Hangover

Abstract

Abstract:Even though hangover is a widespread phenomenon in many societies, it has received very scant systematic attention in social sciences. This article is based on publications from different disciplines (medicine, cultural history, social anthropology, sociology, etc.), my own observations, and interviews with fellow social anthropologists. After a general outline of the phenomenon, I will focus on some psychological aspects of hangover: guilt and vulnerability, but also the idea of complicity. These seem to combine in different ways not only in the selfperception of hung-over individuals: they also inform social perceptions of the consequences of excessive alcohol intake. They may be related to specific practices and patterns of drinking (as exemplified by observations from Siberia and the Far North of Russia), though large-scale comparisons are methodologically and ethically problematic. Examining the interrelation of hangover, responsibility, and transgression, the article concludes that the social perception of hangover involves different modes of human non-perfection.Keywords: alcohol hangover, complicity, guilt, veisalgia, vulnerability Notwithstanding countless books and articles on alcohol consumption (in Russia and elsewhere), hangover has remained a very enigmatic topic. This article, initially prepared for the Tartu 2013 workshop on the particularities of alcohol consumption in the Far North of Russia, emerged from my interest in the rites and practices of excessive drinking, the idea of transgression, and the question of how people describe, and deal with, the 'day after'. If practices of drinking bear certain cultural specifics 1 , can we suppose that experiences of hangover do so, too?While not claiming to give a definite answer, in this article I shall try to lay some groundwork for a cross-cultural study of hangover (pohmel'e in Russian 2 ). With the aim to give a first appraisal of how hangover is defined and explained, the first part of the article draws mainly on medical literature. Later, the focus will be on those aspects that fall into the psychological rather than physiological domain: here I rely on interviews that I conducted with eight fellow social anthropologists and one medical expert in 2013 and 2014, as well as on my own observations.