Introduction
Laura Bauer writes in the Kansas City Star that one in five Johnson County sixth-graders surveyed said they had consumed a beer or another alcoholic beverage. Prosecutors and local and state police have tried to crack down. Now they say it’s the community’s turn to pitch in. There were town hall meetings held Tuesday, March 28th in Kansas City, Douglas County, Miami County and throughout America with the goal of educating communities and parents about alcohol use among youth. It’s a national push to create grassroots efforts in which parents are informed of how many children are drinking, how young those children are and how parents can address the problem. “We’d like to invite anyone in the community to sit around the table,” said Jason Verbeckmoes, prevention project coordinator with the Regional Prevention Center in Johnson County. “We don’t know where this is going to go from here…What we are trying to do is change the social norm [emphasis mine] that has been developed in this community.” Kelly Peak, prevention team leader with Addiction and Prevention Services for Kansas said, new information shows that the early consumption of alcohol can affect a child’s brain. “That’s why,” she said, “it’s time everyone gets involved and does more than just meet once and talk about how bad the problem is.”
After reading this article, I was left asking, “Just how bad is it?” As I began to investigate I realized that Johnson County is actually better statistically than the other areas of the country. I came across a report on substance abuse that said,
“The abuse of legal and illegal drugs is rampant in our society. The consequences of abuse and addiction are devastating and they pose a major threat to America ’s most precious asset, its young people. Tragically, for many students on our nation’s college and university campuses, substance abuse, particularly excessive alcohol consumption – “binge drinking” – has become as much a part of the college experience as studying…The evidence is overwhelming that binge drinking is the number one substance abuse problem in American college life. What was once regarded as a harmless ‘rite of passage’ has in the 1990s reached epidemic proportions: one in three college students now drinks primarily to get drunk….Nothing interrupts the growth and social development of college students more than the abuse of alcohol, drugs, and cigarettes. Excessive college drinking is too often accepted as a ‘rite of passage,’ thus nurturing a behavior that is destroying lives and endangering our country’s future.” Each year, students spend $5.5 billion on alcohol, more then they spend on drinks, tea, mild, juice, coffee, or books combined. On a typical campus, per capita students spending for alcohol - $446 per student – far exceeds the per capita budget of the college library.”
As opposed to negative messages society conveys on illegal drugs and cigarettes, society’s message regarding alcohol is much more subtle. Drinking is socially acceptable as long as it is not excessive. Califano sums up this problem by saying “If we choose to ignore or relegate excessive college drinking to a ‘rite of passage,’ schools will nurture a behavior that is destroying lives and potentially endangering our country’s future.”
Attempts to “deal” with or to “fix” this issue have been delegated to a number of different groups: family, schools, churches, the President, etc. While I would agree with this assertion, I question which individual or group has the authority to stop this epidemic of drinking? “Teenagers are the target of nearly every effort to cut smoking, alcohol abuse, and illegal drug use. After all, the teen years are when most people acquire bad habits they’ll have the rest of their lives. One has to wonder whether, by focusing so single-mindedly on teenagers, these laws and exhortations convey the message that smoking [and drinking] is an adult activity – not merely a stupid one.”
Youth appear to be drinking for a specific purpose and accordingly increases consumption. Asking what these changes purpose may be would assist any strategic planning to resolve or reconcile this prolimic problem. Youth seem to be drinking for some purpose and in light of the increase of drinking, we must ask what is changing in the lives of youth that would encourage underage drinking. The research problem of this paper argues along with The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential:
“The current lack of rites of passage is an urgent problem: The absence of rites of passage leads to a serious breakdown in the process of maturing as a person. Young people are unable to participate in society in a creative manner because societal structures no longer consider it their responsibility to intentionally establish the necessary marks of passing from one age-related social role to another, such as: child to youth, youth to adult, adult to elder. The result is that society has no clear expectation of how people should participate in these roles and therefore individuals do not know what is required by society.’”
I would contend with Grimes that the problem is that parents, teachers, youth ministers and other adult authorities are losing their role as and initiators. The task passes instead to the peers. “Initiation in Western society often takes this postmodern, peer-driven form – adolescents initiating adolescents, sometimes compulsively, unconsciously and violently. Such initiations, detached from family and community, are practices that may be substitutes for traditional initiation conducted by elders who represent a lineage.” At the heart of this research is the hypothesis that alcoholic drinking is one of the many rituals that youth use today as a rite of passage into adulthood. “Modern society has provided adolescents with no rituals by which they become members of the tribe, of the community. All children need to be twice born, to learn to function rationally in the present world, leaving childhood behind.” This paper will also investigate why there are a lack of passage rites. Myerhoff claims that rites of passage are as important now as they have always been, particularly for our social and psychological well-beings. Given the fragmented, confusing, complex, and disorderly nature of modern post-modern experience, perhaps rites of passage are more important to orient and motivate us in the predictable and unique life crises that present themselves. But now youth are left to devise for themselves the myths, rituals, and symbols needed to provide life with clarity and significance; youth do so alone, “often in ignorance and always in uncertainty.”
In a society devoid of rites of passage, it seems that youth see drinking as that identity marker representing what it means to be “adult.” “Being a teenager is, in some respects, an unnatural act, an imposition of culture on biology. It means continuing to be a child when your body is telling you otherwise.” “Compared with most other societies, America is short of rituals that meaningfully recognize young people’s arrival at maturity. If wise elders don’t initiate adolescents, then adolescents will initiate themselves, but who, I mused, will train us uninitiated adults such as youth ministers in the art of initiating?
The paper hopes to address this issue and other questions by researching rites of passage for youth. It will begin broadly with defining rituals and will focus more specifically on rites of passage and initiatory rites of youth in particular. In this process the paper will seek to show prominent theory on rites of passage, how community should socially integrate youth in the transition to adulthood, and the lack of initiation rites, which cause youth to search for rites outside of the community. The paper will shift focus to drinking as a rite of passage. Drinking is a social act that constructs a time and space for itself as well as allows youth a passage to portray an ideal world where they are no longer designated to the lower status of “teenager,” but places youth on a level field with adults.
While this is a paper is an attempt to research youth and the desire for rites of transition to adulthood, I believe that mere knowledge of the matter is not enough for change. Rites of passage are productive transforming agents that act. As a seminarian, I also believe that these transforming agents can only truly transform through the grace and initiative of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, I will briefly conclude with an understanding of the Church’s encounter in rites of initiation and certain ritual practices that could be implemented that will guide and walk alongside the youth in the transition from adolescence to adulthood.
Ritual
In order to examine these rituals and rites of passage, one must begin by defining the terms. Grimes puts these terms in perspective saying that “rites of passage are only one among many kinds of ritual, and initiation is just one of the rites of passage.” Therefore, we will begin broadly with understanding rituals. Then we will focus on rites of passage and more specifically, initiatory rites.
Rituals operate symbolically both in the broader context of the rite of passage and in the meanings of specific acts within the rite. This paper will focus on the rituals that are within the rite. The ritual aspect of rites of passage is argued to be the key element that links to the psychosocial conception of identity formation. “It is the performance and repetition of rituals that occur throughout the rite of passage ceremony that advance the outcomes of optimal identity development.” The initiate will successfully progress through a series of rituals that constitute the rite of passage. “Rituals reveal values at their deepest level…Men [and women] express in ritual what moves them most, and since the form of expression is conventionalized and obligatory, it is the values of the group that are revealed. I see in the study of rituals the key to an understanding of the essential constitution of human societies.”
Rites of Passage
Rites and Passages
“Rites of passage are a category of rituals that mark the passages of an individual through the life cycle, from one stage to another over time, from one role or social position to another, integrating the human and cultural experiences with biological destiny: birth, reproduction, and death.” Grimes makes a distinction between traditional rites and invented rites; however, both rites are meant to facilitate or obstruct difficult passages in human lives. A distinction must also be made between a rite and a passage. “Not every passage is a rite of passage. We undergo passages, but we enact rites.” Birth, coming of age, marriage, and death are widely accepted as precarious moments requiring rites for their successful negotiation, but there are other treacherous occasions less regularly handled by ritual means: the start of school, abortion, a serious illness, divorce, job loss, rape, menopause, and retirement. More often than not, these events, particularly when they arrive unanticipated, are undergone without benefit of ritual.
Some cultures offer an array of rites throughout a lifetime, while others barely offer any at all. Grimes says that the main reason for having rites of passage is to enable mindful attendance to events that might otherwise pass us by. Passages can be negotiated without the benefit of rites, but in their absence, there is a greater risk of speeding through the dangerous intersections of the course of life. He claims that in the end, people regret their failure to contemplate these passages. The primary work of a rite of passage is to ensure that we attend to such events fully. “Effective rites depend on inheriting, discovering, or inventing value-laden images that are driven deeply, by repeated practice and performance, into the marrow.”
Rites of Passage Theory
The classical rites-of-passage theory was first formulated by Arnold van Gennep, who explained how rites work through spatial metaphors. According to this theory, a rite of passage is like a domestic threshold or a frontier between two nations. Such places are “neither here nor there” but rather “betwixt and between.” Since the threshold zone is no-man’s land, it is dangerous, full of symbolic meaning, and guarded. A rite of passage is a set of symbolized actions as a means of passing through this dangerous zone, safely and memorably. Van Gennep defined rites de passage as: “Rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and age.” Van Gennep has revealed that all rites of passage or “transition” are marked by three phases: separation, margin (or limen signifying “threshold” in Latin), and aggregation. Victor Turner defines each:
“The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions (a ‘state’), or from both. During the intervening ‘liminal’ period [second phase], the characteristics of the ritual subject (the ‘passenger’) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the third phase (reaggregation or reincorporation) the passage is consummated. The ritual subject, individual or corporate, is in a relatively stable state once more and, by virtue of this has rights and obligations vis-à-vis others of a clearly defined ‘structural’ type.”
Turner changed the conception of ritual in the 1960s and 1970s. “For him, ritual was not the guardian of the status quo or a means of garnering social consensus, as it had been previously under the influence of French sociologist Emile Durkheim. Rather ritual became deeply subversive and creative.” For Turner, liminality is not just a phase in an initiation rite, but it is any betwixt and between “space” in which cultural creativity is nurtured. Furthermore, it is specifically this liminal phase that enables rites of passage to do the work of transformation. A ritual must be utilized by the community to transform. If it does not, it is merely a ceremony. Turner argues that a rite is a creative “antistructure” that is distinguished from the rigid maintenance of social orders and hierarchies. However, he says that a rite should embody both structure and communitas, and rituals are those special activities that mediate between the two.
Initiatory Rites of Passage for Youth
Turner treated the initiation rite of passage as the quintessential rite of passage and the liminal phase as definitive of ritual. Turner was convinced that a powerful but temporary community emerged during this liminal time in rituals. He saw liminality as a cultural manifestation of communitas. Although these liminal situations are everywhere, they are often regarded as dangerous and inauspicious. Turner believes this is because those concerned with maintenance with “structure,” must present sustained manifestations of communitas as dangerous and anarchical, which have to be hedged around with prescriptions, prohibitions and conditions. And, as Mary Douglas has argued, that which cannot be clearly classified in terms of traditional criteria of classification or falls within classification boundaries is regarded as “polluted” or “dangerous.” In his book The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager, Thomas Hine claims that adolescence is such a category which is hard to define and thus feared by society.
Nature vs. Nurture – Communal Shaping of Identity
“Neither are men and women simply born: they are ‘made’ by ceremonies; nor are they truly sexual, adult beings until certain social conditions have been fulfilled.” Robert Hill adds that youth do not develop automatically and naturally but are constructed ritually, actively, and culturally. “He is convinced that identity, community, history, spirituality, and environment are all at stake in the decision to initiate, or to not initiate, adolescents into adulthood.” We are inclined to think of ages of a life likewise as given by nature. But Grimes has shown that “childhood” as a distinctive, universally recognized condition, was only discovered (or more accurately, “invented”) in Western Europe after the Renaissance. Furthermore, Hine reminds us that “teenager” was a post WWII invention, which was further developed by Stanley G. Hall in 1904. We forget there was ever a time when people passed from childhood to adulthood without being “teenagers.” Puberty was defined as the age or period at which a person is first capable of sexual reproduction, and in other eras of history, a rite or celebration of this landmark event was a part of the culture. However, in the early twentieth century, G. Stanley Hall, defined adolescence as a distinct stage in human development. This great step in the tracking of our evolution affected the rites of passage for puberty in a permanent way. “Instead of a rite that focuses on the crossing of a threshold, moving from childhood to adulthood, we have a random series of experiences spanning a period as long as fifteen years.”
“Adolescence is a modern phenomenon. In earlier times, one went from being a dependent child to an adult without a prolonged period of transition. Today, young people find themselves for a stretch of five years or more, as lyrics from A Chorus Line put it, ‘too young to take over, too old to ignore.’ While they are waiting, they in effect remake their personalities, shedding childlike characteristics and trying more adult ones on for size.” Myerhoff says that not long ago, the institution of marriage acknowledged as the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Of course this era no longer exists. “We are living in an age when geographical mobility is the norm and when adolescence is extended by postponing one’s career and marriage into the mid and late twenties. One can argue that the ceremonies and parties revolving around high school graduation could provide meaningful transition from high school to college, but for the most part the overwhelming emphasis at the graduation ceremony is on academic achievement. Other factors, such as sense of separation and transition, are alluded to in a passing if at all. And the personal element is practically lost in the routinized, mass-oriented production of graduation. This leads Turner to express what is generally contended that “there are no communal, pan-American puberty celebrations, though commencement exercises and graduations have a rather weak functional equivalence.”
Reasons for Lack of Rites of Passage
“In societies emphasizing technology, where life is based on individual achievement and is less dependent on communal cooperation for prosperity, such rites have become increasingly inconsequential to mainstream social life. This divergence may also be the result of the lack of a single set of spiritual beliefs within the society. For example, since there are many belief systems in North America, there are no culturally universal rites of passage. While some pseudo rites of passage do exist, these "rites" are not all-inclusive and are not necessarily required for participation in society.” Van Gennep's metaphorical description of society as "a house divided into rooms and corridors" may also aid in explaining why our more complex society lacks the rites of passage that are so crucial to smaller and less complex societies. He explains that the more complex the society, "the thinner are its internal partitions, and the wider and more open are its doors of communication. In a semi-civilized [i.e. less complex] society, on the other hand, sections are carefully isolated, and passage from one to another must be made through formalities and ceremonies.”
Ritual Individualism
Thomas Hine writes,
“Becoming an adult is a highly ambiguous event in our own culture. We have many ceremonies of limited significance, such as religious confirmation, high school graduation and the senior prom, or going away to college – all of which seem to promise entry into the mainstream community, but actually lead to further periods of immaturity. These are accompanied by a welter of laws that confer adult privileges and responsibilities at various ages. Some stepping-stones of maturity are established within families: old enough to be left home alone, old enough to pierce your ears (or whatever), old enough to date. Many other thresholds are set by society in form of laws: old enough to drive, old enough to be a soldier, old enough to vote. And there are some gray areas where the official threshold seems out of synch with practice: old enough to drink, old enough to work, old enough to consent to sex.”
If we do not provide rites of passage for youth then they will most likely devise their own. Grimes says that this trend is prevalent in North America; he calls the trend “ritual individualism.” Ritual individualism is “the conviction that rites can be invented by individuals for the sake of individuals.”
Left to their own devices, youth do not take a social problem to ritual for a solution. Instead, they generate a ritualized environment “that acts to shift the very status and nature of the problem in terms that endlessly retranslated in strings of deferred schemes.” The practicing and orchestrating of these schemes does not result in a resolution; rather they represent the immediate concerns of youth in the ritual. Bell says that a ritualization sees itself as the natural or appropriate thing to do in circumstances. “Ritualization sees its end, the rectification of a problematic. It does not see what it does in the process of realizing the end, its transformation of the problematic itself. And yet what ritualization does is actually quite simple: it temporally structures a space-time environment through a series of physical movements, thereby producing an arena which, by its molding of the actors, both validates and extends the schemes they are internalizing.” In other words, as youth are looking to shape their identity in a culture that does not give them the rites and rituals to do so, they search for their own rites of passage. These rites of passage do not see how to produce a new person, but merely project an environment that produces a new person.
“The cultural message to youth is that they are not mature or prepared enough to enter the adult world and so must continue for years to wait, even as other powerful, contradictory messages implore them to act fully responsibly, be self-directed, and make very good choices as independent decision makers.” “Where once the self was to be brought into conformity with the standards of externally derived authorities and social institutions, it now is compelled to look within…No longer is society something a self must adjust to; it is now something the self must be liberated from.” Interestingly, Hine references Eisenstadt’s argument that the formation of youth groups is due to the unwillingness or inability of the older generation to pass on values and beliefs to youth. Hine says that the moratorium Erikson considered being essential for the adolescent development process has disappeared. “The line demarcating adolescence from adulthood faded; adolescents played adult roles prematurely, and adults played adolescent roles immaturely….Today this process is often replaced by sequential momentary commitments of the self, making identity less a matter of integration than accumulation, accomplished in the thick of adult demands rather than apart from them. The protected moratorium that Erikson envisioned – a place youth could safely ‘dangle’ uncommitted, while constructing an identity that responded creatively to their moment in history – seems as far away as Mayberry.” Dean goes on to say that without moratorium youth are thrust prematurely into adult roles, “sometimes by circumstance, sometimes by choice, and sometimes by the consequences of choice: in all cases, the result is enormous pressure on the inexperienced and malleable adolescent self.” Teens' difficulties with drugs, alcohol, or the law often stem from misguided attempts at a rite of passage. Adolescents attempt to navigate the rocky transitions from childhood to adulthood, and the culture around them does not provide enough support, structure, and guidance. Without socially sanctioned and widely recognized rites of passage, teenagers have little choice but to create their own. And many of these self-generated initiations are dangerous and counter-productive. Some deep intuition tells the adolescent, You must be tested, you must be challenged, and some part of you must die before you can move on.
Drinking as Rite of Passage for Youth
Regardless of whether adult society intentionally socializes adolescents, youth they are in fact being socialized. Smith goes on to show that in the end, teens are simply learning through socialization how to live in this problematic world they are inheriting from adults, and to mirror the life, values, and beliefs into which they are being socialized. “Every teenage problem is finally rooted in and perpetuated by the adult world problems. In their often very real troubles, American youth are normally acting out problems ingrained in the grown-up world into which they are being socialized. It is precisely adults, at least some adults, and not teens who are the primary inventors, suppliers, promoters, and beneficiaries of most ‘teenage problems.’ Where do adolescents get the Marlboros they smoke and Budweisers they drink, and the very idea that smoking and drinking are cool?”
“Without a coherent identity, adolescents feel constantly at risk of disintegrating, of becoming nonexistent – literally, of being a ‘nobody.’ They intuit that this disparate self is ‘not right,’ but they lack the resources to justify it. So they resort to myriad anesthetics to numb the pain of falling part.” Youth use drinking as one of these anesthetics; however, drinking is much more than an anesthetic but also acts as a marker of personal identity and of boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Roger Grainger says that “people sometimes suffer rejection at the hands of society because they are expatriates: on the other hand, they may become expatriates because of some kind of social stigma bestowed on them within the country from which they are in exile. This kind of alienation tends, however, to work both ways. Its effect on individuals and groups may be a paradoxical one. Such ‘displaced persons’ cling strongly to the very things that symbolize their distance from the wider society.” One of the major social stigmas that separate youth from society is drinking. Hine explains this paradox further by stating that age limits, established to keep young people from endangering themselves – such as minimum ages for drinking liquor, smoking cigarettes, and gambling legally – become important passages to maturity. “The mark of adulthood in America is the license to indulge in bad habits.”
“Drink is one of the most noticeable emotional and important ways in which people express and discuss their identities and cultures. Alcohol is one of the ingredients in social cement, but also one of the means to remove such adhesion.” In many societies, drinking alcohol is a key practice in the expression of identity, an element in the construction and dissemination of national and other cultures. “The rapid growth of drug use and abuse is one of the most dramatic changes in the fabric of American society in the last 20 years. The United States has the highest level of psychoactive drug use of any industrialized society. It is 10 to 30 times greater than it was 20 years ago.” “Almost all drug use begins in the preteen and teenage years. These years are few in the total life cycle, but critical in the maturation process. During this intense period of growth, conflict is inevitable and the temptation to drink is great.” “Alcohol consumption tends to increase rapidly among youth until the age of 18 and then begins to decline after the age of 20 depending on the extent to which young people take on additional responsibilities of work and marriage [which replace drinking as the identity marker of adult]. As Foxcroft and Lowe have noted, ‘in a period of approximately ten years young people go from individuals who have never had an alcoholic drink to individuals who as an age group comprise the heaviest drinking section of the population.”
Reasons for Ritual Drinking?
The question is then raised, “Why alcohol?” Youth drink for many of the reasons adults do: to relax, “to laugh, to enhance conviviality, and as an expression of our own multiple and often overlapping sometimes contradictory, identities.” Phenomenologist say that the world is socially constructed. Mary Douglas says, where drinks are concerned, there are at least three distinct ways in which that happens. “First, drinks give the actual structure of social life as surely as if their names were labels affixed upon expected forms of behavior. Second, the manufacture of alcohol is an economic activity of consequence. Third, the ceremonials of drinking construct and ideal world.”
Alcohol is merely a substance that does not ascribe meaning to itself but meaning is constructed by the culture. In America , it has been designated as an adult activity, which is seen by youth as a marker of identity transformation. Alcohol is an accompaniment of social solidarity precisely because it possesses a meaning of contrast to organized work, making it a dissolver of hierarchy. In Victor Turner’s term “communitas,” is a contrast to structure and is a commitment to values of human similarity and anti-structure. This again highlights its fitness as a marker of time and space for the transformation of the person from a socially bound and limited player of roles into someone of self-expression. “It serves as a cue to permit non-hierarchical relations, unregulated by the structures of organization. At another level it signals the exposure of the self to others within an atmosphere which is also protective.” Drinking is essentially a social act, performed in a recognized social context.”
Drinking is also a visible sign of adulthood. The inability to classify youth in this in-between phase of life implies a kind of social invisibility. Nevertheless, this state of liminality can be a uniquely privileged moment in one’s life, one in which behavior denied to either children or adults is tolerated, or even expected. “Because young people are not quite visible, and certainly not fathomable, adults avert their eyes from what they do…Perhaps many teenagers’ recent enthusiasm for tattooing and body piercing, along with the recurrent attraction for eccentric haircuts and dress, is a reaction to our lack of meaningful ritual. Many observers of primitive societies have noted that young people look forward to rites that involve circumcision, scarification, piercing, and other painful rites because they offer visible [italics added] acknowledgement of their maturity.” However, most adults view these actions along with youth drinking as signs of immaturity rather than adulthood. Yet, they are powerful actions for young people to assert control over their bodies and demand recognition that they are at least physiologically mature. What they provoke is not respect but restrictions.
Drinking as Ritual
In the absence of rites of passage major transitions become ritualized. For Joseph Gusfield drinking is that form of ritual. “In the agenda of every-day life we pass from one arena to another. We go through the time periods in spatial passage. We travel from organization to home; from work to play.” He argues that alcohol, in the historical context of the United States , has developed symbolic properties which serve to facilitate this passage in a generally, though not always orderly, manner. “Before the 1830s, while drunkenness was observed and condemned, it had an accepted place in American life in both work and play. With the emergence of industrial organization, the development of leisure as a contrast to work did much to reinforce the disapproval of drinking as daytime activity.” Social drinking was born out of this “break” in life between work and play. Now it serves as that break in one’s life. Those who drink see it as a “time-out” as a bounded and limited space, and they see it as a time in which a more authentic self can achieve expression. “The use of alcohol symbolizes a temporal life style and accentuates the transformation out of the posture of social controls and self-imprisonment.” Drinking provides a liminal time; a way of passing from the ordered regulation of one form of social organization to the less-ordered, deregulated form of another, which is the context youth find themselves.
Social Time and Social Space of Drinking Ritual
Gusfield shows that in the division between work and play, drinks were designated to both areas to serve as passages to enter into those areas. Very much a symbolic interactionist, Gusfield treats alcohol and coffee as two opposing pointers. “Coffee cues the shifts from playtime to work time and alcohol cues the transition from work to playtime, as every American reader will recognize in their own drinking behavior.” “In the folklore of drinking there is the belief that coffee is an agent of sobriety. It is what the drinker should drink if he wishes to achieve sobriety quickly. Common talk pictures coffee as the antithesis to alcohol. It is the liquid with which one wakes up in the morning. It is what the workers and the professionals drink on ‘breaks’ or sip alongside their work. It is the appearance of coffee that symbolically ends the party as it does the meal. Coffee stimulates; alcohol relaxes. Its symbolic properties produce its ritualistic usage.” While coffee could also be seen as ritual symbol youth use as a visible sign of identity, for the purposes of this paper, it is easy to see how alcohol is such a key in rites of passage for youth. Leisure is the domain designated to youth who were kicked out of the workplace with the institution of Hoover’s New Deal. Now, youth are in a state of preparation and only given freedom in this domain. What is significant about Gusfield’s account is the meaning of drinking as an aftermath to the work period and a prelude to the leisure period. Ironically, this concept is a reversal of the life phase of adolescence as a leisure period in which drinking is the prelude to the work period of life.
“Douglas reminds us that “drinking is essentially a social act, performed in a recognized social context…In these terms alcohol is an element in social construction, and drinking is a key practice in the social construction of the world as it is and as it should be.” “The drinks are in the world. They are not a commentary upon it, nor a surface nor a deep structure model of its relations. They are as real as bricks and mortar. They are examples of things that constitute the world, they enter into bundles of other real things, with times and lists of names and calendrical connections. Sampling a drink is sampling what is happening to a whole category of social life.” While drinking serves as a ritual in social time and space, it also points to another idealized world. They make an intelligible, bearable world which is much more how an ideal world should be then the painful chaos threatening all the time.
Drinking as an Ideal World
Myerhoff describes these youth as neophytes in a rite of passage, “symbolically represented as a kind of tabula rosa, pure undetermined possibility, the very opposite of social structure with its emphasis on differentiation, hierarchy and separation.” “Because the hierarchy in our society is based primarily on monetary and vocational achievements, and rites of passage no longer play a role in the determination of an individuals social standing, the rite of passage has evolved primarily into a testimonial, recording important events in life as defined by the individual. Because contemporary rites of passage have become extremely personalized, there really can be no culturally universal rites of passage.” As youth are designated to this area of society they take on these roles. Thus alcohol becomes symbolic of their role in society as it also designated to the realm of “play” with no hierarchy and separation.
“The cultural definition of alcohol as a liquid which develops and sustains personal and solitary human relationships is significant in cueing occasions. The drinking occasion is a contrast to the rational and hierarchical attitudes of persons as dramatic actors and actresses, as players of roles. In the drinking arena first names are required and organizational placements are tabooed. Here again Victor Turner’s distinction between structure and communitas is useful. Structure is rule-bound and role-oriented. Relationships between persons are mediated and regulated by their position in the structure. In play such attributions have less claim on our attention and on our behavior.”
In a world where youth struggle to have a voice and be seen, drinking becomes the leveling passage into a world in which powers of authority are obsolete.
“For postmodern teenagers, maturity is not the outcome of adolescence, but an optional accessory.” Adolescence becomes a lifestyle rather than a phase of life. Drinking remains that threshold practice that symbolizes physical adult maturity while remaining a tool to revert back to childhood irresponsibility. In a sense, drinking symbolizes the liminal state of adolescence. However, Grimes reminds us “ritual knowledge is rendered unforgettable only if it makes serious demands on individuals and communities, on if it is etched deeply into the marrow of soul and society…A rite of passage is more than a mere moment in which participants get carried away emotionally, only to be returned to their original condition afterward. Witnessing a moving play, attending weekly worship, [getting drunk] or experiencing and orgasm can transport us into reverie, but a few days later our commitment needs rekindling. Ritual practices such as daily meditation and weekly worship are responses to recurring needs.” Therefore, while I firmly advocate drinking as a rite of passage, I question the transformational quality of such a rite as drinking. It seems that as a threshold practice, it merely mirrors youth as threshold people imitating a life of adulthood, not actually incorporating youth into adulthood.
Conclusion
“Christ’s Passion transforms adolescent desire into sacrificial love that finds expression in the witness of the church and is made visible in the practices of Christian community that shape human relationships according to the ‘cruciform pattern’ of self-giving love.”
If you remember the Kansas City Star article about the town hall meetings that took place last month. Well, there was a follow up article on April 1st that was anything but an April Fool’s joke. When the meeting began that Tuesday night at seven o’clock, there were no more than fifteen people there. The project coordinator said that is the typical attendance for these meetings. “One parent in the audience told the expert panel that she was dismayed at the lack of attendance. She said, looking around the empty auditorium, that likely the only people who had attended the meeting were parents with children who already had drinking problems.” At this meeting a student at Shawnee Mission West High School told the group that while it is possible to remain sober and not be ostracized, “alcohol is has almost always been present at every get-together he has attended. ‘We grow up in a society where drinking is glorified,’ he said. ‘It seems like a cool thing older people do and you just want to grow up fast.’”
I am writing this paper while participating in the Lent season 2006. As I look toward the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ with anticipation, I think about youth as “threshold people.” I am calling youth the “threshold people” for a number of reasons. Many times a direct rite of passage can be symbolized by passing between an object that has been cut in half. For instance the covenant between Abraham and God was ratified by passing through two halves of an animal. There are a number of rituals pertaining to the door and to the rite of passing through the threshold sprinkled with blood, as was the case with the Exodus story. Van Gennep writes, “the door is the boundary between the foreign and domestic worlds in the case of an ordinary dwelling, between the profane and the sacred worlds in the case of a temple; therefore to cross the threshold is to unite oneself with a new world.” Victor Turner writes, “The attributes of liminality or of liminal personae (‘threshold people’) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there