Real­is­ing that “drink­ing alco­hol is one of the most socially mean­ing­ful and richly sym­bolic activ­i­ties in [British] cul­ture”, Vaughan of Mind Hacks offers a short intro­duc­tion to what could be an inter­est­ing topic; the cul­tural ‘ben­e­fits’ of binge drink­ing.

There’s more to alco­hol than get­ting pissed but you’d never know it from the papers. In a period of pub­lic hand wring­ing over ‘binge drink­ing cul­ture’, our under­stand­ing of the ‘cul­ture bit’ usu­ally mer­its no more than an admis­sion that peo­ple do it in groups and this is often implicit in the work of psychologists.

[…] In the UK at least, the social mean­ing of booze is often hid­den behind the ordi­nar­i­ness of day-to-day consumption.