Being the weedy and bespectacled type, I view drinking societies with the keen eye of the outsider, rather than the blurred vision of the participant. Whilse drinking societies are the subject of an unending debate about whether they represent elitism or ‘banter,’ I prefer to ask a much simpler question: why? Using anthropological insights gleaned from eavesdropping in the UL, I tried to work out why these things exist.

On the face of it, being in a drinking society sounds horrible. Try to imagine that you are about to become a member. Your evening begins with being taken to a room in your college where you drink until you are only half aware of your surroundings, and end up willingly undertaking challenges and tasks which you might find degrading if you were sober. You go to a swap, where everyone finds out about all the humiliating things you have ever done, and then, if you make it, you go to a club where, too drunk to dance, your chances of success in the mating rituals are somewhat limited.

Why would you do this? And more importantly I feel, why would you want to do this to someone else? What makes some of the brightest people in the country re-enact scenes from Lord of the Flies every Sunday?

This is, I maintain, undeniably weird, yet it is a feature of Cambridge life. As a social practice this makes even less sense to me than shamanism or witchcraft. Performing the rites of the drinking society won’t make it rain, nor will it make your neighbour’s cows fall ill. Drinking too much can be great fun, but being forced to drink too much seems about as much fun as that episode of Tribe where Bruce Parry has his penis inverted.

Leaving aside what my incomprehension says about my own psychological pathologies (I know you were thinking it!), I believe the fact that people at Cambridge frequently do partake in seemingly weird social rituals says something about life here. Our social actions do have a function, however initially baffling they appear.

To pick, as it were, at the fabric of social life where it seems most obscure might lead to an understanding of its functions. Going through initiation rites and wearing the same clothes and ties as each other is probably an act of belonging, and a manifestation of our need to feel secure in ourselves by both making ourselves similar to other people and making other people similar to us.
If this is the case, it seems to me to be a paradox that some of the most charming and self-confident people I know feel they need to do this. I wonder if it is because our colleges do not provide us with true communities, only agglomerations of individuals who are too busy with their own work to live a shared life.

Those social high-flyers perhaps in reality find themselves isolated by their Cambridge experience, crying out for the company of other former captains of school rugby teams who have become, like them, just one of a crowd. Or perhaps not.

Maybe the social functions of drinking societies are more emphatically positive. Being fined at a swap turns your lowest moment into your most amusing anecdote. Vomiting when you were forced to down drinks turns what would normally be an embarrassing miscalculation of your capacity into a heroic effort to exceed it. Within the society, acts have different meanings from the ones they carry outside of it. The approbation of a few at the cost of the mild disapproval of a few others is perhaps a price worth paying.

In any case, drinking societies are a part of Cambridge life. Just as the Amazon has its Yanomami, Korubu, and Tukano tribes, so we have our Crescents, Squires, and Green Monsters. However, whether our own indigenous cultures deserve the same respect and protection as those of the Amazon is a different matter entirely.

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