I’m sure you’ve already seen the map of beer vs wine vs spirit drinkers. It’s limited to Europe, and on seeing it one may mentally overlay a map of Protestant vs Catholic vs Orthodox. I recently heard of another division of Europe, the Hajnal line. It’s strictly binary rather than a three-part division, but interesting nevertheless. It’s based on “nuptiality”, basically whether everyone marries young (more accurate explanation at the link). But as “hbd chick” points out, it also maps quite well onto the Iron Curtain. Emmanuel Todd is cited as claiming that all communist nations had a history of strong patrilineal lineages, which the western church and its marital traditions apparently disrupted.
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January 21, 2012 at 3:35 pm
I guess that there is a correlation between spirit preference and binge drinking. Maybe personality traits explain the preference for binge drinking?
What about availability of firewood vs edible starch? Vodkadrinking people are people whose ancestors suffered famines while they had plenty of burnable firewood. Distillation needs energy but also allows you to get most ethanol from your starch.
Prohibitions in norhtern countries might bebecause they are not as selected for agriculture. (like ausstralian aboriginal prohibitions of alcohol) But possibly also taboos against using eating grain for drunkennes, like indians have taboos against eating cows .
January 29, 2012 at 10:24 am
The British are known for their binge drinking these days.
I would think that potatoes (you can make vodka from them, right?) provide plenty of starch. But they weren’t in europe before the columbian exchange. I don’t know which places had a shortage of available firewood. Maybe nobody lives there but eskimos.