Getting Wasted

by Vander Ven, Thomas

• ISBN13: 9780814788325
• ISBN10: 0814788327
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2011-08-01
• Publisher: Ingram Pub Services

Summary

Most American college campuses are home to a vibrant drinking scene where students frequently get wasted, train-wrecked, obliterated, hammered, destroyed, and decimated. The terms that university students most commonly use to describe severe alcohol intoxication share a common theme: destruction, and even after repeated embarrassing, physically unpleasant, and even violent drinking episodes, students continue to go out drinking together. In Getting Wasted, Thomas Vander Ven provides a unique answer to the perennial question of why college students drink. Vander Ven argues that college students rely on "drunk support:" contrary to most accounts of alcohol abuse as being a solitary problem of one person drinking to excess, the college drinking scene is very much a social one where students support one another through nights of drinking games, rituals and rites of passage. Drawing on over 400 student accounts, 25 intensive interviews, and one hundred hours of field research, Vander Ven sheds light on the extremely social nature of college drinking. Giving voice to college drinkers as they speak in graphic and revealing terms about the complexity of the drinking scene, Vander Ven argues that college students continue to drink heavily, even after experiencing repeated bad experiences, because of the social support that they give to one another and due to the creative ways in which they reframe and recast violent, embarrassing, and regretful drunken behaviors. Provocatively, Getting Wastedshows that college itself, closed and seemingly secure, encourages these drinking patterns and is one more example of the dark side of campus life.

Author Biography

Thomas Vander Ven is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ohio University and author of Working Mothers and Juvenile Delinquency.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. xi
This Is the Shit Show! An Introduction to College Drinking	p. 1
Getting Wasted: The Intoxication Process	p. 20
Being Wasted: Fun, Adventure, and Transformation in the World of College Drinking	p. 50
When Everything Falls Apart: Meeting the Challenges of the College Drinking Scene	p. 79
The Morning After: Hangovers and Regrets	p. 120
Using Drunk Support: Responding to the Persistence of Heavy Drinking	p. 153
Methodological Appendix	p. 183
Notes	p. 191
Bibliography	p. 199
Index	p. 207
About the Author	p. 215
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