Reconfigured Drinking Cultures? Intoxication and Pleasure

This chapter provides an in-depth analysis of young people’s performative pleasurable drinking practices. Some participants reinvented drinking practices that occurred in Westernised contexts in the early 2000s. These participants deliberately pursued transformational ‘carnal pleasure’ through calculated hedonism, engaging in intense but non-competitive drinking episodes, some of which went too far. These young men and women normalised such intentional excessive drinking rituals given the bodily pleasure they derived. On the other hand, other participants practised ‘disciplined pleasure’, engaging in social drinking among friends for fun and enjoying the social interactions and other adjunct pleasurable activities that also occur in drinking contexts. Moving beyond harm (to the self and others) discourses, the chapter demonstrates subjective, socio-spatial, and economic drivers of pleasure-seeking through alcohol consumption, highlighting how much the globalisation of the culture of intoxication is manifesting in contemporary Nigeria. The chapter demonstrates the extent to which young people are reconfiguring drinking cultures that are at variance with the traditional era, underscoring the necessity of rethinking the prohibitive traditional consumption norms, which deviate from contemporary youth leisure cultures. Given the decline in youth drinking in the Global North, the chapter concludes by highlighting the role that the alcohol industry plays in commodifying pleasure and producing the heavy and other drinking practices that the chapter explored.