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Cross-post: Porn/alcohol banned for aborigines

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Jed Dilligan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Jun-23-07 11:05 AM
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Cross-post: Porn/alcohol banned for aborigines
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1161739

I thought this was an interesting topic from an anthropological perspective. On the one hand, it seems like some kind of curb is desperately needed (though is that propaganda talking?) On the other, having the white government impose it smacks of racism and imperialism. To me, it points to the need for a stronger, more autonomous aboriginal government to sort out these problems from within the community.

It also brings up the question of why European-conquered peoples worldwide have been so susceptible to alcohol (especially) and other Western vices. Has evolving around strong drink for thousands of years given the Europeans a genetic wooden leg?
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Viva_La_Revolution Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Jun-24-07 01:12 PM
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1. Yes, exactly...
many cultures had not developed strong alcoholic drink, so they had no 'genetic tolerences' to it.
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HamdenRice Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jun-26-07 08:04 AM
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2. In South Africa, drinking was almost a form of protest
Black South Africans have a long, long (1000 year) tradition of drinking -- originally sorghum beer. Beer was absolutely central to the indigenous diet (brewing added vitamins that the plain grain lacked) as well as to culture, marriage, economics and politics.

When the Europeans established the mines, they tried to attract black mine workers by offering lots of beer, and at first it worked. Then they discovered that the miners, not surprisingly, were often drunk.

They tried banning beer and rationing it, and only allowing Africans to drink traditional beer which has a lower alcohol content than European drink. Women came to the mines and set up many brewing places and informal bars. Black South Africans adopted the Irish word for an informal bar, "shebeen", as the name for these black woman-run drinking establishments (there were lots of immigrant Irish on the mine fields).

By the apartheid era, the government tried to monopolize the sale of drink to Africans. Supposedly, black South Africans could only legally drink at government sponsored beer halls, but the shebeen business was always booming in the black townships. Also, supposedly, black South Africans were not legally allowed to drink hard liquor.

Black South Africans developed a culture of drinking beers aimed at the white South African market and hard liquor almost as a form of protest. If memory serves me, the 1976 Soweto uprising had a significant "beer" component, and I think the government beer halls were vandalized.

When I lived there I was often shocked and amused at the strange places my friends would take me to drink beer -- shebeens in shacks on the tops of luxury white apartment buildings, shebeens in homes in the township, shebeens in shacks in tiny homelands villages.

So I guess my rambling point is that alcohol has been a significant arena of struggle and symbolic meaning in colonial situations, with whites trying to control the consumption of subject people, and subject people using consuming choices as a political statement.
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Jed Dilligan Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Tue Jun-26-07 05:51 PM
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3. This reminds me of Bourbon-era Mexico (New Spain)
There was a War on Pulque, the indigenous mezcal-based booze, akin to our War on Drugs. It turned out that the tax revenue from pulque sales was vital to the colonial economy, so various measures short of an all-out ban were tried. One that I consider interesting was a law that pulque could only be served in open places, so that members of a better class could monitor the goings-on within. (Quite the opposite of our laws against drinking in public today, but with similar motivation.) Another was a ban on selling pulque that had been adulterated with psychedelic mushrooms, peyote, or (oddly enough) meat.

This was part of a broader campaign to curb the public behavior of mulattoes and mestizos. Among the concerns of the imperial court was the fact that certain members of the lower class, in particular, street poets of African descent, were dressing "above their station"--wearing the finery of noblemen. I don't think I need to point out the similarity to public concern over modern-day hip hop artists!

Another thing the S. African case reminds me of is something I heard about the motivation behind Prohibition in the U.S. Apparently the great public beer halls in Midwestern cities were hotbeds of labor organizing and radical politics among the Central and Eastern European immigrants.
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