Leisure, drink and tell: discourses on drinks in cafes, bars and taverns

Abstract

This article aims to undertake an analysis of discourses, ideologies, languages and symbols invested by various social agents on the subject of drinks consumed in leisure time, particularly within public spaces such as cafés, bars and taverns. For this purpose, it will be observed how common citizens construct the social and discursive image of drinks they consume, while they talk about beverages in their everyday language and in leisure moments spent within institutional contexts of everyday drinking. Each institution produces its own language and discourse, which legitimate the power that this institution holds (Foucault, 1971, 2001). And every discourse contains a number of concepts that structure it (Paltrinieri, 2012).

This text questions how ordinary people builds the social and discursive image of beverages they consume daily, while they talk about these drinks in their everyday language and in leisure moments spent in public drinking contexts, particularly in collective spaces as cafés, bars and taverns. The symbolic and discursive images of paradigmatic drinks (wine, beer, water, milk, etc.) are produced and reproduced through strategies that use common concepts and their relationships, enunciated by drinkers, especially within leisure times. This conjecture is tested through an emerging methodology, named reticular interdimensional hermeneutics. This procedure uses a strategy of writing and sociological argumentation in two major steps, which will be applied here to the study of public drinking paradigmatic beverages: (a) reading and critical interpretation of the sources, (b) definition of semantic-logical social networks through various social dimensions.