Drinking Patterns and the Shaping of Inclusion and Eccentricity:
From Ancient Greek Wine to American Cocktail
Jordi Pmias & Mart Grau Universitat Autnoma de Barcelona
Key Words: Social History of Alcohol, Cultural Construction of Drinking, Greek Civilization, American Culture.
0
As usually happens with the consumption of stimulating products (tobacco, coffee), alcohol has a prominent role in socialization processes, in the building of a large variety of groupings. Even if it does contain calories and some nutrients, alcohol consumption is by no means determined biologically. To live, one needs to eat but does not need to drink alcohol. Thus alcohol, freed from any constriction of nature, is revealed as a complex form of social expression, fully embodied in the sphere of culture. 1
Consumption of superfluous products or, if we prefer, luxury products constitutes a powerful tool for social inclusion. In this paper, we take this verit acquise as a starting point. 2 A quick glance at linguistic uses provides us with hints in the same direction: whereas the English term luxury food insists on its socio-economic side, and the French labeling of excitants or stimulants in the pharmacologic and psychological aspects, the corresponding German word clearly reflects a social practice: 3 Genumittel (in etymological connection with Geno companion, comrade) are the products shared by the members of a group for pleasure (genieen).
Indeed, even if drinks have not attracted the attention of prestigious anthropologists and sociologists as much as the study of food has, 4 there is general agreement on their deep social significance and, above all, on the significance of patterns and behavior required by each drink. The inclusive and cohesive role of alcohol ensures the firm anchorage of an individual to a group. At the same time, leaving aside this associative function, drinks are the reflection of even more complex relationships: those marked by exception and exclusion. Exceptionality is granted to the elites, as recognition of their higher status. Exclusion is the consequence of transgression, the fate of those unwilling or unable to comply with the norms. Of course, those norms are to be found in a wide range of situations, from coded in sacred prescriptions to implicit in diffuse social habits. But they are always accompanied by a compelling element: the risk of being left out.
When facing drinking phenomena, sociological critique has especially focused on the significance of drinking habits and rituals within a given grouping, with an
1 Cf. Edmunds (1998, 103). 2 See, for instance, the SIRC report (2000). 3 Cf. Hengartner & Merki (2001, 11-15). 4 But see the contributions collected by Douglas (1987).
2 eye to their social uses and functions. Thus, this functionalist and instrumental approach has dealt more with the social dimension of drinking than with drinks themselves in society. We will attempt to look at the specific, socially constructed nature of drinks in different contexts, such as wine, milk, beer, and even the dry martini.
1
Even though the actual reach of wine interdiction for women in Greece and Rome has been under discussion, several witnesses confirm that wine consumption was a mans privilege. 5 Despite its doubtful historical value, from a cultural point of view the theory that kissing among relatives was invented so that male family members could detect alcohol consumption of their women is fully revealing. 6
In Classical Greece, women had access to wine only in very specific religious contexts, especially during the Thesmophoria. These celebrations in honor of the goddess Demeter stood among the more universally diffused in the Greek world. 7 In Athens, the three days of the celebration marked a caesura in the institutional order: trials were suspended, prisoners were freed, and the political status quo was interrupted. Only in this context women were entitled to meet in a central location of the polis and organize themselves socially under the leadership of their own rchousai. 8
Behind this celebration, some authors recognize the features of rituals conveying a crisis message. These momentary situations are known as periods of license, rituals of rebellion, rituals of conflict, legitimate rebellions, or with the German terms of legale Anarchie, Ventilsitten o Ausnahmezeiten. The liberating effects of these practices have been widely stressed in specialized literature: they allow for the expulsion of pressures that constrict the social body and thus periodically alleviate but above all in a controlled way! the oppressed strata. In parallel with this psychosocial function, the reversal rituals perform a legitimating function of the existing status quo, in the measure that the ruling order is confirmed e contrario by the transitory enactment of an upside down world. So the threat of a return to a pre-cultural stage is materialized. 9
In this atmosphere of exceptionality, women necessarily assume a central role. On the first day of the Thesmophoria (known as Anodos), women are in charge of sacrifices, an extraordinary privilege from which they are regularly excluded. 10 Similarly, on the third and last day of the festival (known as Kalligeneia) women exchange verbal obscenities, using unrestrained indecent
5 On the historical value of this prohibition see the different points of view discussed by Versnel (1994, 264). 6 See Versnel (1994, 229). 7 See Burkert (1985, 242). 8 Cf. Is. VIII 19: rchein eis t Thesmophria. 9 Cf. Versnel (1987, 132 ff.). 10 Although women were not precluded from meat consumption deriving from bloody sacrifice. See Detienne (1979, 183 ff.), and rejection by Osborne (2000).
3 language (aischrologa), something that in normal situations only men can do. Therefore, this abnormal and somewhat artificial context showed how womens access to wine was an alarming sign of crisis, and how, in the right order of things, wine should be kept in the mens exclusive domain.
This is further confirmed by the cultural meaning of opposite drinks. Milk and honey, in polar opposition with wine, clearly fall into the sphere of female and child. As shown by Fritz Graf (1980), milk and honey constitute the liquid marks of marginal groups or situations, in contrast with the supreme values of civilization that wine substantiates! whenever mixed with water! This polarity worked both within the community and outwards. Milk consumption is attributed to marginal sects in the polis, such as the Pythagoreans, but also to peoples such as the Scythes or the Massagetai, epitomes of the barbarian other. 11
The symbolic power of wine in Greek anthropology is even more rich and complex: its cultural centrality and normality does not preclude some threats or fears. Moderation is essential, because wine can lead to foolish promises, unattainable challenges, ungrounded quarrels and futile skirmishes. For good or evil, wine is the door to an alternative reality, a means to widen the meager boundaries of the hic et nunc. Together with theatre, wine becomes a rich source of illusion, a way out from normal life and a momentary expansion of the individual horizons . 12 In the Olympic family, the god who promotes wine consumption, Dionysus, is nothing less than a xnos, a Greek word that can mean stranger but also strange, bizarre, just as the German fremd and the Latin alienus. 13 Seen as a Dionysiac product, wine emerges as the dividing line between spheres, as a powerful shaper of social spaces. But above all, wine is the expression of an eccentric and centrifugal movement that flies away from the sphere of intimacy and the sphere of everyday life. So besides being gender markers, wine and milk play a crucial role in defining spaces and spheres, in shaping intimacy and eccentricity.
Here we need to stress that some authors have questioned the use of notions such as everyday life or intimacy when applied to pre-modern societies. In their view, those notions were not common among the ancient Greeks, but modern contructions that we should not project back to ancient communities. Acording to this, one would tend to think that only capitalist alienation gave way to a zealous keeping of a domain of intimacy 14 . On the contrary, it can be argued that the notions of day and daytime and the thinking about what kind of life the individual can lead in accordance with a daily routine, largely
11 See Graf (1980). Cf. Hartog (2001, 267 ff.). 12 See Henrichs (1993, 14). Not surprisingly wine has been considered in its sakrale Funktion als Mittler zwischen profaner und heiliger Welt, zwischen Menschen und Gttern (Spode, 2001, 49). Also not suprisingly, authorities eventually needed to control rituals related to wine consumption and to Dionysiac religion. In Rome, the senatus consultus de Bacchanalibus (in 186 BCE), which prohibited under penalty of death meetings of initiates in mystery bacchic cults, represents an extreme case. 13 The modern construction of Dionysus as the conceptualization of the other is a product of the Parisian quipe pioneered by Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant (notwithstanding their debt to Louis Gernet; cf. Henrichs, 1993, 31 ff.). 14 See in particular Lefebvre (1968).
4 precedes the rise of capitalism. 15 On the other hand, ancient religions appear as a coherent corpus of feasts and celebrations that interrupt and articulate everyday life all year long. Even if they do not always signal a breaking of the rules or an upturning of order, feasts always constitute a momentary gap that inaugurates a new social code, different from the one that rules normal activity in a given group. 16 Be as it may, wine consumption in a Dionysiac context should be seen as an expression of dissolution or of shifting of the limits of everyday experience. 17
2
Besides constituting a social vector inside a community, their communication potential makes drinks a vehicle for the expression of wider cultural cleavages between communities. Like food, drinking habits and kinds of drinks have been presented throughout history as distinctive marks that reflect the overall essence of a community, underlining specific differences in front of other groups. This goes well beyond the relatively nave stereotypes ad usum today, mainly coined by modern mass tourism. In rejecting any kind of essentialism in the definition of identities, modern sociology and anthropology have disclosed a number of constructions that lay in the basis of self-definitions, in the ancient world as in todays societies 18 . Objects that help self-definition are nothing but culturally constructed, and this construction is not produced in isolation but by contrast: the opposition with the other reflects, like in a mirror, the I. 19
Indeed, the Hochkulturen know, from the very onset, a strong opposition between beer and wine. In the fourth millennium BCE, Sumerians and Egyptians produced a kind of drink similar to modern wine. But much more widespread than wine was beer. Wine was reserved for the elites and, most of all, consecrated to religious cult. 20 That was only the beginning of an ever- lasting story of cultural cleavages involving wine and beer. With time, this oppositon was instrumented for political reasons. In Europe, such a dispute opposing wine drinkers and beer drinkers has experienced periodic resurgences up to the present day. Attempts have been made to draw a clear borderline enclosing wine producing and wine consuming areas, as a territory sharing common values and a common background. According to this view, the divide would revive the old Roman limes. To some, this is no less than
15 See on this issue the appraisals by Giulia Sissa and Marcel Detienne (1989, 13 ff.). 16 Cf. Calame (1982-1983). Finally, as Jean-Pierre Vernant has shown, Greek religious thought is entirely capable of conceptualizating notions of movement and permanence, from the firmness of the hearth to the centrifugal departure from the oikos (cf. Vernant, 1991 [orig. 1963]). 17 As for the religious experiences undertaken by the followers of Dionysus, see Henrichs (1993, 14-15). 18 For the Greek world, and the constructions of its/their identity/identities, we cite a single work only, for its massive impact: Hartog (2001; orig. 1981). See also Hall (1997). 19 The notion of otherness, with its philosophical ramifications (Martin Buber, Emmanuel Lvinas), has reached several academic spheres. For the construction of the Oriental other, and the mirroring of the Occidental identity, see Sad (1978). 20 Die getreidenreichen Bewsserungskulturen entschieden sich fr das Bier Traubenwein war den Reichen und dem Kultus vorbehalten (Spode, 2001, 47).
5 recognition of the contradictory nature of civilized sophisticated Mediterranean peoples, as opposed to Northeners of Germanic descent.
In this dynamics of indentity-building, France stands out as a case in point: the ideological power of wine as a national product is shown with clarity. As Barthes has argued, in the French imaginarium, wine expresses conviviality within the group and virility in the individual but, above all, shows the boundaries of the national character. 21 Nothing reflects more closely the essential frenchness of red wine as the public commotion provoked by Mr. Coty when taking office as the countrys Prime Minister: he dared to show himself in press photographies with a bottle of beer at home, instead of mandatory red wine.
3
The limitations of an instrumental and functionalist approach to alcohol consumption are obvious when we tackle the study of certain culturally complex drinks. As one of the best modern examples of this, we can look at the symbolic power and nuanced meanings of cocktails, and especially of the dry martini, in 20th century American culture. As demonstrated by Lowell Edmunds (1998), the dry martini appears as a complex and sophisticated symbol, given its suitability to convey messages, sometimes simple, but sometimes ambiguous and contradictory. Therefore, we should explore to what extent this drink can express and interpret notions of movement and space, taking into account its undeniable iconographic projection. Can we speak of a fundamental impact of dry martini on the contemporary notions of intimacy and eccentricity? How can we describe the passage from a fundamentally plastic and iconic symbol to a social vector?
The mystery about the dry martini is how it can be both elitist (only the initiated drink it, in exquisite loneliness, at the end of a hectic day) and national (strangers just dont know how to mix a dry martini). Both class divide and national consensus are cointained in the dry martini. Dry martini drinkers may be despised by American uninitiated individuals but hardly anyone would deny that the dry martini is a milestone of American heritage, its true knowledge being banned to strangers. The dry martini develops as a symbol throughout the 20th century, and the roots of its unusual combination of characters can be found in the theories of individualism that spread since the second half of the 19th century such as the Nietzschean superman and related schools of thought. They reconcile egocentrism and community engagement in a single message. In American culture, cosmopolitan leadership and down-to-earth melting pot form a whole that one can even drink.
The right proportions of gin (of Dutch origin), vermouth (French or Italian) and olive (Greek) result in a genuine American product. At first sight, a combination of foreign products is behind the dry martini, but its independent character and potential for self-representation were evident from the beginning. 22 Cocktails, and especially dry martini, became statesmens and diplomats favourite drink
21 See Barthes (1970). 22 Cf. DeVoto (1951, 22): [The martini is the] supreme American gift to world culture .
6 between 1930 and 1960. Some American presidents were aware of the value of dry martini as an ideological tool as well as a means to stage world dominance in meetings abroad. 23 Somehow, by its both simple and sophisticated formula, as well as by the evolving proportion of its ingredients tending to a chmeric dryness, the dry martini appears as a compendium of cosmopolitan American culture and politics in the 20th century world.
At the same time, though, the dry martinis contribution to American identity entails detachment and competition vis--vis other nations. 24 The telling of uncountable anecdotes strenghtens this reality by stressing the nightmares of any American who insists on ordering a dry martini when abroad. 25 As a matter of fact conventional wisdom would claim the secrets of a perfect dry martini are not accessible to foreign would-be connoisseurs.
On the other hand, like wine in ancient Greece, the dry martini is a product perfectly integrated into the male sphere. 26 As a male drink, the cocktail projects itself outwards, in accordance with the eccentric tendencies that it sparks. But also, like ancient Greek wine, it is much more than a gender marker in society. With female alcohol consumption increasing since the turning of the 19th century, a phenomenon of reversal could be at work. 27
Egalitarian discourses in the mid-20th century accentuated the expansion of the cocktail to womens spheres. Thus we can wonder if, once firmly installed in the female sphere, cocktails will embrace new meanings in the opposite direction, towards the definition of intimacy ties. By so doing, the dry martini could effectively mirror new developments in American-led world society: on the one hand, in accessing to leadership, women assume male-originated power icons; on the other hand, individuals will best show engagement with the collectivity by protecting family seclusion.
23 Cf. Edmunds (1998, 3): American presidents wielded the Martini in meetings with their Soviet counterparts in the 1940s and 1950s . US presidents consumers of dry martini: Hoover, Roosvelt, Nixon, Ford and G. Bush. 24 See above n. 19. 25 Cf. Edmunds (1998, 3-7): The Martini is American it is not European, Asian, or African . 26 Cf. Edmunds (1998, 18-22): The Martini is a mans, not a womans, drink . 27 Cf. Edmunds (2002, 53): Womens moderate at-home drinking was to set the pattern for alcoholic consumption in the twentieth century . As shown by, C. G. Murdock (1998, 105), female alcohol at home consumption in Victorian America, legitimized as no other beverage could alcohol consumption within the home .
7 Bibliography
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