Photo by Michelle Jones
Americans typically take it for granted that their behavior reflects their own decisions about what to do. Holidays provide many clear examples to the contrary. On New Year’s Eve there’s a very good chance that you will attend a party, that you will stay up until midnight and make noise at that time, and there is a fairly good chance you will drink too much alcohol. If you think this is simply a reflection of your own individual decisions, you need to explain how millions of others happened to make exactly the same individual decisions at the same time.
We do these things because they are traditions, and that implies that we don’t necessarily think very carefully about why we are doing them. So, quickly now, why exactly does the beginning of a new year require that you stay up and experience it and that you get excited, perhaps with the aid of a mind-altering substance?
Americans, of course, are not the only ones who observe these traditions. Throughout history, people have celebrated transitional holidays with parties, noise-makers, and drugs. By transitional holidays I mean times that mark important transitions in the calendar, such as New Year’s Eve, Halloween (New Year’s Eve in the pre-Christian European calendar) or Mardi Gras (held on the transition to the Christian season of Lent).
As I pointed out in an earlier post, transitions of all sorts are often marked with rituals. Think for example of initiation ceremonies in which a person goes through a transition from one sort of being to another. Anthropologists have shown that transitions are ritualized because they represent a point of tangency with the unknown. All human beings have classification systems that divide experience into classes and categories: types of people, types of animals, times of the year, and so on. When one sort of thing—say, 2009—turns into another sort of thing—say 2010—there must be a moment that is between the two and is nothing at all. “Nothing at all” is strange and potentially a little scary, because it could draw our attention to the fact that really all of the order we have imposed on the universe is our own creation.
Thus people have developed traditions to deal with those moments of time that are outside the normal order of things. They gather together both to pay homage to and to ward off the powers that dwell out there in the dark. Raucous gatherings at these points can serve many purposes: distraction from uncertainty, celebration of successfully negotiating the danger, flirting with the powers of the unknown, to name a few. Is there any problem with following age-old traditions without really thinking about why we do them? Not really; in my view this is one way we express our kinship with other human beings everywhere. Although now that we are armed with automobiles it’s probably best to re-think the drinking too much thing.
