Day: May 9, 2008

Why A Final Essay When We Can Do This?

My Notre Dame students are great! All eight of their group posts are now up. I am so proud of them and the effort that they put into this project.

Already their posts have been read more than 1400 times, and been linked to from sites like Mind Hacks and Sharp Brains and promoted at del.icio.us and Stumble Upon. I hope to see much more as the word continues to gets out.

The eight posts came out of my class on “Alcohol and Drugs: The Anthropology of Substance Use and Abuse,” and represent the range of perspectives brought to bear on substance use over the course of the semester. Though I guided each group through multiple revisions, each post represents an argument that the students developed on a particular topic.

I started the series off with Stress and Addiction: The Vicious Cycle, which showed how stress and substance use go hand in hand, reinforcing a cycle of addiction.

Next was The Problem of Post-Conventional Outlaws, which examined how the US Drug War is increasingly at odds with our modern sensibilities of self.

The Genetic and Environmental Bases of Addiction was the third post in the series, an essay that took on both nature and nurture and won!

Fourth came Inequality and Drug Use, providing a clear demonstration on how social status and marginalization feed into worse drug use and even worse outcomes.

The other middle child was Understanding Brain Imaging, a comprehensive presentation of the different imaging technologies used to understand addiction and other mental health problems. Well worth a look!

It’s Our Fault: Denial, Disease and Addiction showed how the social roots of denial and misperceptions about what counts as a disease make for a double whammy against people struggling with alcohol and drug use.

The seventh post was Culture and Learning to Drink: What Age? This one covered debates about the legal drinking age in the United States, with an even-handed consideration of the costs involved and the varied ways we might think more creatively about how better to learn to drink.

Last but most certainly not least, College Drinking: Battle of the Sexes? examined how central gender is to the drinking culture on US college campus, in particular to understanding and doing something about binge drinking.

A great mix of essays! Please enjoy them.

-Daniel Lende

College Drinking: Battle of the Sexes?

By: Carolyn, Andrew, Brandon, and Sarah

Drunk- this five letter word has many connotations, ranging in extremes from positive memories to negative stigmas. For men and women, it is one word that has different meanings, from the number of drinks it takes to get drunk to the behaviors men and women are expected to exhibit while drinking. For college women and men in particular, binge drinking is an area in which they relate quite distinctly with alcohol. Gender norms, rituals and relations often lead to, and perpetuate, binge drinking on campuses nationwide.

Many aspects of college drinking are unique. Tailgating is one of them. Where else can you find people drinking excessive amounts of alcohol early in the morning? At big football schools, tailgating facilitates the social learning of binge drinking as a normal and acceptable behavior. The ritualized drinking associated with tailgating is often the first place where students are introduced to binge drinking. It also sets a precedent of drinking enough alcohol to get drunk and stay drunk for an extended period of time.

In the fall, people tailgate every weekend before football games. In the ritual of tailgating, binge drinking as a socially learned experience is evidenced by the fact that students learn to drink from the very alumni whom they are taught to respect and admire. Across the nation, students only need to leave their dorms to encounter the alumni who have been drinking since early morning. Since this is often a student’s first exposure to binge drinking, students may initially be shocked to find huge crowds of people drinking heavily in parking lots and around campus. The immersion in the football culture, which often depends upon tailgates, will soon numb any hesitation or doubts the student may have.

Tailgating perpetuates binge drinking among the general student population, but its significance varies based on gender. During a typical night out, a college student may consume four or five drinks to “pregame” before the actual party has even started. Many students do not realize that this qualifies as binge drinking, and that it impacts women and men differently.

Continue reading “College Drinking: Battle of the Sexes?”

Freaky Franz

Franz de Waal, the renowed primatologist who has pushed reconciliation and morality alike into our primate past, answered some great questions about life, love, sex and happiness at the NY Times Freakonomics blog.

Here’s a taste about bonobos: “Bonobos often engage in sex with same-sex partners, but they’re not gay in that they also have sex with the opposite sex. They’re ‘bi.’ They seek sex often for social reasons, to reduce tensions, and to form friendships.”

And one of my favorite answers? Building from his work with capuchin monkeys and a sense of fairness, de Waal says, “This holds an important message for American society which is becoming less fair by the day. The Gini-index (which measures income inequality) keeps rising and is now more in line with that of third-world countries than of other industrialized nations. If monkeys already have trouble accepting income inequality, you can imagine what it does to us. It creates great tensions within a society, and we know that tensions affect psychological and physical well-being. Some attribute the dismal health statistics of Americans (now #42 in the world’s longevity ranking) to the social frictions of an unfair society.”

de Waal is also organizing a June 2009 conference called “The Primate Mind: Built to Connect with Other Minds.” My colleague Katherine MacKinnon, a primatologist herself, tipped me off about it. Here’s the blurb: “A high-level international meeting of cognitive ethologists, behavioral biologists, and neuroscientists that will address how the primate (including human) mind relates to other minds through empathy, imitation, and other social cognition.” The best part? It’s in Sicily! (Well, maybe June is hot there, but still, a great place for a conference.)

And, with a hattip to My Mind on Books, with recent coverage of Franz, here’s a video of his talk at the Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity conference.