Semiotics of Drink and Drinking

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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 props in the exclusively human drama of the social, the book promotes them to actors on the stage.

Reviews

From coffee to vodka, and from wines to waters, Manning brings to life the extraordinary registers of meaning across everyday practices. By his bright telling, modernity itself can be understood anew through a tale of multiple imbibings. This delightful book should find a wide readership among anthropologists, historians, and sociologists, as well as scholars of the modern age, semiotics, and food studies. -- Bruce Grant, Professor of Anthropology, NYU, USA
How much of social life flows from what we drink, when and how we drink it, and with whom!Through a glass clearly and with great ethnographic and semiotic insight, Paul Manning brilliantly contextualizes the potables of American capitalist modernity - (gin) martinis, for instance, and Starbucks coffee - as well as those of Georgian socialism and post-socialism - vodka, beer, wine, and fizzy drinks - revealing their central place in the cultural worlds in which they are produced and consumed.The introductory "aperitif," a treatise in miniature on the proper semiotic study of materiality, will become an instant reading-list classic, as will, no doubt, the entire lively and fascinating book.' -- Michael Silverstein, Charles F. Grey Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago, USA

Author Bio

Paul Manning is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Trent University, Canada.