In New Orleans there is this magical thing where you can put your alcoholic drink in a plastic cup of any kind and leave the establishment you are patronizing — or even your own very house — and go outside!
!!!
It’s called a “go-cup” and, in its simplest form, it looks like this:
The bars and restaurants have them for your convenience and many residents keep a supply on hand too.
I still remember the first time I went to New Orleans, about five years ago, and realized that I could do this. It was… okay “liberating” might be a strong word… but it did bring into sharp relief the lack of freedom that I experience in other parts of the U.S. that do not allow public consumption of alcohol. Moreover, it revealed to me how deeply I had internalized the idea that (1) you can’t drink alcohol in public, (2) if you want to drink alcohol and you’re not at home, you have to purchase it from a vendor and, (3) if you purchase a drink, you must finish drinking it or abandon the remains if you want to go somewhere else.
None of these rules apply in New Orleans.
I had the pleasure of showing my friend Dolores around the city last month and chuckled as she kept forgetting that we could leave a bar or restaurant with a drink in hand. I’d suggest we go and she’d remember, suddenly, that we could. We didn’t have to sit around and finish our drinks. Or, even crazier, we could pop into a bar as we walked by, order a drink, and keep going our merry way. Her realization that these were possibilities happened over and over again, as she kept reverting to her non-conscious habits.
Dolores’ experience is a great example of how we internalize rules invented by humans to the point where they feel like laws of nature. In our daily lives in Los Angeles, where we both live, we hang out together and drink alcohol under the local regulations. We rarely feel constrained by these because we forget that it could be another way. This is the power of culture to make alternative ways of life invisible and, as a result, gain massive public conformity to arbitrary norms and laws.
Cross-posted at Pacific Standard.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 22
Umlud — May 26, 2014
I often see this sort of internalization when streets are temporarily closed. Unless there is a street festival with *lots* of people walking in the street, most of the people remain on the sidewalk, *despite* the street being completely closed to vehicular traffic and often having far more space than the sidewalks.
It's one of the reasons that I take the opportunity to walk down the middle of the roadway when the street is closed: to remind myself that the rule that pedestrians should stay on the sidewalk is not a hard-and-fast rule, and that personal safety isn't about blindly following internalized rules, but is about recognizing the existence of such rules and thinking critically about them.
drdanj — May 27, 2014
Just one little problem, this so-called freedom results in tons of plastic waste being produced that will poison the environment for centuries, the world our children and their offspring will live in. As with so much that passes for freedom in our society, it translates into the "right" to harm others.
Record of the Week (Week of 26 May 2014) « STS Turntable — June 2, 2014
[…] Sociological Images – All Hail the Go-Cup: Culture as a Form of Control […]
gregoryabutler — June 9, 2014
So public drunkenness is a GOOD thing?
NOPE
It's more accurate to say that Louisiana has stupid liquor laws that promote binge drinking, and other places (like New York City, for example) have liquor laws that are superior.
Compare our drunken driving deaths to theirs
i speak tongue — June 10, 2014
To assume that these more lax alcohol consumption laws in certain places in the US have anything to do with the governments “concern” about our freedom seems extremely naive. Think about what New Orleans’ economy revolves around. Think about the DROVES of college students who flock to the French Quarter for Spring Break, Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, or even a long weekend, for the explicit purpose of getting shitfaced. And think about the fact that while this is the reason they’re going, it isn’t just alcohol vendors that are profiting, but an entire tourism industry: hotels, restaurants, retail shops etc… New Orleans has a vested interest in having more liberal liquor laws than the rest of the country, just like North Carolina had a vested interest in retaining more liberal smoking laws than the rest of the country up until 4 years ago(they just happen to grow more tobacco than any other state).
Equating freedom with consumption is problematic enough in such a capitalist society, but when dealing with abused substances it gets even darker. Because the more freedom we’re given to consume these products the more “freedom” corporations have to encourage us to abuse them, and even become dependent on them. When there’s a liquor store on every street corner, and a margarita in everyone on the sidewalk’s hand, how easy does it become to loose sight of what it means to have a drinking problem?
While tobacco cigarettes are still legal, we have very strict laws concerning how they can be advertised, sold and consumed, but it took decades to overcome the tobacco lobbyists in Washington because they knew that once people weren’t as “free” to smoke where ever they liked, that their profits would take a hit. Tell me that’s unrelated.
Ira — September 6, 2014
These unconciously accepted norms are called 'doxa' in sociology.: From Wikipedia
Pierre Bourdieu, in his Outline of a Theory of Practice,[ used the term doxa to denote what is taken for granted in any particular society. The doxa, in his view, is the experience by which “the natural and social world appears as self-evident”. It encompasses what falls within the limits of the thinkable and the sayable (“the universe of possible discourse”), that which “goes without saying because it comes without saying”.The humanist instances of Bourdieu's application of notion of doxa are to be traced in Distinction where doxa sets limits on social mobility within the social space through limits imposed on the characteristic consumption of each social individual: certain cultural artifacts are recognized by doxa as being inappropriate to actual social position, hence doxa helps to petrify social limits, the "sense of one's place", and one's sense of belonging, which is closely connected with the idea that "this is not for us" (ce n´est pas pour nous). Thus individuals become voluntary subjects of those incorporated mental structures that deprive them of more deliberate consumption.