Michelle Ruth Gamburd has written an engaging and illuminating book on an important topic: the place of alcohol in a Buddhist setting in southern Sri Lanka. Although practicing Buddhists routinely recite the precept that promises abstention from intoxication, real rural Buddhists in Sri Lanka often do drink, often to excess, and often with serious consequences for their immediate family and sometimes for the wider community around them. Gamburd's drinkers are almost entirely men, mostly poor and lower class, sometimes from families whose adult women are thousands of miles away working as domestic servants in the Persian Gulf (the topic of Gamburd's previous book, based on work in the same community). Some of these men drink occasionally, especially at big public events such as weddings and funerals, but a significant minority drink heavily and as often as they can find the money to pay for it. What they usually drink is illegal hooch, known locally as kassipu. Sometimes things go wrong in the production of kassipu, resulting in blindness or even death. Even without these small local disasters, heavy drinkers pay a price in liver disease and other ailments. Gamburd, not a drinker herself, gives an uncensorious but unflinching account of these consequences of the local culture of drinking, and she also reviews a range of attempts to do something about problem drinking, from biomedical interventions to vows to the Goddess Kali.
Gamburd's book has two great strengths. One is her skilful embedding of her ethnographic material in a broader nexus of poverty, politics, and local idioms of gender and especially masculinity. Alcohol, she argues, has to be part of a more holistic understanding of local society, and in particular, it has to be understood in terms of local political economy. The second strength derives from her unusually long-term engagement with the particular community at the heart of the book—this is her second ethnographic study based in this community, but it was also the place where Gamburd's mother did her anthropological fieldwork in the late 1960s and early 1970s. One particular relationship stands out in Gamburd's narrative, and that is her friendship with her long-term research assistant, Siri, himself a man with an occasional drinking problem. Siri facilitates the ethnographer's access to illegal drinking dens, their proprietors, and their patrons. Out of this come a series of memorable vignettes, drunks' tales of their own heroic drunkenness, and other villagers' less heroic tales of the disasters that often follow from drinking. This is an ethnography with unusually three-dimensional characters and unusually memorable tales of everyday drinking.
Alcohol, of course, can tell you about much more than just drinking. Gamburd's topic is illegal drinking, so her ethnography necessarily touches on the state and its agents, the local police. Here, I think, the reader may feel slightly short-changed. In the early sections of the book, the battle between drinkers, producers, and sellers, on one side, and the authorities, on the other, is taken a little too much at face value for anyone who is familiar with the grey zones in which police, local politicians, and criminals connect and support each other in much of Sri Lanka. This is acknowledged later in the book, where the theme of police corruption is discussed very cautiously, without fully reflecting on the ways in which this undermines some of the dynamic described earlier. An even bigger context—the global economy—is invoked in the closing pages, but the attempt to treat the story of everyday drinking as part of wider changes in global capitalism relies rather heavily on what might happen if the state encouraged deeper multinational penetration into local alcohol markets. But, of course, that is precisely what is not happening in the ethnographic sections of the book, and it is these much more locally framed interpretations that give this valuable book its authority and importance.
