In this ritual, Christ, who is for believers both God and human, enters not only into the minds but into the bodies of the congregation; the people present at the table eat God. No animal and no new death is needed, no bridges required: God enters directly. The Eucharist is the ritual perpetuation of the incarnational relationship with humankind which God initiated through Christ (the word “incarnation” means “becoming flesh”). The death of Christ—injustice, torture, murder, and sacrilege—is experienced as transformed by him, and his acceptance and forgiveness of it, into grace and salvation; an ending and an initiation into new life. And then the ultimate taboo is reverently broken as the people share out and consume his body and blood, the proofs of his love. They become “one body,” as they say, “through him, with him, and in him.”
The ceremony uses every psychological device defined by scholars of ritual. These include notions such as entrainment, formalization, synchronization, tuning, and cognitive structuring, as well as spatial organization and focusing, and perfected ordinary action. Distances both temporal and spatial are collapsed, as ritual contact is made with past, present, and future at once, and as “this place” is united with “everywhere else,” including the realm of the supernatural. When the bread and wine are consecrated, the profane becomes sacred, the sacred insists on annihilating the difference between it and the profane. One past death ritually repeated leaves no excuse for any further violence or scapegoating. All the boundaries are crossed: between individual and group; death and life; spirit and body; meaning and fact; beginning, lasting, and ending; old and new; here and elsewhere; eternal and temporal; linear and cyclical time; host and guest; God and humankind. As a meal, the Mass spans all of the meanings of eating at once—from cannibalism to vegetarianism, from complete fusion of the group to utterly individual satisfaction, from the breaking of the most fearful of taboos to the gentlest and most comforting restoration. All this and more is contained, expressed and controlled by ritual: dramatic movement and structure, song, costume, poetry, incense, gesture, and interaction; every one of the five senses is employed in the service of mystical experience. There are also tablecloths and napkins, candles, cups, plates, jugs, and wash basins. The Eucharistic celebration is a dinner, at which table manners are entirely necessary; for nothing like it—no ritual celebration whatever, not even the most ordinary lunch at a fast-food restaurant—can begin to be imagined unless the people participating in it commit themselves, both now and in future, to behaving.
2
Learning to Behave
Polite behaviour is ritual performed for the sake of other people, and for the sake of our relationship with other people. Its purpose is to please and soothe them, especially where a rough passage is to be feared; to recognize and supply their need for esteem and comfort; to get one’s way with them without arousing resentment. “Arousal” and “roughness” are avoided; smoothness and lubrication are what is sought. A polite person is polished (from the French poli; words to do with etiquette tend to derive from French).
Men are polished, through act and speech,
Each by each,
As pebbles are smoothed on the rolling beach.
Being made “smoother” by others’ insistence, by “rubbing up against each other,” we become easier to deal with and better able to handle other people. By an odd coincidence, “politeness” sounds like “politics,” which comes from the Greek word for a city (polis), just as “civilized” and “civil” come from Latin civis, a dweller in cities. It is often the assumption that “polished,” “civil” people are to be found where many other people live: they are probably in an urban environment, which renders them “urbane.”
Politeness forces us to pause, to take extra time, to behave in pre-set, pre-structured ways, to “fall in” with society’s expectations. It is therefore the object of education, both by our parents when we are small and by society later. Other people inevitably make demands on us and inhibit us, partly in order to make room for themselves; we learn that it is in our best interests to play the game, because we also require the freedom which other people’s restraint allows to us. But nothing about being polite is simple: the “polish” intended to help people interact with one another can be used to prevent real contact from occurring at all. It can also become itself a barrier, keeping the “unpolished” beyond the pale.
Mark Twain spoke of the cauliflower as “nothing but cabbage with a college education.” We immediately see what he means: cabbages are simple, round, and lowly; but cauliflowers erupt into a sort of solid flower, elaborate, white, delicate, and somehow “refined.” “Training is everything,” Twain concludes—although, in the very metaphor he uses, he draws attention to cauliflower’s original cabbagy “background,” which the vegetable can never entirely transcend, no matter how much success its college degree might signify. But the cauliflower has complicated itself; it has put on embellishment. And in doing so it has prepared itself to move in “the best circles.”
BRINGING CHILDREN UP
It is not enough that a child must grow up; he or she must “be brought” up as well. The verb is passive—the bringing is done to the child—and the implication is that the road travelled leads to a higher level.
Babies cannot be treated as though they were adults. They are utterly dependent on adults for their survival; they cannot walk or talk or eat or control their bowels. People have often thought of babies as not quite human—feeding off their mothers like little cannibals, impossible to discuss things with or explain things to, unruly, messy, demanding, “untamed,” and rowdy. The ancient Romans believed that baby bears were born not only helpless but shapeless as well: mother bears (who had presumably been seen from a distance cleaning their newborns with their tongues) were thought actually to lick their offspring into the shape of little bears after their birth. We think of human children as needing, culturally speaking, to be “licked into shape”; fitted to be “one of us.”
The process begins as soon as possible, with nursing. Mothers can be indulgent nursers, or let their babies cry to be fed; the infant soon experiences the degree to which it, or its mother, determines the feeding schedule. The mother’s attitude in this regard, as in so much else, tends to be culturally induced. In most of the societies anthropologists have studied, mothers show enormous indulgence in feeding their babies, tending on the whole to feed them as soon as they show the slightest sign of wanting to be fed. In many cases women are not allowed any sexual relations while nursing. Sooner or later—very often because her husband demands it—the mother must wean her child. Renewed sex is desired, a new sibling has arrived, the woman’s labour and unremitting attention are required in other fields. The baby, like its mother, has no choice but to fit in with these claims, suddenly laid by other people.
Every human being without exception must pass through this rite of passage, being forbidden the motherly breast or the bottle and taught to eat solid food. The child must learn for most of its mealtimes to give up sucking, the skill with which it was born. The area inside the cheeks of small children is well provided with tastebuds, which adults’ cheeks are not; babies taste not only with their tongues but with their cheeks. This is thought to be why they like packing their mouths with food. They must be made to take less at a time. Chewing itself has to be learned, by trial and error. Hunger—direct, physical, and individually experienced, the natural necessity to which every one of us submits—now truly enters the social domain. It will continue to be teased, delayed, diverted, interpreted, and manipulated by other people until the day we die.
The growing child is educated in, and becomes accustomed to, the food of its culture (the English word “wean” originally meant “to accustom,” as in one’s “wont”). If adults commonly eat powerful substances like chili peppers or fermented fish, the child will have become accustomed even before it is weaned to the smells of these, and even to their taste, through its mother’s milk. Foods like these are usually culture-specific; they
may function as distinguishing marks of the society that learns from childhood to eat them. Other people, who have not been taught as children to like them, find the consuming of them incomprehensible. They might mock the chili-eaters and the swallowers of smelly fish by jeering at their weird tastes—but even in so doing they are forced to recognize the identity of the group. So the Germans are nick-named “Krauts,” the French “Frogs,” and the Inuit “Eskimo” (from an Indian word meaning “those who eat meat raw”). It is well attested that people continue to enjoy as adults the food they learned to like as children. They grow up loving, say, curries and chutneys, or pasta and tomatoes, olives, sharp cheeses, and bitter herbs, and this food seems normal to them. Other people seem to them to eat very poorly indeed by comparison. The language one first learns to speak, and the food one is accustomed to eat in childhood, are two of the most fundamental preservers of an adult’s social and racial identity.
Many adults are extremely conservative about what they eat. This attitude, which is known as neophobia, “the fear of the new,” has the important biological function of guarding us from eating unknown, possibly poisonous substances: people all have a tendency to be fussy about what they put into their mouths. Children who are first learning to eat solid foods will try (or resign themselves to) almost anything; solidity itself is enough of a problem to get on with. But this is a temporary phase; they soon “lock in” to a set of expectations about what to eat and what to refuse. These are derived from a combination of their own personal experiences with food and the prevailing cultural pattern. They become extremely finicky as they learn to differentiate, deciding what to choose and what to reject from the vast numbers of possibilities in the world, which have been made available to them by the weaning process itself.
There is another, totally different attitude towards food, which is neophilia, “the love of the new.” Human beings are capable of seeking for variety, almost in itself. They will try new ways of cooking, new ingredients, new combinations of tastes. They hunt through books describing the food of cultures very different from their own, searching for new things to eat, new flavours and textures to try. Such people have usually had occasion to conquer and break out of their “fear of the new” through contact with other cultures and the availability to them of a wide assortment of “strange” foods. We admire and envy such people, and feel we should try to imitate them, thinking how sophisticated, knowledgeable, and broad-minded they are. Yet neophilia, in fact, is a typical human reaction to eating. Our own culture is experiencing at the moment a strong bias, or perhaps more specifically a pull exerted by the trend-setting “upwardly mobile” classes, towards neophilia.
Human beings are omnivorous, which means far more than being able to live on flesh, or vegetables, or both. They can survive either on a very monotonous diet (if only a few things happen to be on hand) or, if that small but satisfying range of foods becomes scarce, they can leave for new pastures and search for other things to eat. This physical capability, and the openness to experimentation which it allows, was as important for our successful evolution as was neophobia. Both tendencies inhabit all of us. The philosopher Wittgenstein hated being confronted with a change in his diet: he regarded the effort involved in adapting to it a waste of his energy. He once made it clear to some friends with whom he was staying that it did not much matter to him what he ate, so long as it was always the same. He settled during those months for an almost unvarying diet of Swiss cheese and rye bread.
Fast-food manufacturers and other mass producers of foodstuffs love and encourage the neophobia in us: the acceptance of, even preference for, hamburgers or pizza day in, day out, served always in the same way, in similar surroundings, and with always the same small range of trimmings; the eternal steak or lobster because these are the “best,” the “most unadorned,” the “most expensive”; the constant comforting presence on the table of the same brand-name sauce to lend a predictable taste to everything. A place in our lives for the monotonous is assured in any case, because people under stress always settle for eating what they are used to. We reject, for instance, anything fancy for breakfast, feeling fragile and unadventurous just after the little daily trauma of getting out of bed. Similarly, sick people are not usually tempted by strong-tasting, constantly changing, or “inventive” food.
Nowadays there is tremendous encouragement to develop the neophiliac tendency in ourselves. In parts of the world where people already have plenty to eat, “more” can only mean “more expensive” and “more various.” Adventurousness has become an aspect of consumerism; it is in addition a cultural expression of one of the cardinal principles of modern ideology, which is mobility. It is a response to the increasing pluralism of modern society, and the unavoidable contact into which we are flung, with new ideas and different tastes. “Love of the new” has come to seem a hallmark of experience and awareness, a sign of competence and a willingness to accept cultural enrichment—part, in short, of the modern middle-class image. “Ethnic” food was once regarded as a sort of obstinate hangover from the past, clung to by simple folk who ought to have learned how to eat better. Nowadays, smart restaurants set out to tempt smart mobile people with the richly various products of all the traditions. We are exhorted to try not only French and Italian ideas about food, but also Thai and Japanese—or Afghan, Ethiopian, or Sri Lankan.
Neophilia receives strong backing from the health craze. Dieticians tell us to eat a wide variety of foods, plenty of vegetables, fish, meat, cheese, fruit. Parents are convinced for many reasons that what their children need is variety. And so the battle begins, as children, having only just learned to be neophobic, confront tremendous parental and cultural pressures to “eat well,” that is, variously. Parents are trying to do what they are convinced is best; children often resist. They learn quickly that refusing food is a sure way of gaining attention, of upsetting the person who has bought and worked to prepare a meal according to the best modern advice.
It is impossible for us, given our whole background, to let children do without their food; if they refuse to eat, we feel acutely unhappy. Preventing children from eating (sending them to bed without any supper or without any dessert) was a common punishment for bad behaviour until only very recently. Adults themselves used regularly to fast or abstain from luxury foods, for reasons having to do with autonomy in its original sense, “self-control.” The idea of fasting for most Western people has undergone a mysterious change: self-control where food is concerned now means control of one’s shape, in conformity with the convention that people should look narrow rather than wide. Children (who must get bigger) cannot be “on a diet” except for strictly medical reasons; children, unlike adults, must obviously eat. If they (often like adults themselves) refuse to eat much, or want to eat only certain things, adults must try to change their ways.
In France, parents traditionally insist that it is good manners for children to “try a little of everything.” The rule prepares small French people to accept the variety that is offered by French cuisine; it is one reason why the French have withstood the modern onslaughts of sugar as well as they have. North American parents impose no such rule of manners; their insistence has to do entirely with health. Food manufacturers infinitely prefer “health” to “manners” as a guide to behaviour. Manners are matters of self-control and a semi-moral guide; they cause people to make up their minds before commercial interests have a chance to assert themselves. “Health” is vaguer, more scientific and less human, and far less attainable as an ideal. Into the breach between this abstract goal and our hesitations about how to achieve it leap the purveyors of foods and of technology.
They love giving advice to parents on how to persuade children to eat a healthy diet. The promoters of microwave ovens, for instance, put out a whole line of “microwavable” foods which come to us in small, crumb-coated pieces. The advertising of such products suggests that children be allowed to eat these crumbed, “bite-sized” pieces with their fingers,
“because this might persuade the child to try different foods.” Microwave ovens happen to manage small pieces best, and in addition the manufacturers capitalize on the “neat, clean, separate” symbolism so precious in our culture generally. Ready-yellowed coatings are designed to look appetizing even as they cover awkward food colours and shapes, and disguise the raw look which customers are said to object to, even if the food is raw. The promoters also strengthen and “package” their contents for easier transport and longer shelf life. If you buy your broccoli bits crumbed (that is, disguised) and then microwave them, you will make your life a lot easier; and your child just might be seduced by the novelty, and by not having to use knives and forks, into eating, for once, “something green.”
It is very common for the difference between adults and children to be underlined by food distinctions. Many societies decide that there are foods children must not eat. Often the reasons given are half-physical, half-moral ones. Chaga children were told, “Don’t eat the mouthparts of any animal, especially its tongue: it causes you to quarrel”; “Don’t eat the animal’s head—it makes you stubborn.” So adults attempt to assure children that bad moral behaviour can be “turned down” as an option, just as food can be relegated to the “not eaten” category. In our own culture, where taboos are underpinned less by moral than by health rules, children are prevented from eating and drinking what is “bad for them”—but all right for adults. It is our way of finding some respite from our demanding offspring: while we are drinking our unhealthy tea or coffee, children cannot be admitted to the party. They must go away and play together, or drink something “safe”—like soft drinks. Finally being admitted to coffee- and tea-drinking, then, is a minor initiation rite: you are old enough to “take it,” and by that time you are also likely to know how to “behave.”
The Rituals of Dinner Page 6