Alcohol has been known and used by human beings for thousands of years, mostly as a lubricator for social events. It relaxes people and lowers their inhibitions; the desirable end is that of helping individuals to soften their edges and meld better into a group. Eating together intends to achieve this also; alcohol can speed and heighten the effect. Nevertheless, inhibitions are not lowered with impunity, and alcohol introduces an element of danger to a feast—a danger which, we have seen, lies always close, no matter how dormant, at mealtimes. Drinking on one’s own is almost invariably castigated by society. Social rules insist that drinking must always be done for social reasons, and never for solitary escapism or need. Where drinking is often done in common, the company evolves methods of controlling drinking behaviour and sharply discouraging excess; it may indulge in a certain decorous jollity, but it despises loss of control.
The Iteso of Kenya and Uganda admire a person who is epaparone, one who is “happy with himself,” and “likes talking to others in a gentle way, drinking with others, without causing trouble.” An Iteso beer party lasts between five hours and three days. People sit down in two concentric circles round a large pot of beer, drinking from straws often shared among two or three people. There is music, drumming, singing, dancing, and the whole affair is governed by a strict code of etiquette. Never hold your straw with your left hand; always ask permission to speak; anyone who speaks without asking first must take the straw out of the pot and not drink for a while; if you go out and come back in again, thank everyone before sitting down; women must not crawl under straws; no one must step over the straws; pull your straw out of the pot if you sneeze; if a straw is removed, do not pass between it and the pot; never blow bubbles in the beer; always sit facing the pot; never wipe the drinking end of the straw before passing it to the person you share it with; do not stand and stare at the pot.
A “sergeant at arms” is delegated to draw attention to drunken behaviour and eject anyone who loses control. Sucking straws is a knack quite difficult to learn—just as is the correct use of forks. A host must place his guest’s straw in the pot and get the beer moving through it; the guest must competently keep up the flow. The seating of the circles of participants expresses the kinship system of this society: it is all arranged so that each person sits in the half circle that does not contain his parents or his children. The seating separates people and underlines distinctions; yet all share the same pot of beer, and the straw system enables a good many of them to drink of it at the same time. Careful manners meanwhile maintain a lively consideration for others.
The Iteso practise drinking together in order to reach a state of what they call “much understanding.” But they know that a drinking party is a dangerous business: it opens up possibilities of violence, and hatred issuing in sorcery is to be expected. (Many of the rules of etiquette are said to be ways of avoiding sorcery.) The host who gets the beer flowing through the straw for his guest is simultaneously “tasting” his brew to show it is not poisoned. But a guest can show distrust, and so insult the host, by bringing his own personal straw to the party. And as always with manners, the Iteso fear that only lip service may be being paid to fellow feeling—they fear that keeping the rules of courtesy might simply be a disguise for real underlying antagonism. A good drinking party, therefore, is never a foregone conclusion: meeting in this way is a testing as much as it is a gentle, courteous expression of oneness. Coming together is fraught with danger, but we cannot be one without taking the risk and working to achieve that blissful state.
Sharing, which makes eating such a powerful symbol of community, is in some respects more perfectly performed when people drink the same liquid, even if we leave out of account the extra “punch” administered by alcohol. Even if we pour out separate drinks rather than suck the liquid from a single source, what runs from a single bottle into the different glasses is “all one”: it is seen to be one, and remains the same in every glass; no cutting or choosing is even possible. It has been rare among us until fairly recently for each person to have his or her own glass at table; often drink was imbibed from a single cup, passed round the company. As late as 1855, the American Illustrated Manners Book speaks of sharing a drinking vessel as a sign, quite commonly desired, of closeness: “Two persons may drink from the same glass, but this intimacy should never be forced on anyone.” And Gabriel Oak in Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) was thought “a nice, unparticular man” for refusing a clean cup for his ale. “No, not at all,” he said in a reproving tone of considerateness, “… I never fuss about dirt in its pure state, and when I know what sort it is.”
In spite of the modern terror of germs, the power of ceremonially sharing one cup to induce what anthropologists call communitas, or the sense of togetherness, at table, is probably even greater now that we are all used to having our own glasses; it can be used at celebrations of the Eucharist, and of passing the “loving” cup. (A similarly powerful symbol of unification is the circulation of the North American Indian tobacco pipe, where the smoke from the burning weed—also a mild drug—takes the place of alcohol.) Greeks at a symposium celebrated the bonds of friendship and likemindedness which held the group together by passing a capacious pottery cup of wine “in a circle,” as they said, from left to right, from person to person. The wine was mixed with water first, the proportions of water to wine being decided by the symposiarch. A liquid once mixed becomes again “all one,” and so perfectly expresses the agreement of everyone to abide by the rules.
Expecting to drink from a separate vessel, on the other hand, where sharing cups is the custom, signifies that one is hostile and distrustful: it is similar to demanding that one’s food should be tested for possible poison, or bringing one’s own straw to an Iteso beer party. A very grand person may be allowed to cut himself off from others by bringing his own cup—just as a great lord could once demand to have his food poison-tested. Among the Igbo of Nigeria, titled men are allowed their own gourd cup or horn mpi, but anyone else who brings his own shows distrust and a strained relationship with his host. In ancient Greece, a dinner party without singing or discussions, with no sharing wine mixed in the crater, or letting cups occasionally circulate among the group, produced a sense of stifling gloom. Orestes, who arrived in Athens pursued by the Furies for having murdered his mother, was received and given dinner; but the horror and fear which his polluted state inspired was expressed by every person present at the meal having to eat in silence and drink from a separate pitcher. Symposiasts seem to have been supplied with small individual cups in addition to the large shared ones; they may also have been allowed to bring their own cups to the party without causing offence. Athenian courtesans (they were called hetairai, “companions”) could attend banquets as respectable women could not; but they apparently had to bring their own cups. Some of these have survived, inscribed with their owners’ nicknames in the trade. Typical examples of such names meant “Lioness,” “Mania,” “Couchy,” “Skinny,” “Sweetie,” “Mouthy,” “Tipsy,” and “Toad.”
The patrons in certain popular restaurants in the South of France are all seated in close proximity to one another, and each is provided with a one-glass flask of the same cheap wine. A diner, Claude Lévi-Strauss tells us, may pour this wine not into his own glass but into that of his neighbour; the latter will courteously respond by returning the favour. It is the custom in Europe to ignore strangers; it is good manners to offer them “polite inattention,” in Goffman’s phrase. But in the action of pouring wine for each other these temporary neighbours alter their relationship, replacing fortuitous physical juxtaposition with social bonding; they dispel the awkwardness of feeling “at the same time alone and together.” The first person to pour implicitly calls upon the other to respond with good manners and cordiality, and do the same for him; he risks being rebuffed, of course, by indifference or boorishness. But if he succeeds—and the call, in this open arena, is strong: both the giver’s glass and his bottle stand glarin
gly empty—he may then start a conversation, having “broken the ice.” After the action of filling that first glass, there must follow either increased fellow feeling or hostility; there can be no going back to the original indifference.
Wine and beer can support powerful social roles like the one just described because people have chosen them to do so. These drinks, in Europe, accompany food because they are fermented rather than distilled, and considered nutritious and healthful, like dinner itself. They then seem more innocuous than other liquors because they are consumed at table. Beer is cheerful and convivial, and thought of even as a sort of liquid bread; dinner wine in France can arouse what Lévi-Strauss calls “a sort of mystical respect,” even if it is “more than often very bad.” But wine drunk by a tramp in a parking lot, or beer swilled on a doss-house bed, are different substances entirely; they become social problems, the objects of moral crusades to ban them. In our own day, of course, even drinking at meals can become a menace when people drive their cars immediately afterwards.
The measures taken by groups of drinkers to repress drunkenness are enormously various, and always culture-specific. Modern Westerners increasingly drink water at table; guests often express a preference for water even at a formal dinner party. The water chosen is fizzy “mineral” water, or flat water from a named spring, bottled and perhaps imported—ordinary tap water will seldom do. As usual, we make health the reason: we protest that tap water is full of chemicals, and believe that “mineral” water is better for our livers and digestive systems. It certainly costs money, and the bottle and the fizz feel slightly festive. Marketers may also add faint fruit tastes to bottled water, to give it a suggestion of wine.
Enormous research funds have been poured into finding out what appeals to us in a mineral-water bottle. Some of us prefer green bottles (cool, old-fashioned, and rustic); others like white (clean, clear, and modern). Labels, especially those on white glass, are in pastel colours: as little like wine labels as possible, yet—presumably to balance the modernity—old-fashioned in style. Plenty of writing—lists, for example, of the minerals contained and the encouragements they offer to various parts of the body—gives labels an archaic, European air with suggestions of the tried-and-true and the safely gourmet. Wine and especially beer are feared because they are fattening; they also make us sleepy, which at lunchtime on a working day is ill-advised: Even the French, these days, increasingly forego wine with any but the most celebratory meals. No French dinner, however, is really complete without cheese, and the French drink wine with ritual fervour, even if it is only a few mouthfuls of wine, when they reach the cheese course.
At ancient Greek symposia, wine was always “cut” (as we say) by the addition of water. The most common proportion was in fact more water than wine: three parts to two. A mixture of half water, half wine was daring, while unmixed wine was regarded as perilous. Quite commonly the wine was diluted with salt sea water or treated in the making with brine. Nobody has ever been able to account for this taste, which was an enthusiastic and long-lasting one. The Greek doctor Dioscorides complains that “sea-watered” wine causes stomach aches and nervousness; it also makes people thirsty, which could produce the opposite effect from that intended, which was to avoid, or at least postpone, drunkenness. Ancient Greeks were very messy drinkers. We have seen them flinging wine across the room in the game of kottabos, and repeatedly pouring libations over the altar or onto the floor; passing big flat pedestalled dishes of wine from couch to couch, while lying down, using only one hand, and becoming increasingly merry, surely cannot have been achieved without frequent mishap. Aristotle (Problems) and Plutarch (Symposiacs, 9) assure us that Greek habits of both mixing wine and using salt water for washing made the stains harder, not easier, to remove.
Wine which was akratistos, “not mixed with water in a crater,” was a special substance, sipped cautiously during only one drink offering at the symposium, that to the “good Daimon” of the house. It was also used for soaking one’s breakfast bread, the Greek word for breakfast being akratisma, an “unmixed wine” snack. Barbarians were known to drink their wine neat; the gruesome Scythians and Thracians even invited their wives to join in doing so. Obviously only Greeks were capable of conducting a proper symposium, where men revelled in clever talk (impossible if you were drunk), while under the influence of both Dionysus (wine) and his sage nurses the Nymphs (water). Romans proudly adopted most of the Greek drinking customs, and spread their use throughout their empire. A little water is always mixed with the wine in the Catholic Mass, where the correct manner of drinking at the time of Christ is remembered—and given a new significance: the water is the humanity of Christ, the wine his divinity, and both are definitively intermingled.
The Chinese and Japanese normally drink tea with their meals; alcohol is reserved for festive occasions. And at banquets, saké and jiŭ consumption is limited, while the imagery of interaction is multiplied by the provision to everyone of tiny porcelain cups for alcohol. There can be no “drinking deep,” as the Greeks did from their large cups, or in the manner of the Saxons, the Teutons, or the Scandinavians. Saké is taken in sips, with much decorous consideration of who should drink first, and who of the other convives should sip before or after whom. The ancient Chinese Li Chi prescribes constant bowing, whenever the cup is washed, taken, filled, and during the many exclamations of gratitude for having the drink poured by a neighbour; it is suggested that one might “drink all day without getting drunk” if enough bowing is done. Drinking “valour” is played down in favour of a set of polite reactions, in numerical order. On receiving the first cup, the Li Chi says, you should look grave; at the second, be pleased and respectful; and at the third, “look self-possessed and prepared to withdraw.”
A Greek version of the limits to be observed, and the consequences of breaking them, is expressed in the words which the poet Eubulus puts into the mouth of Dionysus: “Three craters only do I mix for the temperate—one to health, which they empty first, the second to love and pleasure, the third to sleep. When this is drunk up the wise guests go home. The fourth bowl is ours no longer, but belongs to hybris; the fifth to yelling, the sixth to prancing about, the seventh to black eyes. The eighth brings the police, the ninth vomiting, the tenth insanity and hurling the furniture.” Ancient wine mixed with water had roughly the alcoholic strength of modern beer; a guest’s share of three mixed craters was about six pints of liquid.
Even where temperance is not the main goal, demonstrations of reluctance may be correct etiquette. Japanese at a business lunch are expected at least to feign increasing merriness and submission to the influence of alcohol. One may pour sake for oneself only on very intimate occasions; other guests should be depended upon to fill one’s cup on formal occasions, as a sign of social awareness and good will. It is one’s duty to struggle against their importunate offers of more saké, while seeing to it that other people’s cups are repeatedly filled. Saké cups may be filled while they are standing on the table only when one is pouring for oneself; a person being served by someone else must lift the cup in his or her hand. One is obliged in consequence to notice the favour and take the opportunity to bow and express thanks. One may raise the cup against the pouring bottle to cut off the flow, all the while protesting fluently; but a dexterous saké-pourer will simultaneously raise the bottle and keep pouring. And in spite of the difficulty of these manoeuvres, and the increasing tipsiness of the diners, they must all do their utmost to avoid spilling anything: spilling is very bad form. The rules impose intense concentration and careful cooperation, and the result is a necessary awareness of other people, their considerateness and their needs. The Chinese host “leads” his guests much as the Greek symposiarch governed the party: no one must drink until invited to do so by the host, and the frequent celebratory drinking all together is usually initiated by the host as well. In many cultures it is very boorish to pour drink for oneself at a party. We ourselves might be permitted attention to our own glasses, but
only when pouring for everyone seated nearby; and glasses must not be filled to the brim.
It is almost invariably rude to begin drinking before some food at least has been consumed—eating something before drinking is known to “line the stomach” and help prevent drunkenness. In both China and Japan, food is classed in a completely different category from drink and this affects table manners; the serving of rice at the end of a banquet, for example, stops the consumption of alcohol then and there. Our own insistence is that wine cannot be drunk with soup. (It is an old English custom to serve Sherry or Sauternes with soup, but this is being increasingly replaced by the French rule of abstention from wine until after the soup course.) Broth, in spite of counting as food, is liquid already and therefore drinking wine with it may be considered inappropriate, although a rustic French custom (faire chabrot) actually encourages the dilution of the soup remaining in one’s bowl with wine; but the resulting mixture is then thought of as drink, not food, and the bowl is therefore lifted, like a cup, in the hands to the mouth. Soup should be served at a formal meal, and must at least be tasted: it is rude to leave it untouched. By this means we delicately ensure that everyone present is fortified before wine is served; we also enforce the highly civilized impression that nobody present is anxious to get started on the wine.
At some Chinese restaurants patrons leave the teapot with the lid raised to show that more tea is desired. German beer steins have covers to them, traditionally to signal whether or not the customer wants more beer. It used to be correct to place one hand over our glasses to show we wanted no more beer or wine, and Victorian women, who wore gloves to the table and took them off to eat, could cover the glass with a glove. It is now politer simply to refuse, or if this fails, to leave some liquid in the glass undrunk: we no longer expect guests to eat and drink up in order to show respect for the host’s generosity. Even worse than covering the glass is turning it upside down to prevent anyone pouring wine or beer into it; the gesture may be efficient, but statements of refusal must not go too far. The ancient Illyrians wore loosely tied belts to drinking parties. As drinking became more intense, belts were tightened, an action which presumably both signalled a desire to stop and reduced the ability to continue.
The Rituals of Dinner Page 31