Black Carnival Mass

A Dartmouth Professor delves into the frat underground

According to my high school psychology professor, people binge drink in college because it’s an awful place to be. I would say most students think they drink for fun. But according to anthropology professor Hoyt Alverson and three years of field—i.e., fraternity basement—research conducted by his students, drinking at Dartmouth serves quite another purpose: “Alcohol is a sacrament in the black (carnival) mass.” That may sound bizarre, but according to Alverson’s paper, binge drinking is first and foremost a ritual—in the most universal sense.

The term “ritual” evokes images of people dancing around a fire or say, going to church and both are activities that are typically far-removed from Dartmouth social life. Or maybe not. There are many important differences between going to church and hanging out in fraternity basements (no public urination in church, for example), but according to Alverson, they are similar in very profound ways. They’re both ways of satisfying that basic human need to affiliate, to cope with group-living.

So maybe binge drinking is really just an iteration of dancing around a campfire. And really, that sort of primitive activity doesn’t feel so different from doing a keg-kill in the side room of a fraternity basement, as one researcher describes it:

“...everyone is packed in with a keg, cups, and trashcans, and the door is closed. Beers are continuously poured and drunk by people in the room, and vomiting is a common sight. Fraternity toasts/songs are sung throughout, and brothers are ‘called out’ to drink often. The door is only opened when the keg is finished, or ‘killed.’”

Then there’s mini-ritual of the beer line. Beer is not first-come-first-serve, but follows a definite hierarchy: “bro’s then ho’s” and then male outsiders. On top of that, while brothers and their friends are being served, female outsiders

“flirt and smile in hopes of getting a beer with a bat of the eyes. While many brothers fall for this ambitious flirtation, many others do not, and begin to literally play games with the girls. “I need a joke,” says the brother at the keg. “If you want a beer you gotta tell me a good one.” ....Often times a girl will tell a joke that does not meet the brother’s approval, and he will reject her and ask for another one.”

It’s a display of power. Then there’s “perching”, the habit some brothers have of standing on the bar to look over the crowd, which further establishes them at the top the basement hierarchy. The bar area itself is brothers-only space where, they “mark their territory against the wall by urinating and vomiting, when they have to [which] separates non-members from members.”

Perching and marking one’s territory sound like actions more at home in the animal world than in human society. So behind the way-above-median SAT scores and the lofty GPAs, and the veneers of civility, are Dartmouth students really as primitive as that? It’s well documented that nothing serves to strip away one’s civility as well as (massive amounts of) alcohol. And maybe that’s the point. I’m reminded of the sign above the entrance to SigEp’s basement: “warning: culture changing”. Maybe there’s something hardwired into humans that makes us sometimes (i.e., on Wednesdays and weekends) crave this sort of return to the primal. What else would explain the free acceptance or even encouragement of things like public vomiting, public urination and in certain basements after certain hours, public nudity. Mark Twain once said that “naked people have no power in our society”. But safely away from society, they evidently could have a great time.

The paper utilizes the rather fascinating “ethnographic method,” in which the researcher establishes a relationship of trust with the subject in order to document him on a daily basis. According to Alverson, the method flushes out “what people say when nobody asks them,” and they lose their self-consciousness in front of an innocuous acquaintance. Alverson’s researchers used this method to define the arc of a typical Dartmouth social life. Freshmen enter the college with varying degrees of drinking experience, and the class is divided roughly between students who are “over it” [drinking] and “making up for lost time”. One researcher documented typical freshmen banter (of the obnoxious sort) during a pre-gaming session:

“One enthusiastic volunteer told me, ‘I drank way too much in high school. Six nights a week. And I was valedictorian of my class. I'm getting A-'s here, and I'm drinking six nights a week.’ He seems eager to show me he is an experienced drinker who can easily handle drinking and academics. “

Sophomore year, roughly half of all students rush the Greek system, mostly because everyone else is doing it. After that, juniors and sophomores are the most involved in Dartmouth’s social life. Since everyone is on-campus at different times and for short intervals, they want to make the best use of their time on the scene, and this “is more conducive to relationships influenced by alcohol such as short-term hook- ups or partying with whom you might not normally go out.”

By senior year however, students—especially women—are often disillusioned with the volatile nature of friendships and romantic relationships (or lack thereof) formed in the previous two years. We “tire of the peripatetic residential life with its transitory connecting and disconnecting of people and the heavy time requirements and evanescent outcomes of the party and hook-up scene.” So maybe the lesson here simply is: drink and hook up and affiliate yourself with something today; because tomorrow, it might not be as much fun.