Stereotyping?

Hey, Osso. I truly believe there is a predisposition to certain addictions, and regardless of the truth of it, it's a variable that children should keep in mind.

I've read anyone who has a predisposition to diabetes or grain allergies are prone to alcoholism, because they can't break down carbs properly. Native Indian populations suffer from this especially, as do the Aboriginals of Austrailia because genetically, they evolved with very little carbs in their diet. Alcohol, was also unheard of, thusly they have a harder time metobolising spirits.
But alcoholism is a mental state and only poses a problem if you drink too much.

maybe you guys should sterotype me as mildly dyslexic. Australia, Alaska, what's the diff? :wink: Sled dogs, dingoes, it's all the same.

Well, they're both places I'd like to go see...

Alaska was very pretty, I went to Anchorage and had a great time. Be sure to go when it's always light, not when it's always dark.

They have lots of deadly things in Australia. I wonder how long you could survive on rabbit alone .

Hmm, I should probably move to Alaska half the year - I have an eye symptoms that involve nightblindness...

I'm Irish... I have quite a fear of alchohol...


Some stereotypes put me at great peril.

For instance... Red heads have fiery tempers but fat people are jolly. Now how in the hell am I supposed to act!

Stereotypes just aren't to taken as fact... Indians as a whole drink a lot at one time because of the seperating of families and tribes, and being forced to either leave or conform. The Irish drink because of the urban setting in America at the time and the depression from the famine. This does not stand true for all of the culture at the time, especially not now, the are just generalizations! Generalizations can not go for fact.

Indians drank because the Americans brought it with them, and sold it to them. The Americans drank whisky because it was safer than water, and though more tolerant to drink than the Native Americans, they were drunk most of the time. Tolerance movements came and went in the U.S. long before prohibition was passed. The Native American Indians quickly became dependent on this drink, but I wouldn't blame it all on their lot (although that couldn't have hurt) so much as their genetics.

I think the Irish drank before they came to America, because I think they brought new alchoholic beverages with them, as did the Germans (beer!)

Hmm. You should be fat and jolly and quick to anger. . Or exercise, diet, & get some hair dye to whatever stereotype you feel fits your personality best :wink: .

I'm irish and I drink too much and adore literature and poetry and i am not entirely kidding you, although the irish do do that. Lots of smartie irish on a2k and smartie others too.

The majority of indians drank MORE than the average American at that time, because of the depression and seperation anxieties. I want to think it was around the big settling the West era. If I made the connotation or said that the Irish didn't drink before coming to America, I'm sorry. I'm saying that increased drinking led from what I said, this increased drinking is why they were stereotyped as So.

My hair was green once... but I'm afraid that was still somehow Irish...

I'm a large part Russian and Irish, and some Cherokee, but I'm no big drinker. But I can blame that one my other genes, the ones that make my stomach really pissed off the next day.

I have watched with interest the progression of this thread. I'm still not certain whether we should look at the medical model or the psychological model. It seems to me that one of the people of the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, was a full blooded American Indian. Later he died, as a result of chronic alcoholism. There is also the conception that American Indians have no facial nor body hair. I think that it behooves us all to consider all variables, and be apprised of the dangers, thereof.

There have been some observations here that would be wonderful in a double blind experiment. Anyone want to volunteer?

Finding, believing in, and respecting culture and heritage is a positive first step toward a more hopeful future for all of us.

What is a double blind experiment.

I've heard the purer the race, the less body hair they will have. Kind of makes the aryan race as pure a bit of a myth.

Dys, believe it. I have always been fascinated by people of other cultures and race, etc. It's the difference that causes us to be curious. That was the benefit of teaching in a coal mining community.

Ceili, A double blind study is when volunteers are the subject of experiments in which the clinical observers have no prior knowledge of what the other is doing. Some people participating in the studies are given placebos, others the actual thing. This type study makes the results more valid. Hope you understand that explanation.

Both the Aztec's and the Inka had alcoholic beverages. Beer for example was one of the items that made up the salary of government workers under the Inka empire. It was also an important means of socializing during Inka times. and still is today. There is a huge brewery in down town LaPaz, Bolivia. But although Bolivia and Mexico have large native American populations, those populations to not have a stereotype as "drunken Indians". Those Indians do have social norms that govern the use of alcohol, and the are integrated to grater or lesser degree into the larger society (in Bolivia they are the majority). North Americans natives historically did not have alcoholic beverages and had no social norms governing their use. Also from the beginning of colonization the English had an apartheid policies that segregated indians on "reservations" with the predictable psychological results.
There is no "alcohol gene". Over use is the result of depression, and social disorientation, and attempt to self medicate the symptoms of those conditions

Thanks, Acquiunk. Perhaps the sagest advice anyone ever gave us on consumption, was "You either drink less and less or more and more."

I have a good friend who is (and I hate this term) a recovering alcoholic. He claims that he could probably have one drink, maybe even two, but from that point it would be all down hill again. As for the gene, I simply don't know nor does anyone at this point.

Ceili, your observation about the Master Race, made me think of what a friend of mine once told me. Should we all live long enough to see it, we could all look Asian. I have always been fascinated with what is called "the primitive eyelid" ...no epicanthic fold. When I think of the propagandists that called the Japanese "slant eyes", I realize that was a stereotype that aroused hate against the enemy. Pure Asians/Japanese/Mongols, have no wrinkle in their eyelids...hence the term.

Well, even if there is/were a genetic marker, or lack of marker, for alcohol metabolism dysfunction, cultural aspects have weight ... as people here are saying. In some cultures, including fairly generally in the US and some other countries, but not entirely, within them, 'tieing one on', getting blasted, is some kind of rite of passage, a validated (even with vast disapproval) way of dealing with crises or just for fun. Or, is one route in solace seeking. In others, no.

Acquiunk, you sound sure about that, and if you're right, that's interesting in itself.

I'm as certain as one can be given that we have just begun to dissect the human genome and no one knows absolutely what will show up. But that aside, if there were a gene for alcoholism and give that all Native American are descended from a relatively small founder population some 30,000 years ago we would expect the associated problems with such a gene to be wide spread throughout the America's, and it is not.
People who are in psychological trouble, particularly those who suddenly find their culture is no longer relevant and the rules they were taught to live by no longer work, are susceptible to the kinds of "relief" alcohol offers. For a truly horrific example of what can happen in that situation, you might read

"A Poison Stronger Than Love : The destruction of an Ojibwa Community" by Anastasia M. Shikilnyk , Yale University Press, 1985.

I always (it seems, of course it was not always) thought we introduced natives (those who were here before us for myriad, manymany millions/years before us) to alcoholic refulgence.

which we probably did. So what are you saying, that what?