Culture and customs help shape the way alcohol affects us. Illustration by Brian Ewing

In 1956, Dwight Heath, a graduate student in anthropology at Yale University, was preparing to do field work for his dissertation. He was interested in land reform and social change, and his first choice as a study site was Tibet. But six months before he was to go there he got a letter from the Chinese government rejecting his request for a visa. “I had to find a place where you can master the literature in four months, and that was accessible,” Heath says now. “It was a hustle.” Bolivia was the next best choice. He and his wife, Anna Cooper Heath, flew to Lima with their baby boy, and then waited for five hours while mechanics put boosters on the plane’s engines. “These were planes that the U.S. had dumped after World War II,” Heath recalls. “They weren’t supposed to go above ten thousand feet. But La Paz, where we were headed, was at twelve thousand feet.” As they flew into the Andes, Cooper Heath says, they looked down and saw the remnants of “all the planes where the boosters didn’t work.”

From La Paz, they travelled five hundred miles into the interior of eastern Bolivia, to a small frontier town called Montero. It was the part of Bolivia where the Amazon Basin meets the Chaco—vast stretches of jungle and lush prairie. The area was inhabited by the Camba, a mestizo people descended from the indigenous Indian populations and Spanish settlers. The Camba spoke a language that was a mixture of the local Indian languages and seventeenth-century Andalusian Spanish. “It was an empty spot on the map,” Heath says. “There was a railroad coming. There was a highway coming. There was a national government . . . coming.”

They lived in a tiny house just outside of town. “There was no pavement, no sidewalks,” Cooper Heath recalls. “If there was meat in town, they’d throw out the hide in front, so you’d know where it was, and you would bring banana leaves in your hand, so it was your dish. There were adobe houses with stucco and tile roofs, and the town plaza, with three palm trees. You heard the rumble of oxcarts. The padres had a jeep. Some of the women would serve a big pot of rice and some sauce. That was the restaurant. The guy who did the coffee was German. The year we came to Bolivia, a total of eighty-five foreigners came into the country. It wasn’t exactly a hot spot.”

In Montero, the Heaths engaged in old-fashioned ethnography—“vacuuming up everything,” Dwight says, “learning everything.” They convinced the Camba that they weren’t missionaries by openly smoking cigarettes. They took thousands of photographs. They walked around the town and talked to whomever they could, and then Dwight went home and spent the night typing up his notes. They had a Coleman lantern, which became a prized social commodity. Heath taught some of the locals how to build a split-rail fence. They sometimes shared a beer in the evenings with a Bolivian Air Force officer who had been exiled to Montero from La Paz. “He kept on saying, ‘Watch me, I will be somebody,’ ” Dwight says. (His name was René Barrientos; eight years later he became the President of Bolivia, and the Heaths were invited to his inauguration.) After a year and a half, the Heaths packed up their photographs and notes and returned to New Haven. There Dwight Heath sat down to write his dissertation—only to discover that he had nearly missed what was perhaps the most fascinating fact about the community he had been studying.

Today, the Heaths are in their late seventies. Dwight has neatly combed gray hair and thick tortoiseshell glasses, a reserved New Englander through and through. Anna is more outgoing. They live not far from the Brown University campus, in Providence, in a house filled with hundreds of African statues and sculptures, with books and papers piled high on tables, and they sat, in facing armchairs, and told the story of what happened half a century ago, finishing each other’s sentences.

“It was August or September of 1957,” Heath said. “We had just gotten back. She’s tanned. I’m tanned. I mean, really tanned, which you didn’t see a lot of in New Haven in those days.”

“I’m an architecture nut,” Anna said. “And I said I wanted to see the inside of this building near the campus. It was always closed. But Dwight says, ‘You never know,’ so he walked over and pulls on the door and it opens.” Anna looked over at her husband.

“So we go in,” Dwight went on, “and there was a couple of little white-haired guys there. And they said, ‘You’re tanned. Where have you been?’ And I said Bolivia. And one of them said, ‘Well, can you tell me how they drink?’ ” The building was Yale’s Center of Alcohol Studies. One of the white-haired men was E. M. Jellinek, perhaps the world’s leading expert on alcoholism at the time; the other was Mark Keller, the editor of the well-regarded Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol. Keller stood up and grabbed Heath by the lapels: “I don’t know anyone who has ever been to Bolivia. Tell me about it!” He invited Heath to write up his alcohol-related observations for his journal.

After the Heaths went home that day, Anna said to Dwight, “Do you realize that every weekend we were in Bolivia we went out drinking?” The code he used for alcohol in his notebooks was 30A, and when he went over his notes he found 30A references everywhere. Still, nothing about the alcohol question struck him as particularly noteworthy. People drank every weekend in New Haven, too. His focus was on land reform. But who was he to say no to the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol? So he sat down and wrote up what he knew. Only after his article, “Drinking Patterns of the Bolivian Camba,” was published, in September of 1958, and the queries and reprint requests began flooding in from around the world, did he realize what he had found. “This is so often true in anthropology,” Anna said. “It is not anthropologists who recognize the value of what they’ve done. It’s everyone else. The anthropologist is just reporting.”

The abuse of alcohol has, historically, been thought of as a moral failing. Muslims and Mormons and many kinds of fundamentalist Christians do not drink, because they consider alcohol an invitation to weakness and sin. Around the middle of the last century, alcoholism began to be widely considered a disease: it was recognized that some proportion of the population was genetically susceptible to the effects of drinking. Policymakers, meanwhile, have become increasingly interested in using economic and legal tools to control alcohol-related behavior: that’s why the drinking age has been raised from eighteen to twenty-one, why drunk-driving laws have been toughened, and why alcohol is taxed heavily. Today, our approach to the social burden of alcohol is best described as a mixture of all three: we moralize, medicalize, and legalize.

In the nineteen-fifties, however, the researchers at the Yale Center of Alcohol Studies found something lacking in this emerging approach, and the reason had to do with what they observed right in their own town. New Haven was a city of immigrants—Jewish, Irish, and, most of all, Italian. Recent Italian immigrants made up about a third of the population, and whenever the Yale researchers went into the Italian neighborhoods they found an astonishing thirst for alcohol. The overwhelming majority of Italian-American men in New Haven drank. A group led by the director of the Yale alcohol-treatment clinic, Giorgio Lolli, once interviewed a sixty-one-year-old father of four who consumed more than three thousand calories a day of food and beverages—of which a third was wine. “He usually has an 8-oz. glass of wine immediately following his breakfast every morning,” Lolli and his colleagues wrote. “He always takes wine with his noonday lunch—as much as 24 oz.” But he didn’t display the pathologies that typically accompany that kind of alcohol consumption. The man was successfully employed, and had been drunk only twice in his life. He was, Lolli concluded, “a healthy, happy individual who has made a satisfactory adjustment to life.”