Holy Waters: An Interdisciplinary Examination of Religion and Alcohol

I am hereby submitting a roundtable proposal on behalf of myself and the authors of a forthcoming volume, focusing on the intersection of religion and alcohol. The session will feature the authors, editors of the volume, and a designated respondent. Historian Marni Davis has suggested that “a people’s relation to alcohol... represents something deep about their relation to other people, and to the culture in which they live” (Davis 2012: 3). Like eating, drinking is a learned, constructed, cultivated and embodied cultural practice, and like food operates as a “highly condensed social fact” within a complex web of social relations (Dietler 2006: 396). It is no surprise that the production and use of alcohol have played an integral role in both formal and informal institutions throughout history. The household was once the major producer of alcohol (Unger 2004), political bodies and governments have long been involved in the production and regulation of alcohol, and alcohol has featured prominently in many aspects of “religious” culture—often in ways that connect religious institutions to the broader social, economic, and political economies. While there has been an increasing number of historical, sociological and anthropological studies of the production and use of alcohol, there have been relatively few contributions from the field of religious studies or that engage with religion in a critical manner. The state of the scholarly literature on “religion and alcohol” reflects this, as alcohol is often descriptively narrated as connected to “religion” or “ritual” in a manner that essentializes the “religious” effects of alcohol, obscuring the many other social, economic, and political contexts and uses of alcohol and intoxication (to say nothing of the theoretical issues involved in demarcating between “religious” and “nonreligious” activity). With an increase in academic programs related to viniculture and brewing science, the time is ripe for contributions from the humanities and social sciences. We believe the theories and methods of religious studies have important contributions to offer studies of alcohol. Thus, this panel brings together scholars from across disciplines to examine the historical, social, ritual, economic, political, and cultural relationship between religion and alcohol across time periods and around the world. Furthermore, two major themes tie the authors’ presentations together. First, Gender identity: the role of gender identity and how religion and alcohol intersect with this. Second, Identity construction in religious communities: The presenters will show that alcohol can be used as a distinguishing factor for religious, ethnic, and national identity. In other words, alcohol can bridge and divide the point at which the sacred and secular meet. Not surprisingly, there is a large volume of work on the history of alcohol. These range from discussions of origins and drink in the ancient world to detailed histories of more recent events like the Gin Craze in Britain and the American Prohibition to broad sweeping narrative histories aimed at popular audiences. In many of these, religion is given a brief cameo, usually adopting one of several predictable scripts: contextualizing alcohol as a ritual or ceremonial beverage or intoxicant; discussing religiously grounded ethical proscriptions about alcohol consumption and behavior; or drawing on mythology to establish a cultural basis for the social role of alcohol in a given culture. Only rarely has religion been featured as the primary lens through which to study humans' historical interaction with alcohol—perhaps aptly named “the nectar of the gods.” Desmond Seward’s (1979/1983) book on monk’s and wine is one exception, and surveys the viticultural history of a number of different monastic traditions. Robert Fuller’s (1996) Religion and Wine seeks to use religion as a lens to study the cultural history of wine in the United States. Most other works tend to view religion as a secondary aspect of their theses, and so while they may include significant information on religion and alcohol, this is often not the focus. Marni Davis’ (2012) Jews and Booze is an example of this. While it is an excellent history of Jews in the alcohol industry during the American Prohibition and religious concerns arise often throughout the book, the student or scholar of religious studies is left wishing for more. It is indicative of the general trend in historical studies of alcohol to subjugate “religion” as an intervention for studying this history in favor of other interventions. The effect is that religion is left on the sidelines, so to speak, despite being intricately tied up in broader social issues like class, race, and gender. For this reason, our panel and forthcoming volume breaks new intellectual territory.