Linda A. Bennett

Accountability for alcoholism in American families

Responsibility for alcoholism is examined within the context of families with an alcoholic parent. The perceptions of alcoholics and their spouses are discussed with respect to who or what is responsible for the etiology of alcoholism, the alcohol-related behaviors, and the consequences of the drinking in terms of the familys reaction to and the eventual resolution of the problem. In their attempt to understand the source of alcoholism and solutions to the problem, families draw upon different explanatory models of responsibility which frequently involve guilt, blame and shame. Brickman et als theoretical framework for responsibility for helping and coping behaviors is applied to interview data from alcoholic families in the United States with respect to alcoholism. While these families typically do not hold the alcoholic responsible for the presence of the alcoholism in the first place, ultimately they do hold the alcoholic accountable for finding a solution to the alcoholism.

Family, alcohol, and culture

During the 1970s and 1980s a small but rich tradition of anthropological and sociological studies of family culture, cultural context, and alcohol has developed. Ideally, ethnographic analysis of a cultural group and in-depth holistic examination of family process are incorporated in such research. In conducting family, culture, and alcohol investigations, researchers are encouraged to reexamine some conceptual assumptions: (1) their working definition of culture; (2) their relative emphasis on family culture or cultural context; (3) their attention to socialization as an active process in the transmission of culture within and across generations; and (4) their adoption of a holistic and cross-generational perspective. To apply this line of research to preventive and intervention strategies, two questions are especially relevant: Why are particular alcohol traditions established and maintained within families? What incentives and constraints from the familys cultural context help create, preserve, and/or terminate particular drinking practices?

Morphological variation and population structure on the island of Korčula, Yugoslavia

A comparison of head and body morphology on the ecologically uniform island of Korčula provides a good example of the balance that occurs in microevolution between selective pressures toward homogenization and selective inertia toward heterogeneity. thirty-eight measurements were made from a sample of 471 males and 526 females. Head variables, being more eco-stable than body variables, remain relatively more different between two distinct populations (eastern and western villages) than do the more eco-labile body variables, although both do vary significantly between east and west. The differences apply to both men and women. These east-west contrasts reflect the differential migration of Slavs to the island over the past three centuries, with a new wave of immigrants settling mainly in the east and introducing a new gene pool to the pre-existing Slavic hybrid population which had settled the island in the sixth to the eighth centuries. In addition to the predominant east-west differences in morphology, we also find significant variation between all villages in both head and body variables. We conclude that this is an indication of the considerable reproductive isolation that has persisted between all villages until the post-World War II period.