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Alcohol, Gender and Drinking Problems: Perspectives from Low and Middle Income Countries

This volume is a collection of essays based on a multinational research project known as GENASIS (Gender, Alcohol and Culture: an International Study), sponsored by the World Health Organization (WHO), the US National Institute on Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse, and other international agencies interested in the reduction of social problems brought on by excessive alcohol consumption. The bulk of the book consists of separate portraits of alcohol use and abuse in eight developing countries, presented in alphabetical order in the volume. The country profiles, each with a different author or set of authors, are presented in alphabetical order within the volume. They concern Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, India, Mexico, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, and Uganda. In addition, the book contains introductory and concluding chapters, which attempt a cross-cultural analysis of gender and drinking problems and which try to systematize the results of the individual case studies. Most of the authors and project directors come from the fields of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and epidemiology. There are a few sociologists and social workers represented as well. It is perhaps unfortunate, given the nominal inclusion of the cultural domain within the project, that no anthropologists participated. As a cultural anthropologist myself, I believe that insights from that discipline would have provided fruitful results, particularly in the design of the master questionnaire employed by GENASIS researchers. It is clear that, in order to produce comparable data sets for the different countries, the investigators carried out their separate studies mainly on the basis of identical or very similar questionnaires, which had been worked out in advance of the actual research. The authors of each study provide information on an identical range of topics, which are imparted in virtually the same order within each chapter. Hence, for each country, readers learn about legislation and governmental regulations regarding alcohol, the kinds of alcoholic beverages available and consumed, and about gender roles. There follows a typology of types of drinkers, the contexts in which drinking takes place, the investigators’ research methods and procedures, the biological and social Global Public Health, July 2007; 2(3): 319 323