While many nations claim to have a remarkable relationship with drink, perhaps few can rival Ireland for the sustained international attention this impression has received. Combining an historiographical survey of existing works with the author’s own research on medico-scientific and state responses to alcohol addiction, this chapter explores shifting representations of Ireland’s “drinkin…
This impressionistic autobiographical inquiry is an attempt to connect the personal with the socio-historical--addiction with Addiction; it is also an attempt to demonstrate that knowledge production can be generated through radically non-traditional means. Narrative serves as method and methodology in a mostly first person account of a fictional open AA meeting. A suspicious hermeneutics is ap…