Quarreling representations: alcohol consumption within judicial, police and advertising discourses. Santa Fe, Argentina, 1860-1890

Abstract

In the second half of the nineteenth century, a new agenda on social order was imposed in the region of Santa Fe, Argentina. It established which behaviors and values would be allowed and which ones would be punished. As part of social identities and subjectivities, representations and meanings built on certain topics played a key role in the demarcation of the limits of public order. Within this general subject, drunkenness was consolidated as one of the main explanations of social violence. In police and judicial files which deal with episodes of interpersonal violence, drinking appears as an aggravating factor as well as a strategy to justify actions, blamed on others, or to deflect the attention from the facts. On the other hand, towards the end of the century, advertising discourse made visible a form of respectable public consumption of alcohol. This paper analyzes the ways in which the representations about drinking and drunkenness are presented and transformed in police, judicial, journalistic and advertising documents, considering three variables: the stability of the  definition of popular consumption of alcohol as a vice; the variation of the uses that different subjects gave to drunkenness in their speeches; and how these uses and meaning interacted with the expansion of public consumption of alcohol for the middle and wealthy classes towards the end of the century.