The purposeful production, exchange, and consumption of alcohol, like all human endeavor, is always a matter of time and temporality – and ranges from the universality of Einsteinian spacetime relativity through to species-specific nature times and the myriad of anthropocentric constructs of nature time and of social times/ temporalities. Thus time and temporality is an integral variable in all alcohol production, exchange and consumption, and is complemented by similarly rendered considerations of space/ place, context and contingent social relationships.

The book draws on historical and ethnographic examples from Aotearoa New Zealand, China, France, India, Peru, Central Europe and the United Kingdom to enhance our understandings of the dialogic matrices of time and temporality that are generated within, and which simultaneously generate, various economic, social, political, religious and moral modalities of alcohol in all their conceits and deceits.

Time & Alcohol: ‘It’s five o’clock somewhere!’ will appeal to researchers and undergraduates from a wide range of disciplines, including sociology, history, anthropology, cultural studies, geography, marketing and business studies.