Wharton Journal

Issue date: 2/22/10 Section: News

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the critically-acclaimed Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, spoke about cultural conversation at the 10th annual Goldstone Forum hosted by the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Program at the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday, January 28. The Goldstone Forum is an annual lecture by a leading figure in the business, political or academic arenas and it was the first year that a non-academic was invited to speak as part of the Goldstone Forum series. The principal theme of Gladwell's speech was the problem that many Americans have of engaging in cultural conversation.

Gladwell spoke at length about the adventures of Dwight and Anne Heath, two Brown University anthropologists, who spent time in the 1950's researching the habits of a small indigenous community in eastern Bolivia during their doctorate dissertation. The Canba community resided in Montero, east of Sucre, the constitutional capital of Bolivia, and had a tradition of excessive drinking each weekend. As anthropologists, the Heaths decided to partake in the severely potent alcohol consumed by the Canba, which they tested back in a lab to be 180 proof, nearly pure grain alcohol. The Heaths noticed that despite this ritual, the Canba maintained a disciplined focus to life and did not experience societal problems typically associated with heavy drinking or the severe hangovers encountered after surplus drinking.

Gladwell added that when the Heaths returned to the U.S., a researcher from the Yale Center for Alcoholic Studies was intrigued by the question of how the Bolivians drink, as he was conducting research on the ties between alcohol and societal problems. The researcher utilized New Haven as his test location, as the city of the 1950's was a booming immigrant town consisting of large populations of Irish and Italians. During this time, drinking among the Italian community was far more rampant than that of the Irish community, but surprisingly, incidences of anger, violence and hostility among the Italians in New Haven were much lower than they were with the Irish. 96% of Italian males surveyed took at least one drink a day, and Gladwell told the story of one man who claimed that wine composed one-third of the 3000 daily calories consumed by one Italian male in New Haven. Yet, the researcher noticed that Italians still drank in a fairly more structured way than the Irish, and hence was interested in uncovering the Canba's methods.

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