilkinson, Elen-Maarja Trell, Bettina van Hoven, and Harng Luh Sin on our challenge for geographers to work ‘beyond moralizing, disciplining, and normalizing discourses’. We show how, when read together, these authors articulate progressive geographic imaginations and repeat orthodoxies and impasses that constitute problematic academic, political, policy, and popular thinking. In riposte, we sketch opportunities for pluralist, relational, congenic ontologies, and comparative ‘epissedemologies’, as new indicative examples to elaborate, and further advance, our original provocation towards re-thinking geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness.

In this response, we engage with the commentaries in this forum to show how, when read together, they articulate progressive geographic imaginations and repeat problematic orthodoxies and impasses that constitute academic, political, policy, and popular thinking. In riposte, we sketch opportunities offered by pluralist, relational, congenic ontologies, and comparative ‘epissedemologies’, as new indicative examples to elaborate, and further advance, our original provocation.

In brief, the content of the warmly welcomed, and keenly read, commentaries are as follows. Waitt and De Jong (2024) introduce new theoretical resources via Deleuze and Guattari's concept of territory to explore how ‘unfolding moments of socio-material relationships shape the affective capacity of bodies to act and sense’, and intensities of (non)human relations, meaning, and experiences as territorial expressions in everyday life. Similarly breaking new ground is Wilkinson (2024) who explores psychologist Daniel Stern's ‘vital flows’ – movement, time, force, space, intention, and directionality – as acknowledgment of multiple registers and agencies of (non)human actors. Going further, Wilkinson points to the value of participatory research, and specifically ‘novel methods’ (e.g. craft-making practices, group-narrative interviews, storytelling), which offer insights into relational geographies, beyond researchers’ situated knowledges. Also discussing methodology, Trell and Van Hoven (2024) weigh up strengths and weaknesses of participatory video, whilst Sin (2024) signals the importance of decolonised understandings of politics, policy, and everyday practices.

Critical insights enabled by new theoretical and empirical approaches; benefits of innovative methodologies; and attention to (dis)connections between politics, policy, and everyday life mirror fertile thinking over the past few decades. However, while our initial article celebrated richness and diversity of theoretical, empirical, and methodological resources utilised by geographers, we nonetheless signposted unquestioning acceptance, rather than critical interrogation, of limiting academic ontologies and epistemologies as well as political and socio-cultural narratives. Unfortunately, such knowledge complexes dominate the commentaries despite new theories and/or methodologies being applied to previous studies. The limitation of such reverse engineering highlights how research design, and resultant datasets, are infused by stubborn mindsets, orthodoxies, and impasses evident in researchers’ and respondents’ unreflexive (re)production of moralizing, disciplining, and moralising discourses.

Firstly, Waitt and De Jong (2024) and Wilkinson (2024) rightly celebrate vibrant thinking to advance the study of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. However, just as with similar previous injections of theory – including amongst others, Lawhon's political ecology-inspired account of flows, friction, and socio-material metabolisation, and Brickell's reflections on causality and violence – there are ‘significant limitations in how critical theory has been applied to studying alcohol, drinking, drunkenness … [because] despite the theoretical … [and empirical] novelty, research remains dominated by a priori assumptions, rather than sustained and convincing critical reflection or empirical examination’ (Jayne and Valentine, 2024). To explain this point further, it is worth noting the outcomes of Waitt and De Jong's (2024) reuse of empirical evidence of embodied geographies to foreground understanding of social spaces and relational, emerging, and fluid subjectivities, which highlights how certain social relations persist over time while others change across times/spaces. Whilst there is no doubt that this critical thinking offers significant opportunities for ongoing research, the ethnographic vignettes that Waitt and De Jong (2024) revisit are nonetheless limited to social-cultural and personal narratives of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness, used as a lens for respondents to elaborate reflections/experiences of gender inequalities, friendship, intimacy, leisure activities, (im)mobilities, etc. In sum, the original research did not generate data needed to fulfil Waitt and De Jong's (2024) subsequent goal to de-determine how alcohol, drinking, drunkenness contribute to everyday territorializations, because there was no exploration of ‘where the beginning and ending of an entity's qualities can be identified as well as their location within a particular set of relations … differences between entities can be accounted for without reducing these differences to the product of a particular set of relations, or by returning to essentialist or binary modes of thought’ (Ash, 2020: 246). In a similar vein, methodological innovation suggested by Wilkinson (2024) and Trell and Van Hoven (2024), if applied in a focused way, clearly can enable exciting new avenues to advance the study of perfomativities and experiences of ‘drunken comportment’ (McAndrew and Edgerton, 1969), alongside emotional, embodied, and affective registers of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness (Jayne et al., 2010). However, the application of new methodologies needs to be premised on focused and critical interrogation of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. More thinking is also needed to explore how health and medical science methodologies can be applied beyond binaries of epidemiology and social constructivism (see Jayne et al., 2011).

Secondly, it is not unfair to assert that all commentators fail to address our concern that ‘there is still relatively little focused attention paid to alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. Studies, at best, offer un-substantiated or -evidenced connections between alcohol and topics at hand; and at worst, alcohol, drinking, drunkenness are depicted in peripheral or unspecific ways’ (Jayne and Valentine, 2024). Instead, alcohol, drinking, drunkenness tends to be used as an empirical lens to explore a ‘bigger’ topic, which in the case of the commentaries includes gender, embodiment, rurality, young people, and socio-economic marginalisation. While there is nothing wrong with this strategy per se, it does mean that alcohol, drinking, drunkenness are theoretically, empirically, and methodologically of secondary concern. Moreover, a clear difference in depth of engagement with alcohol, drinking, drunkenness is also evident in the critical complexity across the commentaries. For example, whilst our original research article questioned Sin's, and others, unreflexive assumptions about ethics of studying alcohol, drinking, drunkenness, there is no doubt that Sin's (2024) call to decolonise understanding politics, policy, and everyday practices is vital and timely. That said, it is troubling that Sin (2024) goes on to offer ‘deep dive … relational observations’, pointing to a ‘rapidly evolving situation on the ground in China’, suggesting that anti-corruption policy has ‘radically reshaped consumption of alcohol in academic and research spaces’. In conclusion, Sin (2024) suggests that ‘when in China dont drink because the Chinese no longer do’. Unfortunately, such unsubstantiated and non-research-based personal observations fail to acknowledge and engage with our own study, which touches on this very topic. Indeed, our research offers a very different and more complex story of drinking cultures in China across diverse work, domestic, and family space (e.g. Jayne et al., 2022, Liu and Jayne, 2023). Whilst, at best, this oversight can be explained as ineffective literature review, and we admit more focused research is needed to fully explore this specific issue in detail, at worst Sin (2024) highlights how easily uncritical moralising, disciplining, and normalising thinking can prevail.

In riposte to both the strengths and weaknesses of the commentaries, we now go onto sketch opportunities of pluralist, relational, congenic ontologies and comparative ‘epissedemologies’, as new indicative examples to elaborate, and further advance, our original intervention.

Whilst ethanol is the most well-known biologically active chemical constituent of alcohol, congeners – for example, amines, amides, adetones, acetaldehydes, polyphenols, methanol, histamines, fusel oil, esters, furfural, and tannins – not only contribute to taste, smell, and appearance of beverages, but are known to have biological, physiological, and psychological effects. Congeners can be added prior to, or are produced during, and/or after fermentation when ethanol itself is created. Medical and health scientists have called for increased attention to the impact of congeners in different drinks as well as their influence in both laboratory studies and ‘naturalistic’ everyday contexts. This emerging research agenda highlights the importance – but lack of understanding – of impacts of congeners on biological, physiological, and psychological responses during alcohol consumption as well as their continued influence after blood alcohol levels near, and move, beyond zero (Verster, 2008).

Right now, readers are no doubt thinking something along the lines of, ‘ok, interesting stuff, but how are these scientific insights useful for rethinking geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness’? Our contention is that adoption of the notion of pluralist, relational, congenic ontologies offers opportunities for developing new knowledge complexes, which mirror the acknowledgment of a lack of knowledge, and desire for new thinking expressed by some health and medical scientists, that can be used to overcome social science alcohol studies’ reliance on ‘a priori “assumptions”, “expressions”, “facts”, and situated knowledges’ (Jayne and Valentine, 2024). This stance demands that researchers draw on pluralist, relational, and critical social and cultural theoretical resources at their fingertips, utilising a mix-and-match of ideas as needed, including those offered by Waitt, De Jong, and Wilkinson, alongside other innovative thinking outlined in our original article. This is vital to fully explore the complex vectors of relationality that constitute (non)human actors, relations, and interactions as well as embodied, emotional, affective, and material registers of political, policy, socio-economic, cultural, spatial, biological, physiological, and psychological factors that influence alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. In sum, relational thinking must be used to drive new detailed and sustained accounts of a multitude of ‘congenic’ constituents that influence alcohol, drinking, drunkenness before, during, and after ethanol is consumed, and then leaves the body.

To pursue this challenging ontological approach, we foreground opportunities of comparative ‘epissedemologies’ – a term we coin as a playful yet critically meaningful neologism constructed from the UK vernacular use of the word ‘pissed’ which means ‘drunk’. Importantly comparative epissedemologial thinking has significant potential to empirically advance understandings of geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness by focusing detailed attention on the diversity and complexity of (non)human relations that constitute social-cultural constructions of ‘drunken comportment’, including emotional, embodied, affective, material registers, alongside consideration of biological, physiological, and psychological effects of alcohol. This is important in avoiding pitfalls of gifting ‘causality’ and/or ‘agency’ to alcohol as a ‘catalyst’, ‘accelerator’, or ‘root cause’ of ‘problematic’ and/or ‘constructive’ drinking (Jayne and Valentine, 2024). Instead, comparative epissedemolgies can be used to shed light on the more-and-less reflexive ways people use alcohol as a ‘technology of the self’ which ‘permit[s] individuals to effect by their own means, or with the help of others, a certain number of operations on their bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct and ways of being so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection or immortality’ (Foucault, 1988: 18, cited in Jayne et al., 2011: 834). In short, research must engage with critical knowledges that alcohol itself does not make people violent, sexist, misogynistic, racist, homophobic, happy, sad, fun, sexy, melancholy, friendly, criminal, corrupt, socially vulnerable, or marginalised, etc. Instead, comparative epissedemology demands interrogation of similarities, differences, connectivities, and mobilities of social relations and perfomativities as well as embodied, emotional, affective, material registers and biological and psychological factors that exist before, emerge, and unfold in multiple ways during, and linger after alcohol is consumed. This epissedemological terrain, which must draw on longstanding application, and new innovative mix-and-matching of methodologies, offers vital opportunities to connect ‘“drinking-non-drinking” knowledges, practices, experiences, and performances’, and can be applied across all human geography topics engaged with alcohol, drinking, drunkenness (Jayne and Valentine, 2024).

In short, pluralist, relational, congenic ontologies and comparative epissedemologies offer critical resources for researchers to question, challenge, and traverse a priori ‘constitutive truths’ infusing geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness. We hope that this provocation – and without a doubt the challenging theoretical, methodological, and empirical agenda we signpost – does justice to the richness of the commentaries. Indeed, this article forum has generated new and exciting questions and challenges, and highlighted the significant potential for geographies of alcohol, drinking, drunkenness to be a rewarding and critically productive area of research, both within and beyond the discipline, for decades to come.