Are Finnish drinking habits changing? In search of a cultural approach

Abstract

Finnish drinking habits have undergone major changes over the past few decades. However, most Finnish studies of drinking habits conclude by stating that drinking is still traditional, national, and uniform in nature. These conclusions draw on the notion of a cultural lag and on stereotypical dichotomies between the traditional and the modern, or between the Finnish and European drinking habits. The article shows that in studies of drinking habits, the concept of habits has not been problematized. In many ways, only the most patterned behavior is dealt with, being mostly that of ‘intoxication-oriented drinking’. Other aspects tend to be overshadowed. Moreover, little attention has been paid to the meanings that actors give to their drinking as the studies of drinking habits have mainly used survey data. In order to allow a more sensitive analysis, the article elaborates on a cultural model of drinking habits, and then applies the model to Finnish statistical and qualitative studies of drinking habits from the past 30–40 years. The analysis reveals, first, that new time-series analyses should be conducted on the epidemiological data in order to both test the uniformity of drinking habits and to explore their diversity. Second, efforts should be made to combine the contradictory findings of epidemiological and qualitative research. Third, studies of drinking habits should devote more attention to the analysis of the situational variation of drinking.

• Drinking habits
• culture
• self-presentation
• regulation
• situationality