Semiotics of Drink and DrinkingA&C Black, 2012 M05 31 - 256 pages Drink, as an embodied semiotic and material form, mediates social life. This book examines the fundamental nature of drink through a series of modular but connected ethnographic discussions. It looks at the way the materiality of a specific drink (coffee, wine, water, beer) serves as the semiotic medium for a genre of sociability in a specific time and place. As an explicitly comparative semiotic study, the book uses familiar and unfamiliar case studies to show how drinks with similar material properties are semiotically organized into very different drinking practices, including ethnographic examples as diverse as the relation of coffee to talk (in ordering at Starbucks). Further chapters look at the dryness of gin in relation to the modern cocktail party and the embedding of beer brands in the ethnographic imagination of the nation. Rather than treat drinks as mere propos in the exclusively human drama of the social, the book promotes them to actors on the stage. |
Contents
1 Introduction | 1 |
2 Coffee | 35 |
3 Gin | 60 |
4 Water | 86 |
5 Colas and uncolas | 118 |
6 Wine | 148 |
7 Vodka | 177 |
8 Beer | 205 |
Notes | 226 |
230 | |
243 | |
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artificial artisanal associated axaluxali Baliauri barista beer Bombay Sapphire boreholes Borjomi botanicals brand chain of authentication chapter circulation Coca-Cola cocktail party coffee commodity consumers consumption conversation culinary luddism culinary modernism culture defined definition discourse distillation distinctive drunk ethnographic everyday example falsification figure find firm first flavoured genre girl drink guests human hybrid icon imagined indexical infrastructure interaction Kazbegi Khevsur Khevsureti labels labour Laghidze Laghidze’s waters luddism marketing martini masculine material mediated Meneley mineral water modernist natural mineral water neutral grain spirit non-human object Ochiauri ofthe ontology opposed opposition parasitic phatic poems poetry postsocialism postsocialist properties Pshavi purified purity qualisigns qualities reflect relation relationship ritual semiotic semiotic ideology shrine significance social socialist period socialist realist soft drinks Soviet specific spring waters Starbucks supra talk tamada taste Tbilisi technical terroir things toast trademark traditional vodka Western wine