Suchergebnisse

The article analyses the complexity of the relationship between young people and alcohol and how this varies over time by using a longitudinal comparison of qualitative studies carried out in Italy. This study highlights the fact that alcoholic drinks remain central in young people's identity-building, which begins at a young age in the long alcohol socialization process within the family context. The young people from the new millennium show more similarities than differences than those from twenty years before, although noticeable is the loss of the transgressive value of drinking in favour of more exploratory and innovative styles.

The aim of this article is to present a social comparison of modern youth culture and the local traditions regarding the drinking of alcohol in Italy and Norway. We argue that the use of alcohol in `wet and dry drinking cultures' in northern and southern Europe has grown more similar. Young people, in both countries, drink beer and spirits at weekends, holidays and during the period of their final exams for intoxication, transition to a new phase of life and celebration purposes within the peer group. The modern innovations of practice combine a ritual structure of traditional forms of `rite of passage' (Turner, 1969; Van Gennep, 1960) with modern individualistic rites (Beck, 1997). In the modern local and global youth culture, use of alcohol for intoxication purposes is the key symbol for `free flow' in the phase of transition from childhood to the individual life project of creating one's social identity. This mixing of old ritual structures and modern reflexive individualization rituals has led to us coining a new concept of `rite of life projects'.

The study applies the concept of boundary work, as developed by Lamont and Molnár to analyze how young people perceive adult drinking. It is based on eight focus groups involving young people aged 17 to 24 years conducted in Torino (IT) and Helsinki (FI). The study contributes to understand why different orientations towards heavy drinking persist in the two geographical regions. In Italy young people draw explicit boundaries between theirs' and adults' drinking and between proper and deviant drinking, so that their boundary work results in producing social norms that are shared with adults, except for drunkenness, which is seen as normal for young people but not for adults. In Finland young people distance themselves from adults' drinking situations, and describe them in terms of light versus heavy drinking, yet without making distinctions between proper and improper drinking in each situation, thereby articulating an absence of explicit norms against drunkenness.