Margaret Visser The Real Meaning of Table Manners By Melanie Fogel Volume 19 Number 5 1991 October Margaret Visser discusses table manners and social behavior, covering everything from cannibalism and the Gulf War to the Eucharist. Regular CM contributor Melanie Fogel spoke with Margaret Visser during her recent tour promoting her new book, The Rituals of Dinner. Read on for a taste of their conversation. CM: Did living in Zambia influence your interest in other cultures? Visser: When I was living in Africa we were pretty benighted. Blacks and whites didn't mix. I suppose one was aware, in a way, that people were different, but not much. I think my interest in other cultures comes from being an exile. I left Africa when I was seventeen and one is never really part of anything again once you're an exile. As an outsider, you're not taken in-- in both senses of the word--by the society you're living in. It's a terrible disadvantage being an exile. Dreadful. The only thing you can do with it is turn it to your advantage, which is what I'm trying to do, I suppose. This is how I rationalize it, anyway. When I was very young, I was sent to boarding school, where I was brought up by nuns. I was living in the Middle Ages, which I don't consider to be a terrible thing at all. It was a wonderful experience and a complete life. It's always given me something that I can look back to and understand, living differently from the way people live now and here. So that helped more than the very impoverished experience we whites had of the blacks, which I deeply regret now. We weren't capable of it. It's like when you bring up your children and later on you say, "If only I could have given them religion." Well, you couldn't because you didn't have it then, and you can't give what you haven't got. We were blinded and we didn't understand. CM: Do you look for your subjects or do they find you? Visser: Both. What I like doing when I've got a spare half hour or so in the library--and I spend my life in the library, you have to understand this-- is go and sit among the magazines. Not popular magazines, but learned periodicals. The really boring stuff with the brown cover that says Anschrift or something. I love to read these and see what they are really saying, and what it is that is interesting. There's something there, if you can just find it, buried in this academic jargon. Usually there's nothing there, perhaps one smidgen of an insight and that may be very boring. But every now and then, in the middle of some incredibly unpromising magazine, you find dynamite. It's said in this appalling roundabout way with ninety-nine footnotes per paragraph, but what it's saying is dynamite. Another thing I like to do when I'm researching something is go to the area where that subject is dealt with and look around and outside it. Very often the best ideas come from the edge of your subject. I recently did a piece on blue jeans. It's a huge subject; it's vast. And I thought, "How am I going to say this in 750 words!" I was looking in the clothing section, and there was this thing about dyes. Why are blue jeans blue? And that was my subject. You don't know it's there until you've found it, so you've got to remain open--open at the edges. I love it--it's like treasure-trove hunting. CM: Does such intimate knowledge of human behaviour increase or decrease your respect for humanity? Visser: I'm enormously impressed by the sophistication of social behaviour. The more you learn about it the more awesome we are. We're so sensitive and so complex. Even the person that thinks or she is terribly simple is carrying a out the most extraordinary feats of communication. Just the way you hold your head, the way you put your hand, the way you're sitting, you're giving out pictures to me and I'm taking them in-- CM: --First you made me self-conscious of the way I eat and now you're making me self-conscious of the way I sit! Visser: If you knew what was involved in taking one footstep! If you had to think through every movement that your body made to stand up and take one step you'd spend all day and you wouldn't take the step. We do all kinds of amazing things. The closer you look the more amazing we become. On the other hand, take something like cannibalism. It's taboo in our society. But this dreadful thing [Persian Gulf War] where Americans killed 100,000 people. Everybody jumped up and down and said how wonderful they were. If you told the same people, "Now go and eat them," they'd be absolutely outraged. "Eat them! What are you saying? Am I a savage?!" In a way, it's much more sensible to eat them than to kill them. And yet we admire the killing and we think we're so smart because we won't now eat them. We're extremely complex in some ways and in other ways we're not very highly evolved, rather primitive. CM: And preposterous? Visser: And preposterous. And wicked! Wicked and cruel, because table manners are used in very cruel ways, to put people down, to keep people out, to reinforce prestige and inborn privilege. Anything we have, everything we do, can be used for good and for evil. You realize the extent to which human beings can do anything. We are created to be able to do anything, from the worst, the basest to the best. We're free in the sense that we can take out culture and choose and change it. We're not free to have none. That's the mistake that a lot of people make. Human beings must have culture, but the freedom is in being able to adjust it. When we feel it's going wrong or it's inappropriate, it can be changed. But you're not free to get rid of it. That's something I'd very much like to get across in this book. There's no such thing as a society of human beings with no manners. That's why I had the cannibalism section, because cannibals are highly mannered. CM: Are they so different from us? Isn't Communion a form of cannibalism? Visser: The Eucharist is blinding, it's so incredible. It's one of the richest, the most extraordinary rituals ever devised. I'm not talking about the belief in it. Just look at it analytically. It smashes all the categories of our culture: all of them. It smashes all the oppositions by which we categorize the world. It takes everything and makes it into one. The difference between here and everywhere is gone, the difference between one and many is gone, the difference between same and different is gone, the difference between meaning and fact is gone, the difference between host and guest is gone, the difference between God and man is gone--all the huge things which are absolutely divided in the experience of the world as we are brought up are smashed. The mystic experience is one of perceiving a thing and its opposite at the same time, and realizing that black and white are the same. The Eucharist does this in an incredibly sophisticated way. And one of the many, many, many things it does is completely destroy the categorization of food, because it is a vegetarian mean which is also cannibal. And then you have all the poetry and all the ritual. This is mediated by ritual, it has to be--mediated by incredibly complex ritual although it's extremely simple as well--and only eating can do this. You see, there are two ways in which human beings are brought together most completely. One is by killing them, namely the scapegoat, and one is by eating together. And the Eucharist, of course, is about both. So it's the ultimate uniting thing. But you see how food can say things like that. Only food could do the trick, because it's an outside thing that comes inside. It's one thing that we all share. We all eat it; we all become one. Human beings have been going on about food and its meaning since we were squatting around fires in caves. It's the great metaphor. Much more important than sex. Sex is really a latecomer. CM: You write a lot about taboos. Visser: We're doomed, in the late twentieth century, to demythologize. I think it's a terrible condition. However, it's our condition and we cannot escape it. What I'm doing is removing the taboos. It's terrifying, because I do see the reason why people have taboos. Taboos are there to control people's behaviour when there is no chance of their using their reason. One taboo, for example, is Don't kill your father. When you're eighteen years old and your father's fifty and you say, "I want the car," and he says, "You can't," Nature says, "Ok, smash him and take it." A taboo is working when the kid doesn't even think of smashing his father. That's not natural; the natural thing is to go smash him and take it. The anger in this youth who's stronger than his father is a very powerful thing, and the taboo is as powerful as his anger. So taking away a taboo is a very dangerous thing to do, and yet we are doomed to do it. In fact, I do believe that we've moved on to a higher level. It's a higher level to understand what you're doing. In other words, to decide not to knock your father out, not because it doesn't cross your brain, but because you know it's wrong and why it's wrong and to have thought about it. We've got to think about everything now. We cannot afford to do things unconsciously. We're too dangerous; we're too powerful. We cannot rely on taboos. Books by Magaret Visser Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos, of an Ordinary Meal. McClelland & Stewart, 1986. The Rituals of Dinner: The Origin, Evolution, Eccentricities and Meaning of Table Manners. HarperCollins, 1991.