Journeying Into Intoxicating Experiences

Sebastien Tutenges, currently an Associate Professor of Sociology at Lund University, had been planning to embark on a study at a Buddhist monastery. Instead, by somewhat serendipitous means, he became curious about why so many young people seek intoxicating escapes. “As it turned out, though, the difference between the monks and the merrymakers was not as enormous as I had imagined.”

Drawing from the work of the French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, who had studied the rituals of Australian Aborigines in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Tutenges examines “collective effervescence.” In his 1912 study, Durkheim had observed his subjects dividing their lives into seasons of work and celebration. Scattering, like we moderns do, for work and gathering for festive days. At the galas, “effervescence” would occur.  

Tutenges spent two decades studying people aged between 15 and 35 years at “pubs, bars, nightclubs, strip clubs, music festivals, drug dens, drug markets, dance parties, and seaside resorts in Bulgaria and Spain.” He was not interested in solitary drinkers but rather in the party animals. He was curious about how coming together generates a kind of electric feeling.

Human Interactions As A Source of Energy

In his work, Interaction Ritual Chains (2004), Randall Collins analyzes the micro-interactions that stitch up everyday lives. He observes that humans are energy seekers. Hence they participate in a chain of interactions, with one fueling another. Such interactions can include conversations at a workplace water cooler, flirting on a dance floor or meeting with friends at a coffee shop. Since some interactions or life events deplete energy, we seek other sources to replenish our mojo.

Collective effervescence is a type of interaction experienced when two or more people are present and there are clear boundaries between an in-group and the excluded. Moreover, like at a rock concert or sports event, all participants are focused on the same activity and share a mood. For instance, at the bar events that Tutenges studied, he noticed that teetotalers were shunned for their dampening presence. As Collins puts it, “[the] key is that human nervous systems become mutually attuned.”

However, the assumption of mutual attunement might overlook differences between how participants experience the same event. To try to get into the interiority of such disparate states, Tutenges deploys a phenomenological approach in his study. His objective is “to capture the essence of people’s experiences and the essential meanings they attach to them.”

The author himself has seen the dark side of alcoholism in his own family. But he approaches this project with open-mindedness and without judgment, so he can get as close as possible to the revelers’ experiences. In his own words, he tries to conduct the study “with sympathy.”

Revelry and Risk: Nightlife Insights

Tutenges shines his lens on young revelers who are Danish, from working and middle-class homes. The immersive research was conducted mainly in the evening or night times, at pubs, bars and nightclubs. These places typically had “bouncers” as well as signs and posters to induce alcohol consumption. Guzzling was boosted by dance floors with deafeningly loud music, sparse seating and table spaces, centrally located and brightly lit bars.

Given the scenes, the research wasn’t easy. In his first study at Ringsted, a town in Denmark, where Sebastien was often accompanied by assistants, he kept zigzagging between a bar and an office to type up notes. But this accorded a very interrupted and not necessarily authentic view into the kind of drunken effervescence that his interviewees experienced.

At one point, he and an assistant decided to drink more, hang about more and experience the scene from the point-of-view of the revelers. But he realized soon enough that such immersive research could also be perilous. At one point, he was cornered by two Neo Nazis, who drove him into an extravagant home where a Confederate flag covered one wall, where racist and violent scenes were played on repeat on a computer screen – all creating a very disturbing experience for the author.

Apart from problems associated with becoming drunk, nighttime ethnographies can also affect the health of researchers in other ways – causing sleeplessness, restlessness and immunity issues. Sensing that such immersive ethnography was not sustainable, he relied on detailed observations and conversations.

Music, Liberation and Bonding: Nightclub Chronicles

Since in modern cultures, we exercise high self-restraint in most social settings, there is a need to release emotions in collective situations.

Like at a nightclub at Ringsted, where bartenders raised everyone’s spirits with loud “Cheers” and with close dancing on the dance floor. Through the night, people donned different roles on the floor – sometimes men danced like women, or the passive became aggressive.

One of the dancers was Ali, of Middle Eastern heritage, who was also involved in drug dealing. He ran a hash club called “Klub Imperator”, which contained a vivarium that held a snake and a poisonous spider. Ali spoke of how he was discriminated against because of his Middle Eastern heritage – by employers, girlfriends, teachers. He also enjoyed fights and brawls. Scholarship on “hooliganism” shows that it can generate a rush or “buzz” just like a drug.

Sometimes Ali would really “let go” at the night club; one night, he had stripped down to his underwear, amidst hoots, whistles and cheers. Later, he and his friends would smoke cannabis in the car to slow down their pounding hearts. Sebastien notes that the combination of alcohol, drugs and music helps create a “sonic bond” between people. Music, especially, forges a shared mood and a feeling of oneness.

Communal Ecstasy and Challenges

At a rave party, Tutenges experienced “compassionate effervescence” – a feeling of calm overtaking him, his own anxiety abating. The sense of doing stuff with others often raises spirits. As Durkheim puts it, “When men are all gathered together, when they live a communal life, the very fact of their coming together causes exceptionally intense focus to arise which dominate them, exalt them, give them a quality of life to a degree unknown to them as individuals.”

Performance researcher Alice O’Grady observes: “The party offers a play zone that protects its players from the outside world.” Of course, it’s not all positive. For instance, there are gender differences in the way men and women are judged after binge parties – with the latter being more frequently slut-shamed. Moreover, heavy drinking is associated with masculinity, compelling men to swig more or faster than they might have otherwise.

Crossing Boundaries: Holiday Deviance

On holidays, folks tend to cross boundaries that they wouldn’t at home. “Few things can unite people more powerfully than acts of collective transgression.”

Consumer culture researcher Russell W. Belk observes that Las Vegas is “instructing us through its farcical architecture and spectacles to adopt a playful mood of irreverent disregard for our normal behaviors and sensibilities.”

Deviance in these places is not always sparked by a personal problem or by some psychological deficiency. As Sebastien puts it, limits are often tantalizing, inviting us to cross them. Like a group of six women that the author meets, who dare each other to do things, so they can carry such memories home.

Capturing Life Moments

In the Instagram age, the drive to commemorate these events is stronger than ever. Even in extreme situations, folks possess a reflective self that occasionally pops into attention – with a sense of how they want that experience to be remembered or narrated later on. For instance, in the midst of violent fights, fighters are known to crack jokes or execute a more stylish punch than they might have otherwise.

Thrills, Bonds and Boundaries

Weaving personal narratives with closely observed situations, this book proffers new and startling perspectives on a range of intoxicating experiences. It’s given me deeper insights into the profound bonding among Rajnikanth fans inside a whistling theatre or the heart-pounding adrenaline surge of Indian cricket buffs. From the perilous leaps off balconies into pools to the euphoria of fighters inside a brawl, this study guides you into spaces that few academics venture into. Beyond that, Tutenges explores the meaning of it all: of why humans transgress boundaries or seek altered states of consciousness with both stirring and unsavory results.

References

Sebastien Tutenges, Intoxication: An Ethnography of Effervescent Revelry, Rutgers University Press, 2023