Abstract
A major contribution of anthropology to alcohol studies is the description and analysis of the range of variation in drinking and its outcomes among diverse populations. Various kinds of cross-cultural comparisons are helpful for understanding the relationships among variables and for testing hypotheses about how alcohol use relates to other aspects of culture. Transcultural studies, small-scale comparisons of a few cultures, are reviewed. Also summarized are those hologeistic studies—in which associations between specific traits are statistically evaluated for a large worldwide sample of cultures—that have yielded theoretically significant models emphasizing anxiety, social structure, dependency, and power as basic motivations for drinking or drunkenness or both.

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