Feasting in society

All human societies practice feasting or the communal consumption of food and drink. Some foods or methods of preparation are only seen during times of feasts. For example, in the United States, turkey and special recipes of stuffings, cranberry relish, and pumpkin pie may only be made for the feasts accompanying the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. In other cases, there may be feast foods that are consumed at every feast and the feast would not be complete without them. These are often foods that take a long time to prepare, such as piki, a wafer thin bread made from ground corn, that is made at Hopi for special occasions.

Anthropological study of feasting has identified several important variables. Among these are (1) the scale of the social group participating in the feast, (2) scheduling of the feast within the annual cycle, and (3) the kinds of foods and other goods that are involved (Toll 1985:369-406). Small-scale ceremonies with restricted sharing may occur throughout the year, because "critical rites" such as birth and death are relatively random in their temporal distribution. However, there may be periods of restricted sharing co-occur with times of particularly low food availability. Still another situation is seen in community wide feasts, which are more closely sequenced to periods of abundance such as summer or fall. In these cases, unrestricted sharing tends to occur and there is greater participation in economic activities such as trading.

An important component of feasts is communal consumption, but the social contexts of feasting may also vary within and between societies (Hayden 1995). One important dimension of feasting is the relation between hosts and guests. These relations may be institutionalized and asymmetrical, as in the hosting of a feast by elite members of a society. In some cases these feasts may be competitive as hosts put on ever more impressive displays of food and other goods in an effort to maintain allegiances and recruit new followers. Feasting therefore may have a political as well as a social basis as networks reach well beyond kin. However, feasting may also have important exchange functions or be celebrations of solidarity that do not imply institutionalized positions of authority.

Fermented Beverages and Feasting

Alcoholic beverages are often a part of feasting behavior. Fermented beverages were probably used as part of feasts organized to bring a labor force together to complete community tasks. In Africa (http://www.sciencenews.org/sn_arc98/5_23_98/bob1.htm), this is sometimes called "beer farming" because many labor-intensive tasks associated with the agricultural cycle were accompanied by feasting and drinking. In Mexico, among the Tarahumara, corn beer or tesguino accompanied all feasts, including those organized to bring labor pools together to construct houses and conduct agricultural activities. We will look at this case more extensively, below. Because of the possibilities for exploitation of labor, and the fact that feasts often bestow status to the organizers, several anthropologists have begun to explore the political implications of alcoholic beverages (Arnold 1999; Dietler 1990; Sherratt 1997). These researchers point out the association of evidence for drinking in the archaeological record with evidence for changes in political organization in past societies. The exact nature of these changes is being debated, but it is likely that certain individuals and families used fermented beverages to construct and reinforce their power during times of feasting.

Most societies have some method of fermenting or distilling plant products to produce intoxicating beverages. Fermentation is the oldest of these methods and archaeologists have found evidence for wine fermentation as far back as the 6rd millennium B.C. from ceramics from the site of Hajji Firuz Tepe in Iran East (see http://www.upenn.edu/museum/Wine/wineintro.html). Beer fermentation is now dated back to 3500-3100 B.C. from the residues found on pottery from the site of Godin Tepe in the Zagros Mountains of Western Iran (see http://www.upenn.edu/museum/News/beer.html).
Archaeologists have interpreted the widespread use of special drinking vessels in Europe, called beakers, as evidence for the consumption of beer in feasts (Arnold 1996; Sherratt 1997). In the Americas, fermentation was discovered independently and was the only method of making alcoholic beverages until distillation was introduced by Europeans.

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