The Rituals of Dinner

by Visser, Margaret

  There is no etymological connection whatever between the words “man” (or “woman” or “human”) and “manners,” but speakers of English have nonetheless found the presence of that common syllable fascinating. “Meat feeds, cloth cleeds, but manners make the man,” went a sixteenth-century jingle: what you eat and what you wear are less important than how you do both. In our own time, Mae West assures us:

  It’s not what I share but the way that I share it—

  That’s all, brother, that’s all.

  The problem is: how much of the way we are is culture, and how much is not ours to control?

  Ever since humankind began thinking (the word or syllable “man” very possibly comes from a root word meaning “think”), at any rate since the age of the earliest cave paintings, we have speculated and worried about the difference between ourselves and animals. It has always been intensely important for us to grasp this difference as far as we are able to do so, especially since we cannot help noticing how much like animals we are. For animals have no culture in the human sense; animals are therefore not, as human beings are, free from some of the tyranny of natural law. Nothing could be more revealing about twentieth-century preoccupations and anxieties than the latest way of posing this forty-thousand-year-old problem. We now tend to ask not “How are people different from animals?” but “In what ways are we the same?” We are so terrified of our own power, our own clear difference from animals, that we desperately seek ways to assure ourselves of our affiliation with the rest of creation. We are trying to remind ourselves, among other things, how much we belong; and struggling to restrain our greed and control our power, which we now see as threatening the earth and everything living on it. We are especially fascinated to find correspondences in animals, not only with our physical nature and biological needs, but with our social behaviour as well.

  It was with considerable excitement, therefore, that a longing to repeat a successful scenario was reputedly found among monkeys living on Koshima Islet in Japan. One day in 1953 a year-and-a-half-old female ape called Imo appears to have deeply impressed her fellows (and the watching Japanese scientists) by washing her sweet potato in water before she ate it. She repeated this action whenever she subsequently ate. She would hold the potato under the water with one hand and brush it, presumably trying to get the mud off, with the other. Other monkeys imitated her. The fashion spread, mainly among her kin and playmates. Within four or five years, potato-washing before eating had become de rigueur among most monkeys aged two to seven, and among some adults as well. All monkeys over five who took up washing potatoes were females.

  Starting in 1958, a tradition had begun, as these females passed on potato-washing by example to their children. The salt taste on potatoes dipped in sea water seems to have resulted in a variant: some monkeys began dipping their potatoes in salt water in between bites; others kept on simply washing them first. It certainly is tempting to detect here not only an ability in a group of monkeys to adopt improvements once they have been discovered by a particularly gifted member, but also an obsessive delight in drama that “works,” and a love of sticking to “the way it’s done,” even without the conscious perception of material benefits. We are reminded of human rituals, and the satisfactions we find in the constant re-enactment of routines, experiencing them as not merely useful but pleasantly repeatable.

  Another of the reasons for “manners” is precisely that they pressure people to behave in a predictable fashion. When we all “know what to do” on a given occasion—say at a wedding, or a death—we are all enabled by convention to interrelate, to play our often pre-ordained roles, just where having to make choices and think up scenarios would be most difficult and exhausting. This is why rules of politeness tend to cluster round moments of transition, of meeting others, making decisions, conferring, parting, commemorating. Rituals are there to make difficult passages easier. They include the gestures—waving, nodding, smiling, speaking set phrases—which daily smooth our meetings with other people; the attitudes and postures we adopt when standing or sitting in the presence of others, especially when we are talking to them; the muttering of “excuse me” when interrupting others or squeezing past them. Full-dress celebrations of coming together, of marking transitions and recollections, almost always require food, with all the ritual politeness implied in dining—the proof that we all know how eating should be managed. We eat whenever life becomes dramatic: at weddings, birthdays, funerals, at parting and at welcoming home, or at any moment which a group decides is worthy of remark. Festivals and feasts are solemn or holy days; they are so regularly celebrated by people meeting for meals that “having a feast” has actually come to mean “eating a lot.”

  Families meet for meals, too; the custom goes back 2 million years, to the daily return of protohominid hunters and foragers to divide food up with their fellows—whom they have usually, but by no means always, decided they would not eat. The extent to which we demand meals at regular times, mostly giving them specific names each with their own connotations (breakfast, lunch, supper), is as arbitrary as it can be solemnly binding. We even develop physical demands for food when food is “due”; the stomach contractions we experience at midday or in the evening, often quite painful ones, which signal mealtimes and which we call “hunger,” are strictly speaking nothing of the kind. They are the result of habit and bodily rhythms only, and they result from a culturally induced custom of eating regular meals. It is often part of a society’s manners code never to eat between meals, so that not only the meals but also the spaces between them are controlled. This turns every shared family dinner into a mini-feast or festival, so that it can, like a feast, celebrate both the interconnectedness and the self-control of the group’s members. Family dinners are rituals too, even though the typical “plot” of a family meal might include the device of lowering the level of formality as compared with other ritual occasions.

  The predictability of manners (if this is happening, then we must all do that) makes us interlock with each other, all act in concert. We connect, in addition, with events, dates, shared emotions, kinship and group ties, the life cycle, the world in general. Conventions, as the word suggests, are attitudes and patterns of behaviour we have in common: we “come together” (as in a business or political “convention”) in accepting them, or at least in knowing what they are, as everybody else does—everybody, that is, with whom we are accustomed to associate. It is an extremely complex and time-consuming business, making all these customary links and celebrating all this understanding. But if we stop celebrating, we also soon cease to understand; the price for not taking the time and the trouble is loss of communication. And conversely, the moment communication is lost, “manners” drop away. Li Chi, the Chinese Book of Rites, compiled in the first century B.C., warns that “the ruin of states, the destruction of families, and the perishing of individuals are always preceded by their abandonment of the rules of propriety.”

  Today, whatever we eat is enormously controlled and limited by rules—we demand that it be so—and the conditions under which we live make food supplies necessarily impossible without artifice. We also, even when alone, keep rules of bodily propriety that are as strict as they are largely unconscious; other people are present to us in that they have formed our habits. And few of us willingly eat always alone. Food is still our ritual relaxation (a “break” in the working day), our chance to choose companions and talk to them, the excuse to recreate our humanity as well as our strength, and to renew our relationships.

  Ritual is an expression of solidarity. Our own society is not one homogeneous mass: individuals in it belong not only to it and to their families, but often, in addition, to groups of people chosen for various reasons; one person may belong to many such groups. Each of these groups must “define” itself (literally, “place a boundary round” itself), or cease to exist as a group; it must declare itself to be both a single entity and marked off from the rest. Definitional enactment of together
ness and difference may include clothing style, bodily markings such as shaven heads or wild locks, and “in” language; nothing is as powerful, however, as ritual performance. People get together and enact what they hold in common. They might speak their agreement as part of the occasion, but more satisfactory still is the doing of an action together. The actual taking part establishes identity. It is obvious why the action of eating together—of partaking in a meal—suggests itself so immediately. An action comprises not only what is done, but how: the two are indissociable in the course of the action’s performance. In ritual behaviour, the “how” as well as the “what” of the matter have been laid down in advance. The individual performs, but the group’s conventions have decided the sequence, the spatial layout, and the manner. Table manners are rituals because they are the way in which it is commonly agreed that eating should be performed.

  There is another kind of solidarity expressed by ritual, and this it shares with language. Language is a cultural construct inherited from the past. If we wish to speak and be understood, we have no choice but to learn the linguistic system. This necessity forces us to enter into relationship—whether we like it or not—with the past: we need, and willingly accept, the constraints of pre-ordained rules. Language is not only for communication with people our own age; it is something we have in common with people older than us, who may have spoken our language before we were born. (Writing and reading have been invented to permit the extension of this continuity into the past and the future.) When we are young, older people occupy the field; they are in charge and in power. We must learn their language in order to meet and communicate with them, and if we want one day to occupy their place. We must, similarly, learn their manners if we want to be asked to dinner by them.

  The group which decides the “how” of ritual is composed not only of the present participants but also of the dead, insofar as we are prepared to entertain the ideas of people no longer living. Ritual is about lasting (which is one reason why ritual occasions are constantly repeated). Because it is pre-ordained, it always expresses order, and it predicts endurance; it links the present with the past, and it hopes also to link the present with the future. Ritual can be used, in its “continuity” function, to keep things going when energy flags and the members in a group cannot maintain their experience at the pitch they would like. People often say that “going through the motions” can help to remind them of past, more successful, experiences. It is possible to look about and see other people apparently rising to the occasion—so perhaps those less inspired might manage, too. Ritual can not only raise the emotional tone of the proceedings, but also lower it if necessary: for instance, ritual politeness can prevent rage from boiling over into action.

  But what about ritual that is merely empty form? Animals can “pretend,” as a puppy does when playing with a ball instead of pursuing prey; but animals can never match the human capacity for performing a ritual without intending what it says. Ritual becomes meaningless to us, and finally destructive, if it is used for deception. Jesus participated in many social and religious rituals and objected to bad manners. He nevertheless condemned the false pretences to purity of soul which were expressed, for example, by pre-dinner ablutions, and pointed to Isaiah’s insight that God detests “lip-service” that covers up the truth. Self-aggrandizing ritual was to be replaced by actions expressing real love and humility: where rituals impede us, they must be changed.

  In our own time, cataclysmic social revolutions have made large numbers of rules and conventions redundant, and many of them have not yet been replaced with new signs and voluntary constraints that are broadly recognized and accepted. This is a time of transition, when old manners are dying and new ones are still being forged. A good many of our uncertainties, discomforts, and disagreements stem from this state of flux. Sometimes we hold the terrifying conviction that the social fabric is breaking up altogether, and that human life is becoming brutish and ugly because of a general backsliding from previous social agreements that everyone should habitually behave with consideration for others. At other times a reaction against the social rituals of our own recent past leads us to lump all manners together as empty forms, to be rejected on principle. There is a shying away from elaboration, a preference for the bare bones of everything. We often seem, for instance, to prefer listening to incoherent speakers than to articulate ones, feeling that incoherence is “straight from the heart” while fluency must be a trick, or at least a method of hiding something. Apologies have almost gone out of style because they are hard to make, and being required by others to make them easily convinces us that they are merely insincere.

  We do cling to the (largely unexamined) ideal that we should strive to be “natural.” Spontaneity seems to be annihilated by anything resembling ritual: how can you be “natural” and still behave in predictable, because pre-ordained, patterns? (People rarely think of animal rituals, which are natural yet invariable, in this context.) We are also deceived, by our desire to reject ritual, into thinking that we are “freely choosing,” from within each individual self, to act in ways that are often in fact decided in advance by cultural forces, or by unrecognized but nevertheless real social structures. Such structures, indeed, often govern us precisely insofar as we are unconscious of their existence.

  The conventional prejudice against ritual assumes that rituals never change, and that individuals can have no influence upon ritual forms. In fact, individuals are just as important to ritual performance as the group and the rules are. It is only the individual who can personally mean what is going on. Each participant uses that ritual, plays with it, rings changes on it, subtly brings it into line with his or her present needs. Ritual is a process; it guides, but it also serves, and is guided. People do influence ritual—and they do so just because human rituals are not “natural.” We made them, so we can adapt them to our present requirement. We can also bend the rules if necessary: ritual codes that last always make allowance for circumstance.

  The fact is that our personalities are necessarily both individual and social, “natural” and “cultural”: these aspects of us can be discussed separately, but they cannot exist alone. The life of the social and cultural “parts” of us is communication with others, and this is achieved and enhanced by means of shared patterns, routines, systems of signals, in a word the performance—whether conscious or not—of rituals. (Even a hermit is a socially conditioned being. Hermits react to society by deliberately leaving it. They normally live alone, and act differently, in ways their societies can “read” and understand.)

  It might well seem to us at times, when we are disheartened by spectacles of human error and iniquity, that “culture” is a thoroughly bad thing; that we should stick with plain sex and nutrients and try to get over the rest. But as long as we live in society, purely physical and individual needs and desires must be mediated by rituals and manners. Social forms become part of the environment; society cannot exist without them. None of us would want to live “by bread alone,” even if it were possible. We are forced to create culture just because we are ourselves the building blocks of society. But that very condition makes society a human construct: if its manners deteriorate or become inappropriate, they can conceivably be changed, just because we ourselves collectively make and live by them. Therein lies our freedom.

  FEASTING AND SACRIFICE

  When the American anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker visited Melanesian New Ireland for ten months in the 1930s, she participated in eighty-five feasts. She was invited to parties for births, marriages, deaths, circumcisions, first teeth (“eating for tooth”), before war (“feast to bring fight”), and to make peace (“finish”). You could not name an infant, go on a long journey, receive help from neighbours, finish your house, or recover from an illness without throwing a party for between twenty and five hundred people. She was sure that other, minor feasts occurred without her knowledge. Only one of those she attended was held “just for sociability”; getting t
ogether was neither rare nor in need of intentional encouragement.

  Feasts the world over are given as celebrations of relationship among the diners, and also as expressions of order, knowledge, competence, sympathy, and consensus at least about important aspects of the value system that supports the group. Feasts display the fruits of human labour and good fortune. (One of those Powdermaker enumerates was held simply because there was plenty to eat: “food much,” it was called.) Feasts can also become boasts of the riches of the giver, enhancements of status, demands for attention, and even straight propaganda, urging certain courses of political action and condemning others. Olivier de La Marche described a banquet entertainment designed to rouse Europe into starting a new crusade against the infidel, in 1453. Charles the Bold hosted many “political” meals, crammed full with entertainments and what we would now call advertising; one such dinner placed before the guests thirty large pies bedecked with painted cloth to resemble blue and gold castles, each of them named, and symbolic of a walled town ruled by Charles.

  In sixteenth-century France Catherine de Médicis staged spectacular fêtes, which she called “magnificences,” to promote political unity; they included ballets, music, costume, and always dinner. Guests were once floated down a river to the banqueting house set up on an island, past elaborately staged allegorical happenings: an attack on a whale signifying war; a marine tortoise with musicians dressed as tritons on its back, singing about the king; Neptune in a car drawn by sea-horses, imposing order over savagery. In order to raise the patriotism of the French and prevent the breaking up of her kingdom, she undertook a “progress” that lasted two years, during which she travelled round the country with her fourteen-year-old son Charles IX, presenting him to the people. There were royal meals in castles, in inns, and in farmhouses; palace chefs in her retinue collaborated with local professionals to produce the kind of meals to which Catherine was accustomed. People ate with her, watched her eat, and marvelled at her Italian refinement. Catherine’s dinners inspired, impressed, drew people together—and incidentally helped to spread the “advanced” cooking techniques and the new table manners of the ultra-modern Italians.