Uncorking the Past, A Talk With Patrick McGovern pt. 1
Ξ October 13th, 2010 | → 0 Comments | ∇ A Day at a Time, Interviews, Technology, Wine History |
Alcohol enjoys a multivalent reputation. From triumphant and vanquished Prohibition movements in the United States and around the globe, to its central symbolism in Christian religious expression; from the painfully refined and esoteric tastings of fine wine vintages, to violent brawls among soccer hooligans ripped on root beer schnapps and Fosters; from the drive-through liquor stores in some southern states, to the parade of Utah citizens passing through Nevada border towns; from “liquor is quicker”, to “shaken not stirred”, alcohol is a highly contested substance of infinite social and (agri)cultural plasticity. And University of Pennsylvania’s Biomolecular Archaeology pioneer Professor Patrick McGovern thinks he knows why. In his latest book, Uncorking the Past, he advances the radical thesis that alcohol is fundamental to the human condition.
With a measured combination of hard evidence and grounded speculation he begins, like a modern Plato, with a cave.
“The phantasmagoria of our dreams can be extremely fluid and evocative: we might imagine an animal transformed into a human, see ourselves from the outside as it acting in a play, or experience the sensations of flying or falling into an abyss. The Stone Age murals in their dark caverns thus have strong similarities to dream images that well up in our three-dimensional and often vividly colored fantasies in the dark of night. The deep silence of the grotto, intensified by the effects of an alcoholic beverage, might have nourished the imaginations of sensitive individuals, who then represented their inner and outer worlds in two-dimensional art. The shaman and the community could then act out the essential rituals that would guarantee their welfare in this life and the one to come.” [pg.21]
“I contend {…} that the driving forces in human development from the Paleolithic period to the present have been the uniquely human traits of self-consciousness, innovation, the arts and religion, all of which can be heightened and encouraged by the consumption of an alcoholic beverage, with its profound effects on the human brain.” [pg.27]
But there is a more important part of the story. Long has been the search within an Anthropology broadly conceived for a unifying explanation of the origins of agriculture and human settlements. What motivated our ancestors’ transition from nomadic hunter and gatherer, from opportunistic scavenger to keeper of field and hearth, as it were? Prof. McGovern developed a scenario in an earlier seminal text, Ancient Wine, that he calls the Paleolithic hypothesis.
“[T]his hypothesis posits that at some point in early human prehistory, a creature not so different from ourselves–with an eye for brightly colored fruit, a taste for sugar and alcohol, and a brain attuned to alcohol’s psychotropic effects–would have moved beyond the unconscious craving of a slug or a drunken monkey for fermented fruit to the much more conscious, intentional production and consumption of a fermented beverage.” [pg.12]
So a central question in Uncorking the Past becomes whether the archaeological evidence gathered world-wide, much of it unearthed by Prof. McGovern himself, can sustain the thesis that we were driven to agriculture and permanent settlement precisely because of a conscious, intentional desire to reliably, predictably produce fermented beverages. Though unprovable owing to the absence of beverage manufacturing artifacts, the Paleolithic hypothesis does derive some support from the archaeological record.
“For example, some of the earliest artistic representations of our species depict bare-breasted, large-hipped females, often referred to as Venuses because of their obvious associations with sexuality and childbearing. One particularly provocative Venus was chisled into a cliff at Laussel in the Dordogne [...]. With one hand on her pregnant belly, the long-haired beauty holds up an object that resembles a drinking horn.” [pg.16]
Of course his caveats are many. The point here is to illustrate Prof. McGovern’s approach to the evidence from the Paleolithic, how he attempts to synthesize all surviving forms of ancient creative expression, cave paintings, religious fetishes, musical instruments, etc. into wider narrative of our passage to Neolithic settlement and plant domestication. Indeed, he argues throughout the artfully structured book that alcoholic beverages are always and everywhere (with modest exceptions) not only the raison d’etre of agriculture, but also of increasingly sophisticated forms of artistic and cultural expression, and a fundamental agency of social bonding as well. And his most radical insight? It is the intoxicating, mind-altering effects of alcoholic beverages themselves, whether from figs, grapes, or baobab fruits, whether from grains, honey, sweet gourds or rice et al, which proves the indispensable motor of early societal development.
And as though holding onto an unbroken chain of the hands extending a 1000 generations into the past, we moderns still desire, we still crave, perhaps it is not too much to say (he does) that we are addicted to the altered states of consciousness alcoholic beverages can provide. Whether we wish to consort with loved ones now dead, relieve the stress of a terrible day, forget or briefly transcend this mortal coil for a glimpse of god’s face, alcoholic beverages, then as now, offer swift passage.
There is a great deal more to say. I will post a full book review in the fullness of time. For now we may turn to the interview with Prof. McGovern for a bit of light.
Admin You recently gave a talk at UCSC, a very entertaining gloss on aspects of your new book Uncorking the Past. The book is quite fascinating, radical in many ways….
Patrick McGovern Not many have recognized that. Not as many as I would have expected.
That is surprising. It breaks a lot of new ground and is filled with compelling speculations of course grounded in your long scholarly experience. The tone of the book is that of a young man who has made great discoveries, a youthful exuberance. Just how old are you?
PG Sixty-five. (laughs)
In looking at pictures of you I wonder, should you shave your beard who would emerge!
PG I’m not even sure. I’m afraid to shave it off! I’ve had it ever since I went into Archeology when I was in my mid twenties because when you’re in the field you don’t have warm water to use for shaving. So you just grow a beard. It’s very smooth, not rough. I enjoy certain advantages. (laughs)
But the youthful spirit of the book, and its radical tone, puts you in a very distinct group of scholars. I’ve read in Anthropology, for example, and such a playful spirit is uncommon.
PG I try to be based as much on evidence as I can be. But I am also putting out hypotheses that try to link the evidence we have together; that keep us moving forward, motivate us to find new things and connections as well. That’s the way I see the book, as a way to get basic information out there, but at the same time to also try to fit it together to make a broader cultural sense. It is to encourage further research, especially as scientific techniques improve. I mean, you can talk about the Paleolithic period all you want, but unfortunately right now we don’t have the tools or the recovery methods to get organic materials from that period.
But you can make assumptions based on what we see later, what other animals do, what they are attracted to, like alcohol and sugar; what our physiology is set up to do with alcohol and sugar. It’s a lot like any historical science, Geology or Astronomy, for example; you can’t actually replicate the phenomena. You’re missing evidence. It’s in the past. But you try to take what you see going around you today, the available information you have, what the human body and senses are attracted to, and then you come up with a scenario that makes sense out of the evidence that we do have, to fit it together as best you can. As time goes on, we will see if the scenario holds up or not.
One of the fascinating things about your reflections on the origins of fermentation and of our being drawn to its products, offers, to use a Freudian metaphor, a royal road back to our ancient ancestors. When you refer to dreams, for example, or the role of the shaman, the darkness of the cave, alcohol in its various forms seems to offer us a special purchase on a historical continuity of our bodies, this despite cultural differences, the remoteness of our histories.
PM You mean as far as tapping into a shared realm? Then yes. Alcohol is universal. You can make it from so many plants given enough sugar, or you can process it in a way with added sugar. And yeast is found throughout the environment. So you can have these fermentation processes occurring quite naturally, and having them easily discovered by peoples everywhere. It is then a matter of figuring out if such a discovery changes their whole mental attitude, how it might open up various attitudes with regard to how the world is seen. You have dream states, a common altered state of consciousness, but here you’ve got an actual beverage, widely available, that can do something similar. I think that is one of the main reasons alcohols get incorporated into religion in general; and may have had a real social impact, much more than we recognize.
We don’t really have the evidence from the Paleolithic period of how much alcohol they were drinking, how it was affecting people, but we can look at modern cultures today and see that they often drink to excess. You’re really going into an altered state of consciousness in that case. So whether you’re in Africa, South or Central America, they had feasts at which they drank huge quantities of alcoholic beverages. Why was that? And how long has that been going on? And what kind of an impact did that really have on the way humans developed?
What I’m sort of suggesting in that first chapter is that alcohol does stimulate peoples’ imaginations. Obviously if you really go to excess then you’re turning off your ability to come up with or bring back something new or different from the altered state because you fall into unconsciousness. So there is a point at which there are negative returns from drinking too much alcohol. My experience is that it varies from person to person, of course. A small example: I’ve spent a fair amount of time now with people in the micro-brewing industry, and they are drinking a lot of this beer too, yet they seem to have a real knack of coming up with new ideas, of always being interested in what the next beverage is going to be. This is probably the case in the wine industry too.
Also in the first chapter you mention the ‘desacralization’ of the shaman in the modern world, now labeled charlatans and so on. Because thinking the sacred has become so difficult in our world, what do you suspect are some of the other consequences of this general desacralization when trying to think extreme beverages?
PM Today it’s as if we’ve taken away any sort of mystery in Nature. Alcoholic drinks have become increasingly specialized. Used at different social events of course, so they still play a social and religious role to some degree, but because of the prohibition movements that have existed in the Islamic world and here in this country, they’ve been pushed to the sidelines. They are even being stigmatized as bad for health, the cause of car accidents, that women shouldn’t drink during pregnancy. So you have this sort of medical point of view that disparages alcoholic beverages yet doesn’t, at the same time, speak of the positive roles alcohol has played and continues to play in human culture and history.
Even Mondavi, when he put on his label that wine is an essential part of the good life, that it has been with us for centuries and millennia, the ATF came in and said he could not use that label because it gave the misleading impression that alcoholic beverages actually had some positive benefits! I think recently they’ve given a little more leeway to having that idea on a label. But alcohol has been an essential part of human existence right from the beginning. And it has played multiple roles in social interactions, breaking down barriers between peoples so that they open up to others, spurring the artistic imagination probably. As long a you don’t go into a permanent state of inebriation! Before modern medicine alcohol was very important. Alcohol was often mixed with herbs, dissolved and administered that way. It’s been at the center of religious culture. So why should we deny that? That is what I can’t understand. I mean, obviously there are drawbacks as there are with everything. But here we have a substance which has been there right from the beginning it seems, even with life on the planet, yet we make it sound like it’s some sort of forbidden fruit without any redeeming qualities. This is what I mean by ‘desacralized’. Alcohol has become medicalized.
About the figure of the shaman, I was wondering how you see the matriarchies of great antiquity? After all, the shaman is gendered male. However, you can read in some of the radical anthropology of the 50s, for example the work of Robert Graves and his British circle, quite interesting speculations on the sometimes violent suppression of matriarchal cultural contributions. I have no idea on the current state of the research, but do you have any thoughts on the gendering of the shaman?
PM Well, I guess I bring it out at various points in the book. I include a Paleolithic drawing of a Laussel woman holding a drinking horn. She could be an early female shaman. Women have really been the principle makers of alcoholic beverages around the world, as far back as we can go. So whether it’s Mesopotamia, like the Gilgamesh epic wherein Gilgamesh meets a beer-maker who is a woman; he asks her, Siduri, to help him on his way to Utnapishtim. Then you also have in the Mesopotamian history both men and women playing various roles associated with alcoholic beverages. There is the wine goddess; she plays a central role in the Underworld. And there are other goddesses related to beer. So there is obviously a recognition among these ancient cultures that women are central to the making of fermented beverages. It is the same in Egypt.
Even today if you travel in these areas, such as South America, the chicha is made by the women. And even now in the wine industry you see a lot of female vintners who produce some of the best wines. So I think what often happens is that it starts out as a woman’s domain, this could be for religion as well, but then men are stronger, especially if you have to do mass production like for a large feast or religious observance; then the men may get more involved in the production end of it. Eventually they start to take over whereas the women stay at the home level, the smaller-scale production. Then as the society gets more complex you have the actual selling of fermented beverages. It then becomes a male-dominated mass production system. It then also becomes more specialized, the actual beverages in beer, wine, hard liquors…
Perhaps that’s when it begins to become desacralized, with the rise of fermented beverages as commodities…
PM Yes, I think it desacralizes it too. When it [alcoholic beverages] was originally associated with smaller groups, when it was holding the community together, it was essential to life, to a culture’s creative development. But when you get into these larger, more complex urban environments, it becomes just another product. Sure, it can be used to still generate an altered state of consciousness, but it isn’t any longer a part of the community’s sense of being ONE [capitals added] with its environs and environment. That’s what you lose with increased social complexity and mass production. The beverages become divorced from this more holistic or organic existence of people together within Nature. Like in a South American village, when you go into Peru, the women are still making the beverages right there in the household involving the whole family and the community. And this goes on everyday with people coming to where the chicha vessel is sitting. And the woman who made it is serving it directly to all of these people. Also involved are people out in the field growing and gathering the corn. It is an organic set of relations with their environment and their community. It’s just a natural part of the alcoholic beverage. Chicha becomes a central expression of a community’s relationship with itself and its environment. It comes to represent what life is all about.
End of Part 1
Admin
