Semiotics of Drink and Drinking

Drink, as an embodied semiotic and material form, mediates social life. This book examines the fundamental nature of drink through a series of modular but connected ethnographic discussions. It looks at the way the materiality of a specific drink (coffee, wine, water, beer) serves as the semiotic medium for a genre of sociability in a specific time and place.

As an explicitly comparative semiotic study, the book uses familiar and unfamiliar case studies to show how drinks with similar mater...