Wine and Milk: Drinking Cultures as Acts of Exclusion

The Milk Booth at the State 4 H Fair at Charleston, W. Va. Location: Charleston, West Virginia, 1921. Photo by Lewis Hine.  National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-nclc-04435.

This is the first (and hopefully not the last) special guest post to the blog. Here, classicist and art historian Dr. Kate Topper explores the way drinking cultures can act as forms of identity politics in both antiquity and now. These cultures normally act to create an 'in' group -- a norm-- against which others are defined and excluded. Here she compares recent 'milk chugging' parties by some white supremacist groups to the ancient symposium. 

For additional readings on the history of the American eugenics movement and how milk fits into it, I recommend Volume 29 of the Public Historian, particularly the article on the Fitter Families programs at local, state, and national fairs.

By Dr. Kate Topper

As readers of this blog know, white supremacist groups are in the news with alarming regularity these days, and earlier this month they made headlines for a reason that – to judge from my social media feeds – struck a lot of people as really strange. Relying on a widely held but not quite accurate belief that only white Europeans are genetically capable of digesting lactose as adults, some of the more exhibitionist members of American white supremacist groups have taken to chugging milk as a way of demonstrating the “purity” of their European descent.

Following moral disgust and nausea, the most common reaction I’ve seen to this stunt is bafflement, both at its logic and at the fact that it would even occur to someone to chug milk to prove their racial superiority. Yet for someone who studies the history of a different type of drinking – ancient Greek wine-drinking, in my case – it feels depressingly familiar, and I believe that looking at white supremacist milk-drinking in light of one of its historical precedents can help to expose the emptiness of its claims in a way that scientific debunking alone can’t.

Symposium scene. Athenian red-figure cup by
Douris, ca. 480 BCE.
London, British Museum 1843,1103.15.

The focus of my research (and much of my teaching) is the symposium, a nocturnal wine-drinking party for ancient Greek men. One point I take pains to emphasize when I introduce the symposium to students is that the ability to drink wine “correctly” was considered a proxy for the ability to participate responsibly in civic life. The symposium was all about defining community – determining who got to be part of it, and who had to remain on the margins – and the people who were excluded from the rights and protections of citizenship (such as women and foreigners) were, not accidentally, the same ones who were most commonly lampooned as incompetent drinkers of wine.

Competent sympotic drinking meant drinking your wine communally and at the same pace as your companions. An early fifth-century cup shows a group of men arranged comfortably around the room, each supplied with a large cup. The wine should also be mixed with water; there was a special bowl for this purpose, called a krater, and as early as the eighth century BCE, we find oversized kraters used as grave markers. Funerary kraters sent a clear message about the deceased’s social identity – he drank his wine communally and mixed with water, so he was a civilized Greek man.

Woman drinking wine from storeroom.
Athenian red-figure cup, ca. 460-450 BCE.
Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum 86.AE.265. Side a.

Woman drinking wine from storeroom.
Athenian red-figure cup, ca. 460-450 BCE. 
Malibu, The J. Paul Getty Museum 86.AE.265. Side b.

Women and foreigners, by contrast, were both seen and represented as incompetent drinkers. On a cup from mid fifth century Athens, a woman gulps her wine down alone, having pilfered it from the storeroom depicted on the other side of the cup. Her body language suggests that she’s trying to drink it hastily and furtively, and the wineskin carried by her small attendant suggests that she hasn’t bothered to mix it with water. We’re probably meant to laugh at the woman’s excesses – not to mention her dubious housekeeping abilities – but the scene also contains a serious warning about women's unsuitedness for serious responsibility.

Sleeping symposiast in Asian dress.
Athenian red-figure cup by the Chaire Painter, 5th c. BCE.
Basel, Antikenmuseum und Sammlung Ludwig BS 1423.

The story was much the same for non-Greek people – who, according to a common stereotype, drank their wine unmixed. On the interior of another cup, we find a sleeping symposiast whose clothing identifies him as being from western or central Eurasia. His sympotic behavior is a collection of stereotypes about foreigners – he has passed out drunk after imbibing from the drinking horn that rests below his couch. The horn was a shape the Greeks associated with foreigners and primitives and with the drinking of unmixed wine, and it was also one that couldn't easily be put down and that thus encouraged fast, intemperate drinking. This man would be an embarrassment at the symposium – but what else, it is implied, could an Athenian expect from a barbarian, who was not culturally or physically suited to drink wine properly? Like the woman on the Getty cup, this guy was not the type to be trusted with serious matters of governance.

To come back to the white supremacist milk-chugging stunt: I’ve spent enough time looking at pictures like the ones described above not to be shocked or even surprised by this twenty-first century trend, even if I’m physically and morally disgusted by it. One thing you quickly learn when you study the history of food and drink is that eating and drinking are intimately tied to the performance of identity. For a Greek man, socially competent wine-drinking was a way to perform a specific gendered and cultural identity – if he didn’t know to mix his wine with water, or if he insisted on filling up on wine while the rest of the group drank slowly, his companions would have some questions. For a segment of American white supremacists, identity performance takes the form of milk-chugging.

And it’s very clearly a performance: in the video shared by the New York Times, a group of bare-chested men stands together, exaggeratedly flexing their muscles before attempting to pound down a half gallon of milk. Others (both men and women) take the “challenge” at home and post the video evidence to YouTube or Twitter for their followers to watch. It’s important to them that people watch, just as it was important for a Greek symposiast to be observed by his companions, because these rituals are ultimately about establishing or maintaining membership in a group to which not everyone is allowed to belong.

For me, this juxtaposition of ancient sympotic drinking and modern milk-chugging is useful because it exposes the recent white supremacist trend as nothing more than a performance – the latest version of a trick human beings have long used to reinforce the legitimacy of the existing in-group and pretend that there’s an objective basis for excluding the out-group. The scientific gloss given to the milk-chugging challenge doesn’t make its claims uniquely valid or worthy of serious consideration, and not only because, as geneticists point out, those claims distort the science. Even without the white supremacists’ (erroneous) claims about genetics, milk comes with a lot of cultural and symbolic baggage that I have to think contributed to the choice to use it as the centerpiece of this racist performance. Like wine did for the Greeks, milk has long occupied a special status in discourses about who is and is not civilized (although whether it was a drink of civilized or uncivilized people has always depended on whom you asked). And in the United States it has been closely tied to ideals of purity since the middle of the twentieth century, even when those ideals are at odds with biological facts.

Milk, in other words, is no less culturally charged for twenty-first century Americans than wine was for the ancient Greeks. As much as the white supremacist milk-chuggers want us to think that their stunt is based in biological fact, it’s really all about cultural perception – to paraphrase the cliché, it’s old wine in a new bottle, only this time the wine is milk. White supremacist groups may have chosen a different beverage to make their point, but their logic is as faulty as that of the ancient Greek man who believed that his habit of drinking wine in the culturally prescribed way made him superior to women and foreigners. We should take their claims no more seriously than we now take the ancient Greek ones.

Crises of Culture and the Anxiety of the Powerful

We were, you know, foreigners in our own city, wandering lost like strangers and it was your books that led us back home, as it were.  As a result we were able to recognize who and where we were.  It was you who revealed the age of our country, the historical chronology, religious and priestly rules, civil and military customs, the location of districts and regions, in sum the causes, duties, types, and names of every human and divine matter.  At the same time, you shone a bright light on the history of our poets and in general on Latin writers and Latin language (Cicero, Academica Posteriora 1.9).   

Cicero, writing in the 1st century BCE, is discussing the situation that he and many other Romans found themselves in during the Late Republic and here praises the antiquarian Varro, who, seeing that much that was Rome's own history had been lost to the shadows of time, began researching his own people and culture. Cicero brings up Varro while he himself was attempting to forge a new philosophical vocabulary, one that was Roman and not, as most literature, cultural terms, and genres had been for centuries, Greek. It was nothing new--Cato the Elder, a notorious crank, had complained incessantly for years about the corrupting influence of Greece on Rome.

The Romans had conquered the Greeks, but, as Horace once wrote Graecia capta ferum uictorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio (Captured Greece captured her fierce conqueror and bore her arts to rustic Latium, Ep, 2.156-7). Greek poetry, drama, history, philosophy, oratory, even language would dominate the Roman educated classes and popular entertainments alike. There was hardly an art the Romans had that was not first Greek (except satire, of course). Not entirely true, of course, but many a Roman felt this way nonetheless.

What it was, of course, was simple anxiety--the kind of anxiety that happens when people who are used to being in their comfort zone or used to being in control suddenly feel like they are out of their element or out of control. It is an anxiety felt by those who are used to swimming in the pool themselves and are suddenly asked to share it. And maybe the people coming in want to float around and play instead of swimming laps. Did the Romans truly no longer know what it meant to be Roman? Were they truly feeling like "foreigners in our own city"? Or was it simply that the sea of people they gazed out upon no longer was 80% "Roman," but maybe more like 65%?

One of the stumbling blocks in many a conversation about white privilege and issues of racial justice and equality is often the fact that people who have privileges don't feel like they do. Or rather, they don't recognize (or don't want to recognize) that at least some of what they have isn't earned, but given. And that others won't ever have those givens regardless of their work ethic or genius because our world really isn't a meritocracy. But meritocracy is one of the fundamental bedrocks of democracy, we are told. We have, we are told, the freedom to pursue our dreams, the freedom to speak our truths, the freedom to achieve--if only we have the ability and drive. And yet, as this weekend's discussion around NFL players taking knees at games during the national anthem in protest of police violence against certain of our citizens show, those freedoms aren't evenly distributed or recognized--no matter how good some people are, the system is stacked against them. There are entire segments of the US population who have never been granted the full rights their citizenship is supposed to provide. For the most part, these are people of color in the US, and the darker the color of your skin, the more the system is designed to keep you down--and out.

Like Cicero and Varro and the curmudgeon Cato the Elder before them, the Romans felt the weight of foreign cultures weighing on them and overshadowing their own. But what did they expect when they decided to leave their land and invade and conquer those of others? When they decided to ship in slaves from all over the known world--from Asia as far away as India, from Africa as far south as Ethiopia, from Europe as far away as the Russian Steppe? But it was the Greeks whose culture weighed heaviest on them. It was Greek culture that they both admired and embraced and feared was destroying their own.

We might think similarly about the "others" who live among us--African-Americans, whose ancestors were brought to the Americas by force in slave ships, and Latinx-Americans, whose ancestors lived in much of the western US long before white, Europeans came to the continent and claimed it as their own. Why is it that we "white folks" are more than happy enjoy the fruits of the creativity and hard work and dedication of our non-white neighbors and fellow citizens, appropriating their cultural achievements while giving them little to no credit for actually achieving them while doing everything in our power to keep from them the freedoms and protections that are supposed to accompany being a US citizen? Because American identity was built upon, first, open racism and white supremacy, and later, upon its "user friendly" and banal front man, that mythical creature called "Western Civilization." And Western Civilization is, for all its high-flown language of freedom and equality and community, really about being of European descent, Christian, and, for better or worse, preferably, a man.  And Western Civilization, if you didn't know, is in CRISIS.

David Brooks, the New York Time columnist now mostly known for Panini-Gate, has been moaning for going on 20 years now about the "Crisis of Western Civilization," which he claims is destroying our identity. How it forms our identity is an interesting question. For the most part, this identity is supposedly shaped through the study of the foundations of Western Civ--the Classics. This education yields, he claims, a shared set of cultural values and a vocabulary for shared dialogue:

This Western civ narrative came with certain values — about the importance of reasoned discourse, the importance of property rights, the need for a public square that was religiously informed but not theocratically dominated. It set a standard for what great statesmanship looked like. It gave diverse people a sense of shared mission and a common vocabulary, set a framework within which political argument could happen and most important provided a set of common goals.

Are these really shared values? Do we really allow everyone in our society to participate in them? Should we expect them to in order to be called Americans? What religion should inform our public square?  Whose property matters more? When does "reasoned discourse" only serve to cover the violence of the powerful? What happens when the only way "diverse people" can participate in the "shared mission" is if they give up who they are, where they come from, and the basic rights they deserve and share that mission as subordinates and lesser than?

There is a fundamental problem with a society built upon a construct premised on the oppression of others--and with a society that is afraid to admit this oppression for fear that only that oppression is what holds the society together. As Brooks again bemoans, over the last few decades, this shared culture has broken down and "Now many students, if they encounter it, are taught that Western Civilization is a history of oppression." Good. The truth matters. And should, we are told, set us free. But is even this truth enough? Reed College, one of the schools that still requires a "Western Civ" foundation course, finds itself hard pressed to defend the course (that includes Homer, Plato, Gilgamesh, and the Hebrew Bible) against students who feel that the civilization that rests upon these texts, and so the texts themselves, excludes and oppresses them--just as Brooks feared. Are these students wrong to oppose a set of texts that have traditionally been used to forge white identity and to exclude them, that incorporate and assimilate the cultures of Egypt and Mesopotamia and Jews to make the class diverse, while the dominant white culture rejects their modern counterparts and to feel like being forced to study them reenacts the violence that led to the establishment of whiteness? I don't have an answer for it, but Brooks' crisis and the crisis we keep hearing about in conservative writings seems to me like cultural anxiety--the expression of the powerful resisting the need to share that power.

Today, I read with my students about Cicero's concerns for Rome's lost identity. We also read Plutarch writing of Alexander the Great's Macedonian companions' anxiety as he slowly sought to merge his two worlds--the Macedonian/Greek practices he had been raised in and the customs of the myriad cultures he conquered when he led his troops into Asia all the way to the Indus River. The more Alexander assimilated himself to Persia--to its clothing, its people, its land--the more they resented it and felt he was betraying them. Some (like his companion Cleitus) grew so angry they threatened to kill him. Again, cultural anxiety, the fears of the powerful that they might need to give a little up in order for others to have a fair share. The Macedonians invaded the Asian continent. They destroyed the Persian empire and the world the peoples they encountered knew. And yet they were the ones who felt anxiety when Alexander decided to adopt some of the culture of the conquered. They even grew violent.

What does it say about us when we look at the world today and see the silent protests of our fellow Americans against the continued and brutal violence perpetrated against them and people think that these protests are more destructive of our communities and our identity than the violence itself? There is a crisis of values in Western Civ, but it isn't a crisis like the one Brooks and Steve King, and Pres. Trump think. The crisis is our acceptance of violence against others in the name of a false ideal, a crisis of privileging our white comfort and privilege and desire for conflict free spectacle over the lives of others.

Ethnicity in Herodotus--The Honest Entry

I keep wanting to finish my post on the use of the Dorian invasion myth as a way of claiming ancient Greece for northern Europeans and (now) whiteness, but I am having a hard time getting to it since I have to write this entry for the Herodotus Encyclopedia on ethnicity and it is killing me. So, I have decided to use this blog post to write out what I would say to Herodotus if I did not have to write a neutral representation of Herodotus' writings or the 40-some years of scholarship that is expected of an encyclopedia entry. 

***

Damnit, Herodotus. Can you please decide what it is you think you are doing with all these ethnographic passages? If, as Hartog suggests, you are doing it in order to get your Greek readers to reflect upon their shared identity as Greeks, can't you be clearer on that and just say Greeks are Greeks because x, y, and z? Instead we get something like "Egyptians aren't like us in these ways and they are like us in these ways, so that means that these are the categories that matter at this moment in my story in defining who we are as Greeks--we don't speak an Egyptian language, we don't worship half animal gods, and we pee in private instead of outside...oh, and we don't usually let our wives do all the shopping--how silly is that!". So--language and customs seem to matter most. So say many a scholar, like Dihle, Hall, van Wees, and Jones.

But this one time in Book 8 (you know, at almost the end!), you have characters (very important ones, at that) give a magical list that says that what makes Greeks Greeks. The Athenians tell the Spartans that of course they won't betray them and side with the Persians after all (you know, like the other hundreds of Greek poleis who did, like the Thebans and all the Ionians) because we share: blood (homaimos), language, institutions of worship, and cultural character (ethos). I get that the shared blood thing works for Athenians and Spartans who are both pretty exclusive societies when it comes to intermarriage and stuff, but that means they don't intermarry with each other either! How mythical is this blood? And the other stuff? Did you mean it? Because if you did, can you tell me what you mean by ethos? Is this cultural? Inborn? How is it determined? Is it a Greek thing?

And what about shared descent with non-Greeks? Are Greeks and Egyptians intermarrying? Do they come from the same geographic space originally? Gruen tells us that we should ignore everything Herodotus tells us when trying to figure out what does and does not constitute ethnicity in Herodotus (or anywhere else in our Greek sources) because everyone knows that it is only blood that matters and that ethnicity in antiquity meant blood--culture, customs, language? None of that is a concern. But if this is the case WHY, HERODOTUS, DID YOU SPEND SO MUCH TIME TALKING ABOUT ALL THAT STUFF!? PAGES AND PAGES?! And why don't you just say that in the beginning?! Instead, you do all this stuff about barbarians and women-knapping.

Speaking of barbarians--is it a linguistic category? Or is it a cultural thing? Is it something you can stop being? Can you become one or are you born that way? Hartog and Lloyd and Rossellini and Said (both of them) and the other Hall don't all agree, but seem to make a really big deal out of it. Oh, and so do pretty much all the scholars writing between 1989 and, like, 2015. Is barbarian like your "42"--the answer to life the universe and everything?

Both J. Hall and Thomas suggest what you really emphasize is nomoi and origin myths. I get the origin myth thing. You tell us a lot of those and, if we believe you, everyone is related (usually thanks to Herakles or his daddy)--one big human happy family with some cultural differences. How they got those differences you don't say--though, let's recall your awesome (wrong) theory that Ethiopians and Indians are black because they have black semen. This is an easily testable hypothesis, dude. Get it together.

Sometimes you give me the impression that you think climate and geography are the creators of ethnic difference (soft lands breed soft people, anyone?), but then maybe custom is king? At this point, I have no clue what ethnicity is in your book filled with descriptions of peoples and cultures. You tell a good story, but you are wearing me out.