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В беседе об обычаях и привычках, связанных с едой - https://youtu.be/5F_zlO2IxgY?t=1652 зашла речь в том числе и о традициях застолий. И была озвучена весьма традиционное обоснование, почему люди устраивали "пир горой" - застолье/банкет это потребность чего-то неординарного, и имеющего отношение к жертвоприношению. И, с особенностями жизни в советское время - ещё и возможность показать либо достаток, либо оригинальность в подходе к приготовлению к какому-либо празднику (из неширокого набора продуктов да "дефицита" - придумать что-нибудь).
Я же склоняюсь к иному толкованию, зачем же эта традиция существует в обществе. Она ничуть не моя, её я увидел в одном из эссе историка Bret Devereaux на тему о выращивании продуктов - Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!, а именно:
Banking the Yields
...So savings accounts don’t exist and even if they did exist they wouldn’t work for our farmers who couldn’t count on the bank to still be solvent in a bad year.
...
Why not store the yield itself? The short answer is that our farmers are doing this, to a degree, all the time.
...
Attempting to store that much of a surplus over multiple years would be a wasteful non-starter.
...
Ok, so why not sell the grain and store something less perishable, like money? Sure, you can’t put it in a bank, but you can just keep it. ... In short, the very portability of money is a potential detriment here.
...
So while keeping some cash around against an emergency (or simply for market transactions – more on that later) might be a good idea, keeping nearly a year’s worth of expenses to make it through a bad harvest was not practical.
So how is a farmer to use good years as a way to cushion bad years?
Banqueting the Yields
The answer was often to invest in relationships rather than in money. There are two key categories here: horizontal relationships (with other subsistence farmers) and vertical relationships (with wealthy large landowners). We’ll finish out this section dealing with the former and turn to the many impacts of the large landowners next week.
The most immediate of these are the horizontal relationships: friends, family, marriage ties and neighbors. While some high-risk disasters are likely to strike an entire village at once (like a large raid or a general drought), most of the disasters that might befall one farming family (an essential worker being conscripted, harvest failure, robbery and so on) would just strike that one household. So farmers tended to build these reciprocal relationships with each other: I help you when things are bad for you, so you help me when things are bad for me. But those relationships don’t stop merely when there is a disaster, because – for the relationship to work – both parties need to spend the good times signalling their commitment to the relationship, so that they can trust that the social safety net will be there when they need it.
So what do our farmers do during a good harvest to prepare for a bad one? They banquet their neighbors, contribute to village festivals, marry off their sons and daughters with the best dowry they can manage, and try to pay back any favors they called in from friends recently. I stress these not merely because they are survival strategies (though they are) but because these sorts of activities end up (along with market days and the seasonal cycles) defining a great deal of life in these villages. But these events also built that social capital which can be ‘cashed out’ in an emergency. And they are a good survival strategy. Grain rots and money can be stolen, but your neighbor is far likelier to still be your neighbor in a year, especially because these relationships are (if maintained) almost always heritable and apply to entire households rather than individuals, making them able to endure deaths and the cycles of generations.
Привожу цитату в таком объёме ровно потому, что полностью соглашаюсь с выведенной позицией. Добавив тот факт (о котором всё чаще и чаще забывают), что ещё даже моё поколение - далеко не всегда даже городское по своему происхождению, а уж предыдущие - тем паче из сельской среды, где вот ровно те же причины застолий ещё были значимы, а в пределах одного века назад и вовсе могли преобладать.
Я же склоняюсь к иному толкованию, зачем же эта традиция существует в обществе. Она ничуть не моя, её я увидел в одном из эссе историка Bret Devereaux на тему о выращивании продуктов - Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!, а именно:
Banking the Yields
...So savings accounts don’t exist and even if they did exist they wouldn’t work for our farmers who couldn’t count on the bank to still be solvent in a bad year.
...
Why not store the yield itself? The short answer is that our farmers are doing this, to a degree, all the time.
...
Attempting to store that much of a surplus over multiple years would be a wasteful non-starter.
...
Ok, so why not sell the grain and store something less perishable, like money? Sure, you can’t put it in a bank, but you can just keep it. ... In short, the very portability of money is a potential detriment here.
...
So while keeping some cash around against an emergency (or simply for market transactions – more on that later) might be a good idea, keeping nearly a year’s worth of expenses to make it through a bad harvest was not practical.
So how is a farmer to use good years as a way to cushion bad years?
Banqueting the Yields
The answer was often to invest in relationships rather than in money. There are two key categories here: horizontal relationships (with other subsistence farmers) and vertical relationships (with wealthy large landowners). We’ll finish out this section dealing with the former and turn to the many impacts of the large landowners next week.
The most immediate of these are the horizontal relationships: friends, family, marriage ties and neighbors. While some high-risk disasters are likely to strike an entire village at once (like a large raid or a general drought), most of the disasters that might befall one farming family (an essential worker being conscripted, harvest failure, robbery and so on) would just strike that one household. So farmers tended to build these reciprocal relationships with each other: I help you when things are bad for you, so you help me when things are bad for me. But those relationships don’t stop merely when there is a disaster, because – for the relationship to work – both parties need to spend the good times signalling their commitment to the relationship, so that they can trust that the social safety net will be there when they need it.
So what do our farmers do during a good harvest to prepare for a bad one? They banquet their neighbors, contribute to village festivals, marry off their sons and daughters with the best dowry they can manage, and try to pay back any favors they called in from friends recently. I stress these not merely because they are survival strategies (though they are) but because these sorts of activities end up (along with market days and the seasonal cycles) defining a great deal of life in these villages. But these events also built that social capital which can be ‘cashed out’ in an emergency. And they are a good survival strategy. Grain rots and money can be stolen, but your neighbor is far likelier to still be your neighbor in a year, especially because these relationships are (if maintained) almost always heritable and apply to entire households rather than individuals, making them able to endure deaths and the cycles of generations.
Привожу цитату в таком объёме ровно потому, что полностью соглашаюсь с выведенной позицией. Добавив тот факт (о котором всё чаще и чаще забывают), что ещё даже моё поколение - далеко не всегда даже городское по своему происхождению, а уж предыдущие - тем паче из сельской среды, где вот ровно те же причины застолий ещё были значимы, а в пределах одного века назад и вовсе могли преобладать.