All human cultures have seasonal and transitional celebratory rites of some sort. Other animals just automatically register things such as the passing of the seasons, and adjust their behaviour accordingly: humans have to make a huge song-and-dance about every little calendrical punctuation mark. Fortunately for anthropologists, humans are also quite predictable, and tend to make pretty much the same kind of song-and-dance about such things - or at least the festivities of different cultures tend to have a lot of features in common. Singing and dancing, for example. Most also involve eating, and virtually all involve alcohol.
The Role of Alcohol
The role of alcohol in celebration is particularly important in understanding the English, and requires a little bit of explanation. In all cultures where alcohol is used at all, it is a central element of celebration. There are two main reasons for this. First, carnivals and festivals are more than just a bit of fun: in most cultures, these events involve a degree of 'cultural remission' - a conventionalised relaxation of social controls over behaviour. Behaviour which would normally be frowned upon or even explicitly forbidden (e.g. promiscuous flirting, raucous singing, cross-dressing, jumping in fountains, talking to strangers, etc.) may, for the duration of the festivities, be actively encouraged. These are liminal periods - marginal, borderline intervals, segregated from everyday existence, allowing us, briefly, to explore alternative ways of being. There is a natural affinity between alcohol and liminality, whereby the experience of intoxication mirrors the experience of ritually induced liminality. The chemical effects of alcohol echo the cultural chemistry of the festival.
But although humans seem to have a deep-seated need for these altered states of consciousness, for an escape from the restrictions of mundane existence, liminality is also rather scary. The fact that we restrict our collective pursuit of altered states and alternative realities to specific, limited contexts suggests that our desire for this liberation is by no means unequivocal - that it is balanced by an equally powerful need for the stability and security of mundane existence. We may be enthralled by the liminal experience of the carnival, but we are also afraid of it; we like to visit alternative worlds, but we wouldn't want to live there. Alcohol plays a double or 'balancing' role in the context of festive rituals: the altered states of consciousness induced by alcohol allow us to explore desired but potentially dangerous alternative realities, while the social meanings of drinking - the rules of convivial sociability invariably associated with the consumption of alcohol - provide a reassuring counterbalance. By drinking, we enable and enhance the experience of liminality that is central to festive rites, but the familiar, everyday, comforting, sociable rituals of sharing and pouring and round-buying, the social bonding that is synonymous with drinking, help us somehow to tame or even 'domesticate' the disturbing aspects of this liminal world.
So, there are the universals. But there are also some cross-cultural variations. Although alcohol and celebration are inextricably bound together in all societies where alcohol is used, the connection appears to be stronger in 'ambivalent' drinking cultures - those with a morally charged relationship with alcohol, where one needs a reason for drinking, such as England - than in 'integrated' drinking cultures, where drinking is a morally neutral element of normal life and requires no justification. The English (along with the US, Australia, most of Scandinavia, Iceland, etc.) feel that they have to have an excuse for drinking - and the most common and popular excuse is celebration. In 'integrated' drinking cultures (such as France, Spain and Italy) there is little or no disapprobation of drinking, and therefore no need to find excuses for drinking. Festivity is strongly associated with alcohol in these integrated cultures, but is not invoked as a justification for every drinking occasion: a celebration most certainly requires alcohol, but every drink does not require a celebration.
The Celebration Excuse - and Magical Beliefs
As well as cross-cultural research with my SIRC colleagues on festive drinking, I did a study a few years ago specifically on English celebrations and attitudes to celebrating. This study involved the usual combination of observation-fieldwork, informal interviews and a national survey.
The main finding was that the English appear to be a nation of dedicated 'party animals', who will seize upon almost any excuse for celebratory drinking. As well as the established calendrical festivals, a staggering 87 per cent of survey respondents mentioned bizarre or trivial events that had provided an excuse for a party, including: 'my teddy-bear's birthday', 'my mate swallowing his tooth', 'when my neighbour's snake laid eggs after we'd thought it was a male', 'the first Friday of the week' and 'the fourteenth anniversary of the death of my pet hamster'.
In addition to the more outlandish excuses, over 60 per cent admitted that something as mundane and insignificant as 'a friend dropping in' had provided a good enough excuse for a bout of celebratory drinking. More than half the population celebrate 'Saturday night', just under half have celebratory drinks merely because 'It's Friday' and nearly 40 per cent of younger respondents felt that 'the end of the working day' was a valid excuse for drunken revelry.
Calling a drinking session a 'celebration' not only gets round our moral ambivalence about alcohol, providing a legitimate excuse for drinking, but also in itself gives us a sort of official licence to shed a few inhibitions. Celebrations are by definition 'liminal' episodes, in which certain normal social restraints can be temporarily suspended. A drink that has been labelled 'celebratory' therefore has even greater magical disinhibiting powers than a drink that is just a drink. 'Celebration' is a magic word: merely invoking the concept of celebration transforms an ordinary round of drinks into a 'party', with all the relaxation of social controls that this implies. Abracadabra! Instant liminality!
This kind of magic works in other cultures as well - and drinks themselves can be used to define and 'dictate' the nature of an occasion, without the need for words, magic or otherwise. Certain types of drink, for example, may be so strongly associated with particular forms of social interaction that serving them in itself acts as an effective indicator of expectations, or even as an instruction to behave in a specified way. In most Western cultures, for instance, champagne is synonymous with celebration, such that if it is ordered or served at an otherwise 'ordinary' occasion, someone will invariably ask 'What are we celebrating?' Champagne prompts festive, cheerful light-heartedness, which is why it would be inappropriate to serve it at funerals. In Austria, sekt is drunk on formal occasions, while schnapps is reserved for more intimate, convivial gatherings - the type of drink served defining both the nature of the event and the social relationship between the drinkers. The choice of drink dictates behaviour to the extent that the mere appearance of a bottle of schnapps can sometimes prompt a switch from the 'polite' form of address, sie, to the intimate du. In England, although we do not have the same clear linguistic distinctions, beer is regarded as a more informal, casual drink than wine, and serving beer with a meal indicates expectations of informal, relaxed behaviour - even guests' body language will be more casuaclass="underline" slumping a bit rather than sitting up straight, adopting more open postures and using more expansive gestures.
In this respect, then, the English are not very different from other humans, but our belief in, and need for, the disinhibiting powers of both drinks and magic words is perhaps stronger than most other cultures', as our social inhibitions are more formidable. Our ambivalence and magical beliefs about alcohol are defining features of all English rites of passage, from the most important life-cycle transitions to the most trivial, trumped-up, teddy-bear's-birthday rituals.