Time and Alcohol: its Five Oclock Somewhere!

The purposeful production, exchange, and consumption of alcohol, like all human endeavour, is always a matter of time and temporality – and ranges from the universality of Einsteinian space-time relativity through to species-specific nature times and the myriad of anthropocentric constructs of nature time and of social times/temporalities. Thus time and temporality is an integral variable in all alcohol production, exchange, and consumption, and is complemented by similarly rendered considerations of space/place, context, and contingent social relationships.

The book draws on historical and ethnographic examples from Aotearoa New Zealand, China, France, India, Peru, Central Europe, and the United Kingdom to enhance our understandings of the dialogic matrices of time and temporality that are generated within, and which simultaneously generate various economic, social, political, religious, and moral modalities of alcohol in all their conceits and deceits.

Time and Alcohol: It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere! will appeal to researchers and undergraduates from a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, history, anthropology, cultural studies, geography, marketing, and business studies.

Peter J. Howland is a former tabloid journalist by mistake, an anthropologist by training, a sociology lecturer at Massey University, Aotearoa New Zealand, by occupation, and a neo-Marxist by analytical and moral compulsion. He has long-standing research interests in wine production, consumption, and tourism and their role in the evolving constructions of middle-class identity; distinction; leisure; elective sociality; constructions of place and reflexive individuality; gifting and commodity economies; and so on. In 2019, he was appointed as a founding editor of the series Critical Beverage Studies for Routledge UK.