Chapter 8
TOBACCO RITUAL AND ANTI-RITUAL:
SUBSTANCE INGESTION AS A HISTORY
OF SOCIAL BOUNDARIES
Rituals mark boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. Such rituals at times are contested, by persons located in various relationships to those boundaries. At times the ritual itself is attacked, frequently by individuals or groups who do not recognize its ritual character; for these people, the staying power of the practice may appear inexplicable, irrational, or pathological. At other times, the boundary rather than the ritual is contested, and there are movements to break through the boundaries and become included on the other side of the ritual. Such rituals, too, can create new social boundaries, social identities and groups, rather than merely being adopted by preexisting groups. This is particularly so of what we may call lifestyle rituals, natural rituals in the middle ground between formal ceremonial and low key unfocused social encounters, represented in figure 7.1. Lifestyle rituals in the realm of leisure sociability have been especially important in the modern era, adding new boundaries to the older dimensions of class, religion, and ethnicity, and often displacing them in the subjective consciousness of modern people with the rituals of situational stratification.
A useful case to study is tobacco ritual. It presents us with a relatively long history, with many forms of use going in and out of fashion among many different kinds of social groups. Along with it, throughout its history, have existed various forms of contestation, both anti-ritual movements and movements to shift the ritual boundaries. Tobacco and anti-tobacco movements have existed over the past four hundred years—indeed during the whole time since tobacco was introduced into the world beyond the tribal societies where it originated. Tobacco using—smoking, sniffing, or chewing—has made up a set of interaction rituals; and these rituals help to account for the strong attractiveness of tobacco for many of its users, the members of the tobacco community, and for their resistance to sometimes quite severe attempts at social control. The historically shifting appeal of tobacco, including its considerable but not yet terminal decline in recent de-
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cades, has been shaped by conditions that have shifted the strength of these social rituals. My aim is to explain how substances ingested into the body are experienced in a variety of ways—either as objects of attachment or of revulsion—depending on the ritual processes in which they take part.1
A study of tobacco simply in terms of its ritualism would have been theoretically straightforward in the social science world of the 1920s through the 1950s—although I do not know of any sociologist or anthropologist who attempted it. Since the 1980s a very different frame imposes itself. What seems the natural, indeed, inevitable way to approach the topic is as a health issue; and the perspective on tobacco use is to subsume it under the category of deviance, specifically under the rubric of substance abuse along with drugs and alcohol. The very awkwardness of the term "substance abuse" tells us something of the recent history, as it indicates the search by regulatory agencies and professional activists for a common denominator by which to designate all the forms of prohibited or deviant consumption. The word "substance" is clumsy and as general as "stuff" or "thing," and its dictionary meaning refers to any material constituent of the universe. The aimed-at referent seems to be whatever is ingestable into the human body but ought not to be. Thus one might wonder if food could not be an abusable "substance" under the purview of official agencies of social control. Viewed without irony and as a sociological topic, it is entirely plausible, perhaps even likely, that there will be just such an extension in the future to the ingestion of food as a form of substance abuse subject to both formal and informal movements of control.2 One such movement, in incipient form at the turn of the twenty-first century, is concerned about standards of body weight and obesity, and with the restriction of so-called "junk food" in schools. This suggests a general sociological perspective on contemporary "substance abuse" movements: the expansive activities of official agencies and professional movements organized around the interpretive categories of health, addiction, and the control of youth; on the informal side, these are movements promoting and contesting lifestyles. As sociologists, we should as always be awake to see that these activities are not just individual lifestyles, but rituals and thus markers of group boundaries. Wherever our sympathies may lie on the side of a particular ritual or anti-ritual movement, our distinctive contribution is to stand above these controversies and to point out their contours.
In this chapter, I will consider first the health and addiction model, with an effort to move beyond its framing in the common-sense categories of contemporary social actors and toward a more sociological vantage point. Although the argument here is couched mainly in
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terms of tobacco, it has implications for other forms of addiction (drugs, alcohol, and, indeed, food—overeating—and noningestive forms of addiction such as gambling). Following will come a brief history of the various types of tobacco rituals, and of their opposition. A health-oriented anti-smoking movement had long existed, but it rose to power only in the late twentieth century. I will argue that a merely empirical presentation of evidence of the health consequences of smoking is not a sociologically adequate explanation of the rise and apparent triumph of the anti-smoking movement. The rise and fall of smoking rituals can be explained largely in sociological terms; the social processes that led to the expansion of smoking rituals to their height in the early and mid-twentieth century, reaching their peak during World War II, also provides an explanation of why the ritual base of support for smoking was in decline in the late twentieth century, at just the time that the anti-smoking movement came into its ascendency. By that time it had an easy target, as most of the ritual attractions of smoking had faded away.
Inadequacies of the Health and Addiction Model
The anti-smoking movement mobilized in the latter half of the twentieth century took its stance in the terms of public health. Above all, it rested its case upon statistical evidence of a causal connection between smoking and cancer as well as other deadly disease. If tobacco is so unhealthy, its strong appeal must be explained by some nonrational process; that is, it is addictive, and individuals get started on their addiction because of advertising by tobacco companies.3 Cancer, addiction, and advertising: these are the three pieces of the anti-smoking case. The historical pattern, however, undercuts all three points. Anti-smoking movements have existed much longer than the statistical evidence on the adverse effects of smoking on health. Evidence on the link between smoking and cancer began to be accumulated in the 1930s in Germany under auspices of Nazi nationalist concerns for public health (Proctor 1999). But this went largely unnoticed at a time when the tobacco cult was at its height in the Western democracies. More attention was paid to health-related statistics from the late 1940s onward in Britain. Wide anti-smoking mobilization based on grounds of health did not develop until after the 1964 Surgeon General's report in the United States. Earlier anti-tobacco movements mobilized on different grounds. There were vociferous reactions against smoking around the time of its introduction and early popularity in England, including a strong denunciation in 1604 by King James I, and violent efforts at
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suppression during the seventeenth century in Russia, Turkey, Persia, and Japan.4 Again from the 1850s through the early-twentieth century there were strong denunciations from parts of the medical profession as well as clergy and politicians, notably in England and America; cigarette smoking was banned in twelve American states in the period around 1890 to the 1920s—just at the time the movement of alcohol prohibition was reaching its peak mobilization. During these various anti-movements, tobacco was charged with a range of defects, including its dirtiness, general vileness, low moral qualities and character debilitation, and sometimes various health problems. Although we are inclined now to believe that there is something in the latter charge, it was put in the distorted form of claiming tobacco caused such diseases as blindness, deafness, palsy, apoplexy, as well as cowardice, laziness, and insanity (Walton 2000, 65-68). The vehemence of reaction against smoking is not correlated historically with social awareness of evidence of its unhealthy effects; nor did the anti-tobacco movements have to believe in its unhealthiness to be intensely opposed to it.
Similarly with addiction. The case is best made against cigarette smoking in particular, rather than other forms of tobacco use. Many smokers have great difficulty stopping; feel cravings when they are not smoking; go through withdrawal symptoms such as irritability or compulsive eating; and are treatable by methods such as nicotine patches that acclimatize users to gradually reduced dosage. This appears to support a straightforwardly physiological process. Nevertheless the addiction model is far from a complete picture of the social process of smoking. Confining attention to cigarette smoking, we should note that addiction is not uniform or automatic. It is not simply a matter of smoking a cigarette and thereby becoming addicted; some process of subjective modification of consciousness about processes going on in one's body must take place before the individual feels sensations for which he or she has cravings.
This is analogous to the process of getting "high" in learning to become a marijuana smoker, in Becker's (1953) analysis; this experience can lead to strong desires for the marijuana high, which, however, is not addictive in the same sense as tobacco. A principal difference is that tolerance for marijuana builds up rather sharply. For a while, larger amounts are necessary to get the "high" effect; but also the intensity of the "high" eventually no longer matches that of initial experiences. Hence many users give up marijuana because it ceases to be effective. There can be nostalgia and psychological cravings for the high feeling, but there are no physiological withdrawal symptoms. The comparison between tobacco and marijuana indicates that the initial sensitizing process that makes an individual into a committed user ex-
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pecting a distinctive feeling from his or her smoking can happen with substances that have quite different long-term effects. An inference is that processes that look like "addiction" (especially involving intense commitment or craving) vary greatly with the social definition or mood of the experience expected.
This may help explain a fact that the anti-smoking movement tends to skip over: that a certain proportion of smokers are light smokers, or smoke intermittently; many persons are "social smokers" who smoke at parties or other festive occasions but not otherwise. Thus the process of "addiction" cannot be simply an automatic physiological reaction to tobacco smoke; there is a set of behaviors and procedures—on the terrain of microsociological research—which determines how narrowly the individual becomes attached to the feelings in their body while smoking, and in their entire social posture, of which the mutual orientation of bodies is a part.
Some persons' reaction to smoking is to feel it as unpleasant experience. This is the experience of many persons who are starting to smoke; some go on to identify other aspects of their experience that make them smokers, while others never go beyond the negative experiences or even intensify them. Envision a continuum: at one end, negative and unpleasant reactions to smoking; tapering off to neutral experiences; then moderately attractive experiences; and increasingly strong attraction ending with craving and compulsion. The microsociological hypothesis is that individuals' experience in each portion of the continuum is shaped by a particular kind of social context.
We have relatively little evidence of how many persons are distributed along the full continuum, and how they shift among positions over time; and we lack a systematic historical picture of these patterns across the centuries. Correlating these patterns with their accompanying social interactions would give us empirical grounds for a micro-sociological theory of smoking. It would be a theory not of absolute, all-or-nothing addiction, but of variations in smoking behavior (cf. Marlatt et al. 1988). Those at the negative end of the continuum are potential members for anti-smoking movements; but for them to be mobilized takes a more complex social process, including their interaction with those on the opposite side of the continuum.
One conclusion we might draw from the historical data is that an "addictive" type of behavior is not necessarily produced by physiological processes at all. Historically, the first spread of the tobacco movement was in the form of pipe-smoking; it was followed in the eighteenth century by a widespread popularity of snuff; and in the nineteenth century cigars and (especially in America) chewing tobacco. All of these had their enthusiastic practitioners. Although careful sta-
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tistics are lacking, there are biographical descriptions of tobacco users in these various forms who puffed their pipes all day long, smoked a score of cigars or constantly kept their noses or mouths full of snuff or chewing tobacco: in other words, there were substantial numbers of individuals who were at the high end of the continuum, corresponding to what today would be called "addiction." There seems to be relatively little systematic evidence on cravings and withdrawal symptoms among persons using tobacco in these forms; but they may have occurred. The key point, however, is that these forms of tobacco use did not involve inhaling smoke; the smoke was too harsh. It was only with the invention of flue-cured tobacco in America in the mid-1800s, and its use in mass-produced cigarettes through the introduction of rolling machines in the 1880s, that tobacco smoke became inhalable; whereas pipe and cigar smoke is alkaline, cigarette smoke is acidic (Walton 2000, 76-77). Hence the rise in lung cancer, a hitherto rare disease, with the spread of cigarette smoking in the twentieth century.
What this comparison brings out is that it does not require the strong and immediate flow of nicotine into the blood stream through inhaling smoke to bring about behavior, in some proportion of tobacco users, that resembles the highly attracted, "addictive" end of the continuum. It also seems likely, based on the historical pattern, that there were many persons at the moderate-to-low levels on the continuum of tobacco ingestion; quite likely many of them were maintaining a steady pattern of tobacco use, but not at the levels that we label as socially deleterious through the term "addiction." In short, historically there seems to have been a lot of tobacco use that cannot be explained by an "addictive" mechanism; and also some (maybe quite a lot) of tobacco use that resembles the social pattern of "addiction" without its physiological basis.
One other conclusion about addiction: The image of addiction is useful to anti-smoking movements, since it gives a picture of users who can't control their own behavior; they are not normal human beings, having lost power over their own bodies; and this gives warrant for ceding that control to outside agencies. Addiction also connotes a process that is voracious and expanding; it gives a rhetorical account of how smoking spreads—cigarettes are introduced to unsuspecting non-users (especially youths) who try them and automatically become addicted. The last step in the causal chain is clearly untrue. But the rhetoric of addiction does give an account, or at least sets a verbal atmosphere in which it is plausible that smoking spreads so readily, as if by contagion. The reality is that smoking expanded as a social movement propagating lifestyle rituals, with its focus of attention, its emotional energies, and its feelings of membership. Lacking a microsociological
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view of how this happens and of the power of this sort of social contagion, one might well describe it as a kind of cancer in the body social, an addiction spreading from one cell to another. This gives an accurate enough emotional sense of what anti-smoking crusaders feel they are up against.
Finally, advertising. The advertising of tobacco is a phenomenon of the twentieth century. It cannot be the explanation of how tobacco spread initially: its widespread popularity in England and Holland in the late sixteenth century; the spread throughout Europe (especially intense in Germany), but also widely into the Middle East, India, China, and Japan in the seventeenth century. It did not take advertising to spread tobacco use; it spread by what the media business calls "word of mouth," or more accurately, by example and collective participation, and by acquiring prestige as a social custom. Wars were particularly significant occasions for the spread of tobacco-using customs (e.g., the spread of cigars during the Napoleonic wars in Spain, and of cigarette smoking during the Crimean war); these customs jumped from one army to another, across lines of emnity Thus even in the twentieth century, with its massive advertising campaigns (above all in the United States and western Europe), cigarette smoking spread to a considerable extent independently of advertising—as in the rapid adoption of cigarettes in place of pipes in Asia.
This implies that even in the heart of the advertising country, the influence of advertising on smoking was only a portion of the phenomenon, and probably of minor influence. In general, studies of advertising show that consumers are skeptical of claims made by advertisers (Schudson 1986). Thus the anti-smoking movement's allegations rest on an assumption that tobacco advertising must be an exception, the mostly wildly successful advertising campaign of all time. It is more plausible to regard the effect of cigarette companies' advertising campaigns as securing market share among themselves by keeping their brand names in public memory. Some proof of the point is provided by the fact that after the prohibition of most forms of tobacco advertising in the United States, smoking dropped but then stabilized at about 26 percent of adult males and 22 percent of females, with slightly rising percentages among teenagers (30-35 percent) (Los Angeles Times, March 29,2001). In other words, tobacco smoking sustains itself among a core group of committed users by the same social processes that have always supported it.5
In what follows, I will present evidence that users of tobacco have interpreted its effects in several quite distinct ways: among others, as tranquilty or as carousing excitement, as facilitating concentration on work or as sexual arousal. For comparison, I introduce similar evi-
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dence for the ways in which the bodily effects of coffee and tea have been interpreted, and also well-known work on marijuana use. For all of these substances, this is not just a matter of how they are interpreted, but how they are felt; the bodily experiences themselves differ depending upon the social ritual in which those experiences are enacted.6 This is not to say that there is no physiological process going on, and no chemical distinctiveness among nicotine, caffein, or various drugs. I do not hold that the distinctive chemistry of ingestable substances containing nicotine, caffein, alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, opium, and other drugs, all interact with social processes in the same way. It may well be the case that at certain dosages these substances have distinctive bodily effects that override most of the social inputs—that ingesting a large amount of opium will have a different effect than a large amount of caffein, regardless of context. What I argue here, minimally, is that at least in the case of nicotine and caffein, the component of undifferentiated arousal is very large, and allows a very large range of social interpretation, which leads to a range of bodily experiences through the fusion of undifferentiated arousal with socially specific emotions.
Nicotine, caffein, and a variety of other ingested substances produce a relatively undifferentiated physiological arousal, which is shaped into a particular bodily and emotional experience by interaction rituals. These are not merely mental interpretations, labels placed upon physical processes; the shaping of these experiences happens in the body itself, because interaction rituals operate as intensifications of coordination between bodies.7
Smoking ritual generates particular kinds of emotional energies in groups; it is these that are experienced bodily as the effects of smoking. And since over time the symbolic objects charged up by strong interaction rituals carry a sense of that emotional energy with them, the solitary smoker can invoke the previous social experience in his or her temporarily isolated body. I am arguing that no one would have a stable experience of tobacco, or of coffee or tea, if they were not introduced to it through social rituals; the completely isolated Robinson Crusoe smoker or coffee-drinker, in my opinion, would never come into being. As we shall see, coffee and tea, although both containing similar amounts of caffein, were socially interpreted quite differently in European history, as moods of convivial action or dignified tranquility. In the twentieth century, further differences are visible in the typical social interpretation of coffee in the United States and in Europe (especially in France or Italy). In the Unites States, coffee is associated with working (preparing for work in the morning; coffee breaks to sustain work during the day). In contrast, the European ritual of coffee,
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although involving much stronger caffeine concentrations, is treated as equivalent to the situation of having an alcoholic drink; it is a form of conviviality and elegant sociability, and thus rather sharply marked off from working. Against this backdrop has appeared the late-twentieth-century American cult of decaffeinated coffee (and its equivalent, herbal rather than authentic tea). Thus whereas in Europe one would drink a strong coffee to conclude an evening meal (taken to balance or complement the drinking of alcohol), in the United States at comparable evening situations upper-middle-class persons tend to drink "decaf," stating that they cannot sleep if they drink real coffee. The international comparison (as well as individual differences among Americans) suggests that this is a social construction. Not to deny that for these Americans drinking coffee in the evening is followed by difficulty in getting to sleep; but I am suggesting that this is not an automatic physiological result, but the social construction of bodily as well as cognitive habit such that coffee is associated with working and hence with being awake. It is striking, too, that the cult of "de-caf" came into the United States at the same time and in the same places (and quite possibly among the same persons) as the triumph of the anti-smoking movement. As we see in the interpretation below, both are forms of anti-carousing movements, and both are legitimated by an ideology of health; herbal teas first appeared in the health food movement, and until the 1980s were available only in cult-like health food stores.
Social interpretation, based on social ritual, determines a considerable proportion of bodily experience; it is not simply the result of unvarying, naturally given physiological reactions to chemical substances ingested in the body. My argument for a microsociology of smoking parallels the argument in chapter 6 for a microsociology of sexual interaction. Just as I have argued that sexual "drive" is not usefully conceived as an autonomous, self-motivating biological process; and that it is not to be understood as genital pleasure per se; here I propose that we examine the pleasures and repulsions of smoking, up through the apex of intense cravings and bodily convulsions, as deeply determined by variations in interaction ritual.
Tobacco Rituals: Relaxation/Withdrawal Rituals, Carousing Rituals, Elegance Rituals
Tobacco has been used in five main ways: smoking in pipes, cigars, or cigarettes; as snuff; and as chewing tobacco. The social meanings of these kinds of tobacco use have varied, as has the composition of the
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groups who have used them, and thus who was included or excluded, and what kinds of lifestyle were being exalted or defended. The fact that the same substance might be used in different kinds of rituals and given different meanings shows that the meanings are not inherent in the physical characteristics of the tobacco. On the microsociological level of IR chains, the individual tobacco user has to make the same kinds of attributions and develop the same kinds of sensitivities that get one high as does a marijuana user.
There are three main tobacco rituals: First, relaxation and withdrawal rituals, characterized by serenity and ease away from the pressures and excitements of work and of social life. Second, carousing rituals, in which the quality of tobacco is felt as enhancing excitement and riotous enjoyment. The third type, elegance rituals, resembles carousing insofar as it takes place in sociable situations; but whereas carousing is sheer immediate excitement and thus a momentary focus of attention that we can call situational stratification, elegance rituals convey an aesthetic impression of the actor as a categorical identity within the status hierarchy. These not only organize different forms of social stratification but involve quite different emotional tones; the kind of social ritual determines the quality attributed to the tobacco.
As a preliminary comparison, note yet another kind of ritualism for which tobacco has been put to use: the original ceremonial of the diplomatic "peace pipe" observed by the European explorers of America among the native tribes. In northeast America, the pipe was a huge ceremonial object, four feet long, carried prominently on diplomatic expeditions where it served as a flag of truce. It was decorated with ornaments representing the various tribes adhering to the alliance, and was smoked in an elaborate ritual, in which the pipe was passed around the assembly of chiefs and leading warriors. Taboos of sacred-ness were observed; smokers were not to touch the pipe except with their lips; they blew the smoke toward heaven and earth in religious invocation. (Goodman 1993; Walton 2000, 280-83)
Here yet other qualities were attributed to the tobacco: spiritual and religious significance. In a society in which religion was organized as public participation, largely identical with the political and kinship structure of the group, smoking ritual had a Durkheimian significance on the largest scale, symbolizing the collective forces at their maximum. This kind of tobacco ritual was rarely to any extent used by the Europeans or in the other complex commercial civilizations to which smoking propagated. The tribal ritual was not part of everyday life; and it took place in groups organized so that individuals neither withdrew into privacy among intimate, voluntarily chosen friends nor did it occur where nonkin came together outside the bounds of formal ritu-
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als to carry out carousing. In short, these tribal societies did not have the kind of social organization that tobacco smoking was to constitute in Europe. It is consistent with this structure that, as far as we know, there were no anti-smoking movements in tribal societies, nor any local critique of tobacco-using practice.
In European and Asian societies, to the contrary, tobacco was always used in an informal, private, and unofficial capacity. This structural location left smokers open to be attacked by officials, whenever they were seen as an affront to official commitments and ritual. Christian ministers could attack tobacco as a vice, equivalent to other forms of immorality; autocrats such as the Russian Czar, the Mogul emperor of India, the Turkish sultan, and the Persian shah during the mid-1600s attempted to extirpate smoking by punishments ranging from slitting smokers' lips, pouring molten lead down their throats, public whipping, and execution by torture (Kiernan 1991; Walton 2000, 39-46). In these societies, smokers were treated as violators of ceremonial correctness of public order. In less authoritarian, pluralistic societies, smokers might be attacked not from above but from their putative equals, both on grounds of offending rival standards of behavior, and because of the group boundaries that smoking drew and the ranking that it implied between insiders and outsiders. Issues of lifestyle and social boundaries went together, since the ritual practice constituted the lifestyle that draws lines of inclusion and exclusion.
Tobacco was first used in pipe-smoking, and this remained the main form of consumption up through the vogue of snuff in the eighteenth century, and indeed throughout that period for the lower social classes until the era of cigarettes in the twentieth century. During the early period when pipes were virtually the only form of tobacco use, several interpretations of its effects circulated indiscriminately. In the earliest period of its introduction into Europe, tobacco was suggested as having medicinal use. This settled into a long-standing interpretation that tobacco was antidote to hunger, fatigue, and hardship. The association with ingestion as a substitute for food was expressed in the terminology of the seventeenth century, which often spoke of "drinking" or "tippling" tobacco smoke (Walton 2000, 230). Yet this association with physical sustenance was socially specific, since tobacco was used almost exclusively by men; it was not "food" for women and children. The interpretation arose because tobacco use began among men in hardship situations, initially explorers and colonists, and spread during military campaigns.8
When pipe-smoking spread into routine social life, it acquired two connotations: relaxation and tranquillity, and, on the other hand, carousing. These alternatives gradually diverged as specific social situa-
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tions of tobacco use became institutionalized. On one hand, smoking became an activity of times of rest: in the evening, or during a work break, after exhaustion, or for elderly men in retirement. The ritual ingredients of these situations came out most strongly where they involved men sitting together smoking their pipes, speaking little, or quietly chatting. The activity of preparing and looking after pipes (which will be analyzed in more detail later) could act as a substitute for conversation; men were focused together on the same object, enjoying a largely wordless communication. This was no doubt particularly useful for men with little cultural capital, few things to speak about, as among retirees or others out of the action; and it probably also helped to create a more introverted personality type, in that it gave a legitimate and meaningful activity for men to do wordlessly, differentiating them from the livelier extroverted talkers. As we shall see shortly, this latter group (I deliberately resist calling them extroverted "personalities") was emerging at the same time in early modern society, building a distinctive lifestyle in a network circulating the techniques of joking, story-telling, and game-playing pastimes—and with these a different interpretation of tobacco rituals.
There were doubtless some men who smoked alone, which is to say, without the company of other smokers. But given the housing conditions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it is likely that these "solitary" smokers were in the presence or at least the sight of others most of the time. Smoking thus would act as a boundary marker in yet another sense: it gave a social definition to what an individual was doing alone, establishing a membrane around that activity that others understood and respected (or, as the case might be, despised and criticized). The solitary smoker at the fireplace nook or on the doorstep watching the village street, much like the group of mostly silent men gathered in similar positions, was defined as engaging in an activity of tranquil relaxation. This would have been contrasted with the main earlier alternatives: religious contemplation, and perhaps mere social incompetence, dullness, or senility. The ritualism of pipe smoking thus gave a modest boost in social status to innocuous or inactive men, outside the religious sphere, in their hours or years of inactivity.
The other venue for pipe-smoking was in scenes of carousing. Smoking became a favorite activity in taverns, along with drinking. It was associated with riotous action, the deliberate saturnalia of inebriation, loud music, gambling and other rowdy games, and prostitution. In a time when smoking was a male preserve, prostitutes were virtually the only women in Western societies who openly smoked—which presumably they did while taking part in these scenes of carousing. One result
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was to keep up a barrier against respectable women smoking, by assocating those who did with whores.9
Taverns had long existed as accommodations for travelers, and they became more prominent as urbanization displaced the daily round of religious ceremonial that had made up the routine of the medieval households under the patrimonial authority of household heads (Wuthnow 1989). In the seventeenth and especially the eighteenth century, a more respectable version of the tavern developed, the coffeehouse. This developed in commercial centers connected with world trade, and thus became prominent not only in London, but also in commercial cities of Holland and Germany. The coffeehouse became a center for a double ritualism, coffee and tobacco. In contrast to the culture of tranquility and withdrawal associated with quiet pipe-smoking, the coffeehouse featured stimulation and excitement.
Coffeehouses expanded at the time when snuff-taking became the socially reputable form of tobacco use, although pipe-smoking continued there to some extent as well. A number of conditions were associated with the spread of snuff. By the late 1600s, pipe-smoking had become so widespread among males of all social classes so that snuff could acquire prestige as a more elite practice. The rise of snuff was furthered by criticism, especially from women of the respectable classes, of the dirtiness and smell of smoking tobacco; and snuff-taking was more convenient, at a time when pipe-smoking was cumbersome in the absence of matches or other methods for bringing fire to the pipe. To be sure, the aesthetic objection to smoking was merely displaced to another area, since snuff-taking left a good deal of powder on clothes, faces, and furniture. This was one reason why tobacco tended to remain in all-male enclaves such as the coffeehouses, although snuff developed its polite ritual and paraphernalia and became part of the sphere of drawing-room etiquette as well—or at least contested that terrain for a time.
Tobacco, like coffee, was here associated with liveliness. Both provided an ongoing small-scale physical activity during the urban gatherings of journalists, politicians, theaters producers, "wits," and other intellectuals, and those engaged in speculative business.10 Each of these circles had their habitual coffeehouses. Many of these occupations were then first appearing or becoming institutionalized. The early eighteenth century was the time when the English parliament began to meet regularly and politicians took over control from the monarchy; regular periodical publications began to appear, giving an appetitite and a demand for news; similar developments took place with the theater and other realms of specialized cultural production. These institutions constituted a new form of "action," ongoing excitement that they
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both promoted and reflected upon and publicized as part of their own commercial activities. Talking and writing about the "action" was itself one of the activities that went on around these centers of assembly.
Why did these activities have to be associated with ingestion of any substances at all? Conceivably businessmen, journalists, politicians, and the other circles could have met to carry out their plotting and professional gossiping in a purely instrumental way, focused on nothing but the talk at hand. This would have made their meetings the equivalent of professional conferences. But they were not conferences, and the contrast enables us to see just in what the social ritualism of the coffeehouses consisted. Even today, when one wants to talk with a professional colleague, not in a formal way but in a setting that is defined as backstage, one suggests "meeting for coffee" or, with a connotation of even greater role distance, "meeting for a drink." The implicit purpose of the encounter is not openly stating positions, making offers for explicit exchanges and thus committing oneself to a bargaining posture, but deliberately avoiding this degree of definiteness. The flexibility of backstage encounters allows more room for maneuver in bargaining, as well as a more open field for acquiring information and for making contacts. Thus although the more or less ostensible purpose of meeting in this way is related to professional business, it requires an immediate purpose that is purely sociable and informal, something defined not as work but as recreation or pleasure.
Another way that this kind of backstage setting could be provided for professional encounters was through membership in a private club. Clubs emerged in London in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, to some extent by differentiating out from the same kinds of circles that had frequented coffeehouses. But a club was a more cumbersome form of meeting than a coffeehouse, requiring long-range planning and fixed investment on the part of participants; its membership procedures, too, were more cumbersome and time-consuming, not suitable to fast-moving shifts in information and reputation. Thus clubs were not so much places where business or culture-production work took place, but rather where success in these fields was ratified and formally recognized.
A useful contrast to the "liveliness" culture of tobacco and coffee in these settings is the ingestion of the same substances, at about the same time, in the coffeehouses of Turkey and the Levant. There the government structure had no place for open discussion of political parties, and no equivalently lively market for cultural production in the form of commercial entertainment was developing. It appears that coffee-drinking and smoking in Turkey and other Islamic societies did not acquire the same connotations of being the center of excited "action"
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as they had, for instance, in London at the time of Alexander Pope. Instead, both coffee and tobacco were part of a time for leisured withdrawal, part of the cult of tranquility. Once again we see that the social context determines the perceived emotional effects of similar physical substances.
Tobacco at the northern European coffeehouse acquired the social significance of a moderate form of carousing: not the unbridled licentiousness associated with taverns, drinking, gambling, and prostitution; but connected with a higher social class (or with the higher classes engaged in less rakish pursuits); and as ancillary to the serious business of respectable and indeed somewhat elite occupations. It marked the differentiation of status spheres, which were becoming more elaborate than those that existed in the medieval society of patrimonial households ranked by aristocratic status and enacted in religious ritualism.
In the medieval world, the main scenes of social attention were the court ceremonial of the high aristocrats and officials of the church; a lesser degree of stateliness surrounded the daily routine of heads of modest households. The main sphere of socially legitimated privacy would have been the prayers and religious exercises of the monks and priests, and their emulation by devout laypersons. Tobacco arrived from tribal America into an early modern social world where more room was becoming available for private sociable gatherings. These were separating out into enclaves for men withdrawing quietly to smoke pipes alone or in small groups of intimates; alternatively, tavern-like scenes of crass carousing (including both low-life and adventuresome males from higher ranks); and these again in contrast to the backstage scenes of action involving public business (initially in the coffeehouses), which both facilitated professional life and became a magnet of social attraction in its own right.
Rival scenes of private sociability were also developing, outside the boundaries of and in contrast to these male-dominated enclaves whose borders were most sharply marked by tobacco. A new sphere of ritual sociability developed with a national marriage market, with greater scope both for individual negotiation of love matches, and simultaneously greater complexity of parental involvement in steering marital alliances (Stone 1979). This brought a great expansion in the sphere of female-centered sociability as well: the "Season" at London, the balls and hunts at country houses; an etiquette of social calls, at-homes, proper introductions among the socially eligible, the art of leaving calling cards; dinner parties in the city and eventually in country homes, where they were often combined with extended visits and hence entertainments. An elaborate set of female-centered ceremonies grew up,
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involving routines of polite conversation, card-playing, domestic musical performance, and tea-drinking (Burke 1993). This realm of female "action" took on a life of its own, over and above the marriage market. Refined social rankings were being created, beyond those of the medieval aristocracy, involving a certain amount of fluidity based on skills in negotiating ritual borders; and these status prizes gave great emotional significance to items of everyday comportment. We had arrived, so to speak, at the Goffmanian era of modern history.
In this social sphere, the drinking of tea became a rival ritual to the male world of coffee and tobacco. The substances thus socially distinguished were physically quite similar. Tea was also an import from the era of world trade in the initial period of colonial expansion. Tea contains similar amounts of caffein as coffee. However, tea became a domestic drink, associated with family meals, mixed company, and women's socializing. Tea-drinkers became defined as sedate in contrast to the "action" connotations of coffee-drinking; this was a contrast of social locations, the ritualism of coffeehouse encounters as against the ritualism of ordinary family meals, or at its most elegant, of ladies' tea-time.
Pipe-smoking, coffee-drinking, and snuff-taking spread with the enthusiasm of lifestyle movements. Along with them went emotional moods and ways of talking about the effects of tobacco, coffee, and tea. The safest course is to regard these substances as producing psychologically undifferentiated physiological arousal, which was then situationally defined as particular moods by the kinds of rituals built up around them. Pipe smoke, snuff, coffee, and tea became symbols of social groups and social boundaries; the symbolism was an intimate one, since it involved feelings in one's own body and emotions—tranquility, rowdy celebration, sophisticated action, dignified elegance— which were experienced both as parts of oneself and as enacting one's social relationships in the micro-encounter and one's larger place in the social order.
Snuff-taking, although a contested practice on the terrain of drawing-room sociability, the sphere where elegant women exercised their greatest control, came closest to socially defining tobacco as a dignified elite ritual. It failed and largely disappeared from high society by the beginning of the nineteenth century, and shrank into a minor practice of rural and lower classes. Although snuff was one form of tobacco that males used in sociable interaction with respectable women, it did not cross over the gender line to any extent; probably an important consideration was that the messiness of the custom could not be made compatible with the elegant self-presentation women were cultivating during this time with face powders, jewels, and décolletage. Where
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men could engage in the end-of-snuffing ritual of wiping away powder with their billowing handkerchiefs, women of the higher social classes had committed themselves to a more immobile, statuesque elegance. Snuff did not fit into their ritual presentation of self.
Chewing tobacco may be passed over lightly in this survey. Of all the forms of tobacco use, this was the least elegant and left the messiest residue. Its main practical virtue was that it eliminated any need for lighting and burning tobacco, and thus could be practiced in the course of physical action, as well as in any outdoor setting; indoors as well, if spittoons were available. Tobacco chewing was a fad—and thus a temporarily prestigious social movement—mainly in the United States during the nineteenth century. This apparently carried a political symbolism. Chewing tobacco became popular during the period of Jackso-nian party politics in the 1830s; it had rural connotation, and signaled membership in the class of rural landowners in the land speculation and agricultural business boom that dominated the American economy of that period. As late as 1900 chewing tobacco made up 44 percent of the American tobacco market. The U.S. Congress and other government buildings furnished ubiquitous spittoons, which were not removed until the 1950s (Brooks 1952).
The distinctly inelegant display of chewing and spitting tobacco juice was a form of aggressive self-assertion, mitigated by being shared in a community of men all spitting together. Its practitioners must surely have felt that it contrasted sharply with polite drawing-room etiquette and with the more restrained and self-contained practices of smoking; no doubt this was the message they wished to convey. Chewing tobacco was popular and prestigeful in this time because it represented assertive rural democracy, the attitude of "I'm as good a man as any so-called gentleman or aristocrat." The humor of contemporary remarks about daring to spit in a rival's eye (i.e., spit tobacco juice) conveyed the self-image that the tobacco-chewer attempted to project. This interpretation is confirmed by comparisons: the fact that tobacco-chewing was nowhere widely popular other than the United States; its decline at the time when the moderate-size rural landowner was overtaken economically and politically by other interest groups in the late nineteenth century; its subsequent pattern of hanging on mainly in farming areas and rural pastimes (such as among white baseball players).
Pipe-smoking and snuff had established the main ritual usages of tobacco: tranquility and withdrawal from affairs; and on the other hand excitement, both in the form of antinomian carousing and in the higher class form of sophisticated action. These carried over in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as snuff disappeared and pipe-smoking was gradually supplanted, first by cigars and then by cigarettes. Pipes
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thereby lost their connotation of carousing, and became associated exclusively with calm self-absorption. During the German revolts of 1848, there were mass confrontations in the streets in such cities as Berlin, aimed explicitly at government regulations against smoking cigars in public. Cigar-smoking had the connotation of a young, active, masculine public crowd, associated with modernist tendencies and liberalism; pipe-smoking was regarded as bourgeois, sedentary, respectable and conservative, done in the privacy of home (Walton 2000, 163). By the mid-twentieth century in the United States, where cigarette-smoking had become extremely widespread in all social classes, pipe-smoking gave the image of a well-mannered gentleman, polite and rather self-contained, in contrast to the more hard-driving or carousing image of the cigarette smoker. It also gave off a conservative image insofar as it remained a male preserve at a time when the most popular form of smoking was becoming gender-shared, and thus removed from the sexual flirtation that was facilitated by cigarettes.
Cigar-smoking displaced snuff rather abruptly around the turn of the nineteenth century, as part of the revolutionary transformation in manners when the French Revolution downgraded the aristocracy. Cigars tended to occupy the same social niche as snuff: the relatively higher class world of the backstages of public action, and the male counterpart to the elegant drawing-room. Cigars were emulated by less wealthy and action-central social classes, although the greater cost of cigars kept poor people's smoking (including most of the working class until the twentieth century) in the form of pipes.11 Whereas snuff had come closer to bridging the gap between males and females—insofar as men took snuff in the presense of women—the gap widened again as cigars renewed the aesthetic objections to smoke. Cigar-smoking promoted the sharper separation of spheres in the mid and late nineteenth century, the so-called Victorian era. Men were expected as a matter of etiquette to withdraw to the stables to smoke (thus emphasizing outdoor sports as male spheres, at just a time when work was becoming increasingly indoor and sedentary). The custom developed for women to withdraw from the dining room after a polite sociable gathering, so that the men could smoke their cigars together. One side effect of this custom was probably to increase the amount of cigar-smoking; the ritual announcement by the host—"Gentlemen, you may smoke."—given after the toast to the Queen, no doubt called for a good deal of joining in merely to be in the spirit of the occasion.
Nineteenth-century houses had become physically and interac-tionally much more complex than their earlier forms [Girouard 1978, 1979]. In medieval homes of the elite, most activities had taken place in great halls, with little privacy for the aristocrats surrounded by their
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Figure 8.1 Cigar-smoking as class marker: a working-class admirer makes deferential contact with Winston Churchill, yet with a gesture of ritual solidarity in offering a Hght.
courtiers and servants. This had gradually given way in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to specialized rooms, differentiated by degrees of privacy and restrictions on who could enter them. Women acquired their own spheres of action and their spaces in which they could put on their own rituals of impressiveness. The Victorian house of the wealthier classes carried this social differentiation to the most extreme specialization of household spaces in any historical period: there were elaborate servants' wings for household activities with back corridors so that service would be carried on unobtrusively, giving an impression of unruffled privacy for the family residents and their guests; libraries, a business office, children's nurseries and schoolrooms, conservatories for music playing, morning rooms for the ladies to sit in, as well as formal reception rooms and banquet halls. These physically separated the various activities of the day and the subgroups of persons who took part in them. Victorian houses typically
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included a billiard room, which served as a masculine realm, where cigar-smoking took place; similar purpose was served by a hunting room, and frequently by a smoking room. These rooms were particularly prominent in bachelor quarters: that is, an unmarried man of the wealthy classes would have both a place to smoke, for his masculine friends, but also likely a drawing room, saloon, or library where he could entertain mixed company as well.
Cigar-smoking thus carried a connotation of genteel carousing, and of bachelorhood. It became common in the nineteenth century to set up a contrast between the pleasures of bachelor life and marriage. The former was defined as a life of "independence," although (since married males had a great deal of power) the content of this independence was merely a space away from the female sphere with its different rituals of respectability. The specific content of bachelor life was defined above all as freedom to smoke (which in reality meant subjection to the ritual demand for smoking in male society); this was the respectable form of carousing, more defensible than drinking, gambling, or whoring, and indeed probably the most widely practiced of these (since the latter activities involved a good deal of practical costs and sometimes difficulties). Defenses of bachelorhood and of smoking interchangeably held forth on the pleasures of male company, as the specific form of ritual sociability that involved no obligations other than good fellowship. This was also defended by intellectuals and artists, who held smoking to be part of the creative process or mood; what they apparently meant by this was that writing, painting, or composing took place in a Bohemian atmosphere, independent of mundane considerations, and this was both symbolized by and palpably felt in the ritual of smoking. This is no doubt what Kipling meant by his famous line, the peroration of a poem called "The Betrothed" (1888): "A woman is only a woman; but a good Cigar is a Smoke."
These ritual distinctions shifted once again when cigarette-smoking became popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cigarettes, along with the ready availability of lights through safety matches and gas lighters, made smoking maximaly portable and individualized, and compared to previous forms of tobacco use, relatively clean. They also appeared at a time when the wealth of all social classes was increasing; mass production and marketing made tobacco unprec-edently easy to buy; and barriers between male and female spheres were breaking down. With the wide spread of cigarettes, and especially its adoption among women, other forms of tobacco use declined sharply. This meant that the differentiation of tobacco rituals increasingly shifted to differentiation among uses of cigarettes. Pipe-smoking retained its connotation of tranquil withdrawal, but cigarettes could
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also be smoked for such a purpose (although without signaling a male enclave). Cigars still had some connotation of "big business, important people," but cigarette smokers could also make their claim to being where the action is, both high class and rowdy.
A major part of the triumph of cigarettes over other tobacco rituals was their spread to women, which thus reinforced their importance for men who wanted to be around women; initially this occured as a sexual revolution, the shift in sexual negotiations that in the 1920s was known as the "jazz age." The flapper was shocking because she wore mannish clothes, smoked, and flirted; contemporary conservatives took all three as touchstones, but the smoking was the strongest emblem of the cultural break. I will later take up this process in connection with the ups and downs of smoking and anti-smoking movements in the twentieth century.
Ritual Paraphernalia: Social Display and Solitary Cult
Rituals can focus attention on physical objects, which thereby become emblems of group membership, and reminders of the mood that the ritual practice had concentrated and intensified. "Addiction" to tobacco, like the craving for marijuana or other drugs, involves a strong attachment to the emotional mood and its social interpretation that goes with smoking. This attachment is displaced onto the physical object, as its symbol. In terms of IR chains, it is a way of steering oneself toward a specific source of emotional energy. Similarly, persons can become "addicted" to particular kinds of social rituals, which have nothing to do with ingesting substances; in this sense one can become addicted to gambling, or become a workaholic, a sports junkie, etc.
In the case of tobacco, the Durkheimian sacred objects, or the physical things to which a smoker becomes attached, are often not the tobacco per se (i.e., the nicotine in the blood stream), but its smoke, smell, taste, and also—perhaps preponderantly—the apparatus in which it is ingested. Thus some tobacco smokers lavish attention on the preliminaries to smoking: preparing the tobacco, the way it is displayed and stored, the instruments through which it is smoked or ingested. There is an additional sociological reason for attending to these activities: these help explain how smoking, whose effects I argue are socially constructed, can sometimes be a solitary activity. In this light, let us briefly survey the ritualism of tobacco paraphernalia.
Pipes were initially simple clay devices, which over the centuries became more elaborately shaped and decorated. Particularly in Germany and Holland, where pipe-smoking became extremely popular, elaborately carved pipes of meerschaum stone (introduced in the eigh-
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Figure 8.2 Two emblems of middle-class respectability: a pipe and a cup of tea (England, 1924).
teenth century) were treated as objects of prideful display. The cult of pipe-smoking came to its greatest prominance in those communities because of their distinctive class structure: relatively few grand aristocrats with their courtly displays of rank, but instead local dominance by the bourgeoisie of the free cities and commercial towns. German-Dutch pipe-smoking was a way of showing off in local gatherings while keeping up an aura of fellowship in a modestly elevated collegial group. Collective pipe-smoking was also a favorite ritual among university students, another privileged yet casual and internally egalitarian group within German society. In keeping with the mild antinomi-anism of this liminal age-group, smoking had a slightly carousing tone, as in the favorite practice of smoking out a candle—filling a tavern room with so much tobacco smoke that the candle went out (Walton 2000, 256).
With the rise of competing forms of smoking, pipe-smoking became more of a solitary pastime. Pipes became less ornate, less oriented toward public display. At the same time, the pipe-smoker tended to develop an extensive private ritual of collecting pipes, caring for them,
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and preparing tobacco. Around 1850 wooden pipes largely replaced clay and stone, especially with specially cured and carved briar wood (Dunhill 1924). Such pipes involved a good deal of cleaning, since the taste was affected by residue from previous smokes; much time was spent scraping away the burnt interior of the bowl, so eventually pipes would become too thin and hot and have to be replaced. For both these reasons, committed pipe-smokers kept collections of pipes. These served as a private shrine, which would also include collections of various kinds of tobacco with a variety of scents and tastes. Pipe-smoking acquired an ethos of collecting, a form of hobby and connoisseurship, with its subtleties and sophistication.
By the twentieth century, pipe smokers were no longer assembling very much to smoke in a collective ritual,12 but instead were maintaining a social pose as an individual man of respectable taste. The greatest focus of attention, and flow of emotional energy, would come from the ritual preparation for smoking perhaps even more than from the smoking itself. An analogy in religious rituals is the practice of mystics, for whom the height of religious experience was solitary prayer or meditation, rather than participation in collective ceremony. In Weber's terms, the twentieth-century pipe-smoker was a kind of "inner-worldly mystic," especially its Western version, a practitioner of quietism (i.e., performance of spiritual exercises not in monastic withdrawal but "in the world") (Weber 1922/1963, 177). In their respective historical settings, the religious mystic or solitary pipe con-noiseur had an accepted social definition and was recognized by others, albeit from a distance, as a person aloofly pursuing spiritual excellence and thereby entitled to respect.
Snuff-taking was a thoroughly social and ostentatious activity. Of all the forms of tobacco-using, it had the most concentrated dramatic structure: preparation, buildup, tension, release, aftermath, all punctuated by an audible burst of sound and bodily convulsion.13 It entailed a paraphernalia that was compact, portable, and elegant. Snuffboxes were forms of personal jewelry, and were at the height of fashion in an era when men's clothing, specialized for elite drawing-room sociability, had a great deal of ostentation. Displaying a gold snuffbox, offering it to others, rapping on it to emphasize a point, all were part of the dance-like moves of salon sociability; they were adapted as well to the dramatic enactments of the coffeehouse. Later snuffboxes became collector's items, in much the same way as exotic porcelain would be displayed on table tops or in glass cases in the rooms of a home designed for the reception of visitors. This shift from use to display happened in the period when snuff was displaced by newer forms of high-status tobacco use.
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Cigar paraphernalia were in some respects less elaborate than that of pipes or snuff. But cigars themselves became highly differentiated, by size and shape as well as by the flavor and quality of the tobacco. Large, long, or otherwise expensive cigars made a statement of relative wealth; it is in keeping with this differentiation that cigar-smoking became prominent in the nineteenth century in just those countries (England, United States, Germany) where class differentiation by commercial wealth was developing most rapidly. Cigars became a ritual gift; generally unlike pipes and snuffboxes, which tended to be items of personal identity carried everywhere by their owners, cigars were tokens in the rituals of hospitality. It was the duty of the host to offer cigars to visitors, especially in the after-dinner ritual of the higher classes; offering cigars was also a friendly marker for a business agreement. This ritualism of cigars as honorific gifts declined in the twentieth century with the rise of cigarette ritual. But cigars retained their special status, in the custom of giving out cigars on occasions of special celebration, for example this was expected of a father celebrating the birth of a child.
Cigars were distinctive in having special smoking rooms provided for their use; this was of course confined to the wealthier classes, and reinforced cigars' connotation of social rank. The era of cigar-smoking was also the period in which men had a special smoking wardrobe: generally a smoking jacket and sometimes smoking cap, made of unusually lavish materials such as velvet, with brocade collars and bands, perhaps tassels. These were strikingly fanciful in the style regime of the nineteenth century when male clothing was becoming somber, thereby underscoring the dramatic self-presentation of the smoker in a situation of dignified sybaritic celebration (Laver 1995).
The pleasure of cigar-smoking, like other kinds of smoking, may well have consisted largely in the surroundings and paraphernalia. The best part of cigar-smoking comes at the outset: the choosing, displaying, offering, smelling, and rolling between one's fingers the unlit cigar; sometimes an elaborate ritual of lighting (a high-class servant could spend a good five minutes turning a cigar in a match flame before presenting it to the smoker to be lit); the sense of implicit social membership conveyed by who was present for the simultaneous first few puffs, and who was excluded. From here, it was all down hill: cigars smell progressively worse as they are smoked, since the cigar acts as a filter accumulating the harsher portions of the smoke, and the end is a wet, slimy cigar butt. Cigar-smoking has very strong qualities of Goffmanian frontstaging, in which the appearance is more appealing than the close-up reality. Given that cigars are not inhaled, and produce relatively little nicotine charge in the body, cigar-smoking gives
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Figure 8.3 One of the first women smokers of the respectable classes. In emulation of male traditions, she wears a special smoking outfit (England, 1922).
suggestive evidence that the ritual is far the stronger attraction than the physical experience itself.14
Cigarette smoking in the early twentieth century broke the gender barrier, and thus in one sense returned to the elegance rituals that characterized snuff in the eighteenth century. Cigarette-smoking in the United States was first associated with upper-class "dandies," later spreading to the working class (Klein 1993). But cigarettes quickly became items of mass production and mass consumption, increasingly cheap and widely available, not so sharply differentiated by expense as cigars. Elegance and resistance to social leveling was provided for a time by cigarette holders, some of which took the form of expensive jewelry. Cigarette holders also provided dramatic appeal: they made the cigarette more visible, and could be held at a high angle, with a variety of moves conveying different attitudes. President Franklin Roosevelt's cigarette and holder, clenched between his teeth at a jaunty upward angle, was his trademark conveying determined optimism. Holders could be held at what were called "rakish" angles, as well as dignified or snooty postures. Also possible was a range of signals, symbols of one's attitude toward the world, marked by dispensing with the holder.
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Figure 8.4 FDR's trademark cigarette holder (1930s).
A tone of tough-guy, cynical sophistication, for example, was conveyed in the 1940s by the cigarette hanging casually from the corner of the lips, rarely removed. No doubt this acquired some of its effect by contrast with the hand movements of elegant smoking taking the cigarette in and out of the mouth repeatedly, with a good deal of waving in the air. Such gestures also gave opportunity to display one's hands; for upper-class ladies, this generally involved showing off one's jewels. With or without holders, cigarette-smoking gave opportunity to dramatize hands and fingers, especially emphasizing the long and elegant.
Individuals of the higher classes, emulated by those who could afford it, transferred their cigarettes from mass-marketed packages into
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cigarette cases, typically of silver or gold; these were often inscribed, and could be given as treasured personal gifts. Loading up one's cigarette case was a backstage preparation for the ritual before going out to a party or social entertainment. This not only gave cigarettes an elegant setting for the eyes of the owner, but also made for an ancillary ritual of offering a smoke as part of the etiquette of greeting, or of striking up a friendship.
The ritual of reciprocal gift-giving could be carried out by smokers at all social levels. This gave even greater significance to the elaborateness of the paraphernalia such as cigarette cases for conveying the social standing of the giver. At least, it allowed the situational pretense of such status. George Orwell (1936) gives an example, worthy of Goff-man, of stage-preparation on the part of the downwardly mobile: no matter how poor, one needed to carry in one's case at least one cigarette to offer, in order to honorably receive from others. Among the humbler classes, the exchange of cigarettes or even cigarette butts was a way to strike up a friendship or at least a transient obligation. In communities of hardship, such as prison populations, war refugees or battle zone survivors—especially in the aftermath of World War II— cigarettes were used as currency, substitutes for money; at the same time these exchanges retained some qualities of ritual gift-giving. Cigarettes even when serving as money were also smoked by these populations, indeed especially treasured because their ritual consumption was experienced as luxurious relief, time-out from the onerous situation. Thus to give or lend a cigarette set up a strong obligation of return; it was somewhere between a financial debt and a mark of honor. Failure to repay could result in deadly quarrels (as in prison fights even today; O'Donnell and Edgar 1998); but also borrowers would go to considerable lengths to repay since this implied maintaining a vestige of normal civilian respectability of the cigarette cult.
Offering a light, or asking for one, was a common courtesy; notoriously, it was also a way of striking up an acquaintanceship in public. Here again paraphernalia could be elaborated, from the simple match to lighters, which at the upper end of status ranking were silver or other jewelry. In home furnishings, elaborate ash trays, lighters, and cigarette boxes were equipment of routine hospitality as well as opportunities for display of wealth and taste. And offers and acceptances of cigarettes were standard moves in flirtation and courtship; it was not merely in Hollywood films that cigarettes were used to symbolize sexual engagements; film-makers' use of this symbolism to evade censorship after 1934 came from preexisting custom, rather than vice versa.
In sum, cigarette-smoking acquired a variety of ritual uses: conveying social status, including the dramatization (and pretence) of
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upper-class elegance; sexual intrigue and negotiation; the social ties of reciprocal gifts. Some of these rituals conveyed hierarchy; others common comaraderie. Cigarettes became increasingly important around mid-century in backstage socializing, such as chatting on the telephone, or in a relaxing moment with friends. Ex-smokers, and those attempting to give up smoking, frequently refer to the temptations to smoke m particular situations; this is especially common with women who associate smoking with casual chats with their female friends.15
One other social use, and subjective interpretation, of tobacco emerged with the spread of cigarettes into all social classes. Cigars and chewing tobacco had prepared the way for smoking on the job, especially on certain kinds of outdoor jobs; cigarettes made it possible to smoke ubiquitously, including in most kinds of white-collar work. In this respect, twentieth-century cigarette-smoking was largely unprecedented in breaking down the barrier between the ritual sphere of sociability, where tobacco had almost always been confined, and the practical world of work. The rationale that smoking workers give—that a cigarette helps one to concentrate—adds yet another social interpretation of the feelings generated by the undifferentiated experience of ingesting nicotine. This last conquest of social space by tobacco was the first to be successfully contested by the anti-smoking movement of the late twentieth century. This is understandable by a theory of social movement mobilization. Smokers at work are the least socially organized of smokers. Compared to smokers in the realm of sociability, where the group identity is defined by its rituals, smoking workers are merely adding a private subjective note to an activity focused in entirely other terms. The move to drive smoking out of the workplace undercut at least one respectable social interpretation of tobacco; others were to follow.
The height of smoking ritual involving cigarettes was in the 1920s through the early 1950s. The variety of rituals ran the gamut of those promotmg various kinds of status to those undercutting eliteness and promoting equality. The era of female emancipation into male pursuits made cigarettes a central ritual of sexual flirting and reinforced the carousing culture of smoking; mass production brought the widespread emulation of upper-class styles in the earlier decades of the century; the war years brought emphasis on rituals of camaraderie and expressions of toughness. The anti-eliteness expressed by the 1940s tough-guy smoker with cigarette hanging from lip was already a step toward challenging and eroding elegance rituals. The expression of status identities through publicly visible rituals plummeted sharply after the war; we had entered the era of predominantly situational stratification. The very ideal of a formally ritualized public order was undermined
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Figure 8.5 Women workers, drawn into service in male jobs during World War II, share a cigarette break.
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by the counterculture movement of the 1960s, leaving situational prestige on the side of ritual anti-formalism ever since.
Most of the more complex public ritualism of tobacco was already in decline by the 1960s. Mass democracy undermined ritual elitism and the carousing rituals that went along with it. Much of the ritual appeal of smoking was already disappearing before the anti-smoking campaigns began their surge toward dominance. At mid-century, smoking was quantitatively at its height, but it had become more of a privatized activity, without its supports in the realm of the wider status order. It was this vulnerability that created the opportunity in which the dry statistics of health could receive a growing reception.
Failures and Successes of Anti-Tobacco Movements
Anti-tobacco movements arose to counter tobacco rituals. The social appeals and vulnerabilities of the various tobacco rituals have shifted over historical time and presented better or worse opportunities for opponents to mobilize against them. We will consider what social groupings or locations have been offended by tobacco rituals, what tactics they have adopted to mobilize support, and what determines the success of their attacks.
I have described four main kinds of tobacco rituals: those promoting tranquility and withdrawal; carousing; elegance; and work-oriented relaxation and concentration. The first and last of these rituals are weak and relatively defenseless against attack, insofar as they are carried out individually or quietly and make no claim to dominate a social focus of attention. By the same token, they do not create the most strongly motivated opponents, since they provoke no struggle over ritual dominance. Work-oriented smoking, a relatively recent historical development in the mid-twentieth century, was vulnerable to prohibition as soon as a strong anti-smoking movement became mobilized; but the source of this movement was on a different ritual battlefield, and it merely found workplace smoking the most vulnerable target. I am arguing that liking or disliking of tobacco smoke is for the most part not naturally given, but socially constructed; and hence most people did not automatically find tobacco smoke in the workplace to be offensive until there was a social movement that defined tastes in this way. The centuries of quiet pipe-smokers, on the other hand, were generally unmolested in the absence of a strong anti-tobacco movement.
What provokes such movements are the other two types of tobacco rituals, carousing and elegance rituals. These make explicit claims for social dominance: carousing, for the center of attention in the immedi-
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ate local situation; elegance rituals, for status superiority in the long-term structure of stratification. Carousing rituals promote situational stratification; elegance rituals convey structural stratification and its categorical identities. Both are likely to be contested. There is opposition from old elites who defend preexisting ritual forms of dominance against upstart rituals, thence opposition by traditional autocrats and religious elites to the initial introduction of tobacco. Opposition comes also from persons relegated to the position of situational subordinates by carousing rituals; and from those whose claim to structural status comes from a different resource than making an impression of elegance. Carousing makes enemies out of those who are not carousers, and elegance finds opposition among those who claim the center of status attention for moralistic and other serious pursuits. These latter forms of exclusion, until the twentieth century, had been entwined with gender; and it was only the crossing of gender lines in tobacco rituals that allowed an effective anti-tobacco movement to become fully mobilized.
These kinds of opposition generally remained latent, felt but ineffectively expressed, until mobilizing conditions occurred for them to emerge as explicit social movements. Historically, the strength of these different sources of opposition to tobacco rituals have fluctuated. I will sketch the main types of conflicts analytically rather than chronologically, until we come to the recent period in which an anti-tobacco movement finally achieved widespread success.
Aesthetic Complaints and Struggle over Status Display Standards
A long-standing complaint against tobacco is that it is smelly, dirty, and leaves an unpleasant residue in the form of ashes, pipe scrapings, snuff powder, cigar butts, and the like. In general, women have been the leaders in the aesthetic critique of tobacco. The early dislike of smoking coincided with a period when home architecture and furnishings were changing. The rough medieval buildings, fortress-like for the elite, in close proximity to farm animals for the poor, were giving way to more comfortable quarters as well as more elegant presentation. Homes gradually became less smoky, less smelly from chamber pots, kitchens, and farmyards. Women now complained that tobacco smoke reeked in the curtains at just the time that houses began to have window curtains, rather than wooden shutters. The aesthetic critique of tobacco was at its height in the nineteenth century, at just the time when the house was acquiring a higher standard of freedom from smells, as well as richer accoutrements. The tobacco movement (in this case, largely the cigar-smoking movement) thus ran a rivalry with the
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movement for the domestic display of social respectability. Tobacco ran counter to the new Goffmanian frontstage of household propriety. The outcome was renewed segregation along gender lines, with both male and female spheres making their own claims to eliteness, with and against tobacco respectively.
Micro-situational struggle over defining one's social class position was especially widespead in the nineteenth century, when a growing middle class was able to make claims for respectability, set off against the still highly visible anchors of aristocratic display at the top, and the filthy conditions of the workers below. In contrast, by the early twentieth century, rudimentary home cleanliness was no longer a criterion of much status differentiation, and the aesthetic critique of tobacco largely faded.
On the whole, aesthetic complaints have never been very effective in eradicating tobacco. Early pipe-smoking, along with nineteenth-century cigar-smoking, were immunized from aesthetic criticism by separation into an all-male enclave. Tobacco chewing was a thoroughly ugly practice in every respect; its appeal was precisely this claim to express frontier democracy, its political nose-thumbing at the aesthetics of what was portrayed as an undemocratic urban elite. At the opposite end of the spectrum came snuff and cigarettes, which achieved their popularity in gender-mixed company and in sociable rituals claiming elegant taste and social status. Here the aesthetically unpleasant aspects were trumped by the ritualistic devices that built up the elegance of tobacco using. On the balance, the tobacco aesthetic tended to win out over its unaesthetic aspects.
Anti-Carousing Movements
The movement against the carousing rituals of tobacco has built upon stronger motivations. It invokes moral objections and thus manifests a Durkheimian community at its most self-conscious, defending its ideals and its boundaries with righteous anger. Anti-carousing movements have been formed against tobacco on the basis of several kinds of memberships and have had several historical moments of success, as well as failure.
When new forms of carousing have been introduced, they have typically been opposed by existing elites in their capacity as upholders of the moral order, and as those whose dominant status was enacted by the rituals of that moral order. The initial reaction to tobacco in Christian Europe and in the Islamic world provide vivid examples. The attack published in 1604 by King James I of England took place at the time when smoking had become a vogue among courtiers; and their
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behavior was cause for royal concern in other respects as well. This was the time when the state was beginning to centralize military power and to eliminate the independent armies of the feudal lords; a device for doing so was to build up ceremonial attendance at court (Stone 1967). The gathering of both male and female courtiers, unmarried or temporarily unattached from spouses, encouraged sexual licentiousness; and in an era of marriage politics and volatile claims to the throne, together with backstage maneuvers over royal favorites, popularity in courtier circles could be both faddish and dangerous. Thus the imprisonment and execution of Sir Walter Raleigh, famed as the leader of the tobacco fad (and subsequently but inaccurately elevated to the alleged introducer of tobacco into England), occured during faction fighting and denunciations of smoking by James I's favorites. This type of attempt to suppress the new carousing rituals rather quickly failed, since it ran against the grain of modernizing social structures. With the growing complexity of social organization, venues for sociability and status display were expanding outside the control of the great patrimonial households where the dominant rituals had been those of aristocratic rank-display and religious ceremonial. Tobacco rituals were part of a new private sphere, the growth of places and occasions for purely situational stratification, where temporary elites of carousing upstaged the structured elites of political, economic, and religious hierarchy.16 In the following decades and centuries, carousing rituals blended with elegance rituals to form a differentiated realm of sociable occasions, so that sufficiently elegant forms of carousing became the gateway for admission into the structural hierarchy itself.
The End of Enclave Exclusion: Respectable Women Join the Carousing Cult
Exclusion of women from tobacco carousing rituals set up two kinds of tension. On one hand, women were motivated to attack tobacco. Another motive was to overcome the exclusion and join the action. This is a typical dilemma created by all exclusionary rituals: to attempt to destroy the ritual that imposes lower status on outsiders, or to force one's way in. Before 1920, respectable women did not smoke; those who did were regarded as lower class, although an ambiguous status was emerging of adventurous sophisticates who occasionally smoked. Cigarette smoking in the early twentieth century became such a rapidly growing movement, and reached such levels of enthusiasm, because it promoted the feeling of breaking down barriers. Two barriers, in fact: the barrier against women joining in the carousing culture; and the barrier against the mid-to-lower classes participating in the smok-
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Figure 8.6 The flapper era: self-consciously daring young women share the cigarette-lighting ritual (1928).
ing rituals of the upper classes, which had formerly been blocked by the ritual barriers of smoking rooms, robes, expensive cigars, and the rest. In the IR model (figure 2.1), we see that any source of emotional ingredients feeds into a cumulating process of generalized excitement; the fervor of women smokers and parvenues added to a festive atmosphere that enhanced the mood of the upper-echelon males as well. The various fads in cigarette paraphernalia—cigarette holders, cases, and the like—spread as movements both of inventing new forms of ranking, and of emulating those at higher ranks. The atmosphere was neatly symbolized by (not caused by) Hollywood movies of the 1930s, with their propensity for portraying an idealized upper class at exciting sociable play, and with their display of cigarette smoke as a prominent part of the black-and-white film aesthetic. Film noir of the 1940s expressed the following phase, with curls of smoke rising in the angular shadows complementing the character portrayal of heroic smokers as a strong, tough, and cynical elite.
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The display images always involved a strong dose of fantasy, in the little Goffmanian enactments of everyday situations as well as on the screen. Nonetheless they conveyed something socially real insofar as sociability now became centered on mixed-gender gatherings in settings of carousing. The nineteenth-century marriage market, which had been to a considerable degree conducted in family settings—not so much by parental choice as by the necessity of negotiating membership in home rituals—now moved to scenes of parties and other entertainments of the carousing culture. It is conventional to regard this "jazz age" of the 1920s as a drinking culture, pushed into solidarity in the underground through Prohibition; perhaps even more important components were the mixed-gender smoking culture, and the sexual flirtation that went with it. Thus as women joined the smoking world, they brought even more men with them than had previously belonged to it; smoking by men went up to a height of 80 percent in Britain and the United States by 1945, ahead of the sharply rising curve of women smokers.17
Women had been split by the two available strategies for confronting exclusionary tobacco rituals: prohibition or inclusion. With victory of the counter-exclusionary strategy, it would appear that tobacco rituals had won. But the end of the split within women's ranks opened the way to a more direct line of assault. Tobacco rituals no longer were all-male enclaves, and hence they no longer were supported by male identity; one source of support for tobacco was eroded. A ritual marking categorical identities by gender had lost its category-marking status. And since gender division no longer overlaid the conflict, the stage was set for conflict as a simple opposition of smokers and non-smokers.
The Health-Oriented Anti-Smoking Movement of the Late Twentieth Century
The anti-smoking movement that became prominent in the 1980s, at first largely in the United States, shifted its focus to health statistics: publicizing first the connection between smoking and life-threatening disease among smokers; and then among non-smokers through exposure to second hand smoke. This late-twentieth-century movement presented itself as a movement of scientific professionals. But there are other components: it was also a movement of public health agencies, consumer advocates, and, finally, of legislators. Perhaps most importantly, it has been a movement of lawsuits, including suits brought both by individuals, and by elected officials, primarily state Attorney Generals, seeking compensatory payments into state budgets and contributions to campaigns to discourage smoking.
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The existence of health statistics is not itself an explanation of why this social movement became successfully mobilized in the political and judicial arenas, and why it became widely accepted by American public opinion. Statistics alone do not explain why, in the 1980s, people began to organize impromptu local movements to exclude smokers from workplaces, hotel lounges, waiting areas, restaurants, and their own private homes; and why often quite heated personal confrontations began to take place with smokers. These patterns are characteristic of the mobilization of a social movement passing through a swell of emotional solidarity and of antipathy toward its enemies, and a bandwagon swing to join the victorious side. Statistical documentation of a problem does not explain the strength of a social movement. Statistics are always subject to variations in social interpretation; when they define a risk, there is always a collective assessment of how seriously that risk should be taken. A successful social movement occurs when the risk appears to be very great, but that is a shifting social construction, and has more to do with the dynamics of the movement vis-ä-vis its opponent, than with the purely factual character of the threat.18 The process of movement mobilization drives changes in the perception of the risk, more than vice versa. Once initiated, two components feed back into each other, and when the movement growth reaches the level of a bandwagon effect, both strongly increase each other. We need this full-scale sociological view to understand the success of the health-oriented anti-smoking movement; to leave out the mobilizing process is to operate with a simple technocratic theory, in which the pronouncements of experts automatically determines people's responses.
The first danger of smoking to be well documented was lung cancer.
The risk of developing lung cancer increases with duration of smoking and the number of cigarettes smoked per day, and is diminished by discontinuing smoking. In comparison with non-smokers, average male smokers of cigarettes have approximately a 9- to 10-fold risk of developing lung cancer and heavy smokers at least a 20-fold risk. ... The risk of developing cancer of the lung for the combined group of pipe smokers, cigar smokers, and pipe and cigar smokers is greater than for non-smokers, but much less than for cigarette smokers." Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the Public Health Service, 1964.
A heavy-smoker male age 35 has 33 percent chance of dying—of any cause—before age 65, compared to 15 percent of nonsmoking males (i.e., smoking approximately doubles one's chances of dying at these ages). For coronary heart disease, the annual risk of death is: 7 per
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100,000 for non-smokers, 104 per 100,000 for smokers; a ratio of 15 to 1. In raw percentages, however, the story can be told another way: both of these ratios are very low (expressed in more familiar percentages, the former is 0.007 percent, the latter 0.104 percent. Hence a smoker has 98.9 percent the annual chance of a non-smoker of escaping death from coronary disease (Walton 2000, 99-100;103-4). Publicizing the ratios is one form of the rhetorical use of statistics, just as the statements in percentages illustrate another rhetorical usage.
Lung cancer has increased during the twentieth century, from a relatively rare disease before 1920, to one that cause 6.6 percent of all U.S. deaths in 1990, or 57.3 lung cancer deaths per 100,000 population (Statistical Abstracts, no. 114, 1992). The historical increase in lung cancer can be attributed to several conditions. One is the shift to cigarettes, which are inhaled, from non-inhaled forms of tobacco. There also has been the extension of longevity in the twentieth century, the result of improved health conditions, and the decline or disappearance of the many of the most prevalent deadly diseases of the earlier centuries.19 Cancer could show up as a major cause of death in the latter half of the century because there were now more people available at advanced ages where they could die of it.20 Today total deaths from all kinds of cancer make up 23.4 percent of all deaths, but most of these are not tobacco-related. Campaigns associating smoking with cancer tend to blur over this distinction, playing on people's awareness of cancer in general and unawareness of the actual numbers.
The anti-smoking movement in its period of success after the 1970s was riding upon a redefinition of the normal lifespan: whereas 60 (or even 50) had formerly been considered the onset of old age, it became redefined as within "middle age." And distinctions have been made between various segments of the aged: the "young old" in their late sixties and early seventies; the "old old" in their eighties and beyond. It remains normal to die of something during old age, conceived as the terminal period of life; but the medical custom is to attribute all deaths to a specific cause, rather than to "old age" per se.
Cancer is a socially emergent disease in the sense that something had to become the category under which deaths could be recorded. What I am arguing against is the notion that "cancer" is simply a discrete pathological condition, which has a particular cause; and if that cause were eliminated, there would no such pathology, and people would not die of it. According to this line of reasoning, when cancer is eliminated, then people who would have died from it will continue to live; and once all such diseases are eliminated then people will live forever. Put in this fashion, the flaw in the argument seems obvious. We do not reasonably expect that people will live forever; or indeed
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that they will likely live very much longer than their eighties or nineties; it may well be case that the bodies of people by around their late eighties have broken down to the point at which sooner or later the system gives out and they die. The terminal process, however, can always be analyzed in more detail, so that it can always be attributed to some proximal cause.
Cancer becomes more prevalent at older ages primarily because aging bodies lose their defenses against it.21 Smoking earlier in life may contribute to bodily defenses breaking down in particular ways—such as in vulnerability to lung cancer or heart disease—and in some percentage of cases may cause this to occur in one's sixties or seventies instead of eighties. But in a situation of generally declining health in those years, and the near-certainty that some disease or another will cause death, to attribute the death simply to smoking (and thus imply that without the smoking the person would otherwise be alive indefinitely) is an exaggeration. It is part of the rhetoric of polarization: not smoking is good; smoking is bad; and good or evil consequences follow without qualification.
In sum, the evidence does not show that all or even the majority of smokers die of tobacco-induced diseases. Heavy smokers have higher risks of dying earlier than what has become typical life-spans. But since the anti-smoking movement has a polarizing, all-or-nothing rhetoric, it is not concerned to point out what levels of light or moderate tobacco use might be relatively unrisky; and it does not attempt to advocate switching to less risky forms of smoking (such as substituting non-inhaling forms of tobacco use). Its stance is that of the conflict-polarized movement: total abolition of an unmitigated menace.
Similarly on evidence for the effects of second-hand smoke. The anti-smoking movement presents its statistics in maximally dramatic form: it declares that "52,000 persons will die this year in the United States of second-hand smoke." This would not sound so dramatic translated into the percentage of the population that will die.22 Statements of this sort show the presentation of statistics for rhetorical effect. A weak relationship can be given statistical significance—that is, it can be shown to be a reliable number, even though the causal effect is small—because of the fact that confidence levels depend upon the size of the sample. With a sufficiently large sample (in this case, millions of health records), even a very weak relationship can be shown to be statistically significant. The public, unsophisticated in statistical methods, is impressed with the claim, without considering just what the numbers actually mean.
Another rhetorical manipulation of statistics consists in basing analysis upon persons who were exposed to extremely high levels of sec-
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ond-hand smoke, such as bartenders in smoky bars. This is equivalent to making dire predictions, based on evidence gathered on those who smoke several packs per day, that all smokers, including light ones, will die of tobacco-related diseases. The evidence would equally support the statement that there is relatively little, indeed tiny, levels of risk being around occasional ambient smoke. The construed image that any person exposed to any smoke is likely to die encourages non-smokers to engage in hostile attacks on smokers. Yet statistically the chances of adverse health consequences for exposure to any single incident of enviromental tobacco smoke are vanishingly small.
The anti-smoking movement in the 1980s seized upon the data on second-hand smoke because it gave leverage for portraying everyone in the population as being at risk from the smokers; thus smokers could be portrayed not merely as irrational self-destroying addicts but as murderers. It also gave a justification for anti-smokers to do what they have attempted, with varying degrees of success or failure throughout the last four hundred years, to personally attack smokers in their presence. Given the widespread public acceptance that quickly came about, with little attention to the statistical issues noted above, smokers accepted the attribution of themselves as dangerous offenders. As most of its rituals were undermined, the community of smokers had lost its confidence, its EE, its energy to defend itself. Critics of the statistical adequacy of the anti-smoking argument were treated as representatives of tobacco companies, and were given scant hearing in the U.S. news media or even in scientific publications. The second-hand smoking statistics, weak as they are, were just the catalyst or turning point for an already strongly mobilized anti-smoking movement. Thus any discussion of smokers versus anti-smokers in local struggle over personal space was steered away into exclusive focus upon the tobacco companies and their profit-oriented manipulations. The ordinary smoker lost rank through a virtual reversal of situational stratification: the smoker, once the center of ritual attention, became the pariah.
With the mobilization of an increasingly dominant anti-smoking movement in the 1970s and 80s, non-smokers have often confronted smokers directly, demanding that they stop smoking in their presence. These anti-smokers have been charged with EE to take the initiative rather aggressively in personal encounters. The overt content of their message is straightforwardly medical. In these confrontations, anti-smokers declare that they have serious bodily reactions to smoke, that it makes them ill; some claim that it gives them asthma attacks. These claims are usually taken at face value, given the weight of public pressure on smokers now defined as a dangerous pathology. This backing down by smokers occurred most readily in places where the anti-
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smoking movement was strongest, in the United States; Americans attempting similar tactics in foreign countries often found themselves confronting angry counterattacks.
Sociologically, we need to examine two kinds of points. One is on the level of the social movement; was there in fact a constant level of asthma attacks, and other feelings of being made ill by smoke, across all the decades of heavy cigarette smoking? Research is lacking on this point; but it appears that the number of persons claiming ill effects of smoke went up during the period of peak mobilization by the anti-smoking movement. Judging from well-publicized cases as well as casual observation during my lifetime, it appears that the numbers of persons claiming to be made ill by smoke in their presence increased at just the time when the number of public smokers were decreasing.
The second point is on the micro-level of bodily interaction. We need not take the position that the perceptions of anti-smokers were merely ideologically constructed because the label of smokers as dangerous and pathological became available—that is, that this was only a cognitive change in interpretation. The anti-smoker angrily confronting a smoker in a restaurant or bus may well have felt unpleasant sensations in his or her body. But the same argument I have made above, that smokers interpret bodily feelings in the context of their ritual interaction, applies to anti-smokers as well. It was when an anti-smoking movement had mobilized and focused on smoke as a noxious experience, that participants' bodies experienced smoke as insupportable. By contrast, in the smoke-filled atmosphere of the war-time 1940s, by all indications, most non-smokers simply took smoke as part of the normal background, at worst a minor nuisance. The ostentatious coughing fits and angry outbursts that occur today are socially constructed in particular historical circumstances; they are constructed in bodies and not merely in minds.
There is a classic sociology of crowd hysterias that encompasses the claims, and feelings, of anti-smokers at their height of mobilization. The classic instances are pseudo-epidemics of medically nonexistent diseases that spread in tightly networked, relatively bounded or enclosed communities like small towns, factories, or boarding schools (Kerckhoff and Back 1968; Lofland 1981, 424-26). Such emotional epidemics may also center on nonmedical conditions, such as laughing epidemics going on for weeks (Provine 1992). It is of course possible that a social hysteria of this sort could also coincide with conditions that pose some degree of medical danger; in this case, tobacco smoke, although as indicated the actual danger of any particular incidence of exposure to second-hand smoke is rather slight, in comparison to the vehemence of the immediate bodily reaction. In recent decades, in the
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ideological climate of medical verdicts on smoking, few persons are inclined to see the large component of social mobilization which goes into constructing these bodily reactions.
The rhetorical exaggeration of claims by the anti-smoking movement is a version of the ideological polarization that happens in highly escalated conflicts. To attack a ritual is to be offended by it; and since rituals produce social membership and give an aura of status to those who are within the magic circle of social attention, and a negative penumbra of low status among those who are outside it, a ritual social movement can be seen as a struggle over the shape of boundaries and rankings in situational space. Tobacco-using spread as a movement recruiting more and more people into its rituals, and reached its height of popularity as a central feature of the mid-twentieth century status system, the situational stratification that divided the world into fashionable carousers and devalued, even scorned, bystanders. Anti-smokers are a countermovement, mobilized on the rebound, in opposition to the dominance of the smoking movement.
The statistics in themselves do not contain such a strong case for the health risks of smoking as to explain why so many persons turned against smoking so vehemently. The statistics could equally have been interpreted as showing that relatively few people get cancer; that they get it at relatively advanced ages; that many of them would die at approximately those ages anyway; and that there there is a very small chance of being injured by exposure to all but quite intense and prolonged exposure to second-hand smoke. The interpretation put on the data, that the risk is indeed very high and socially intolerable, cannot be explained without the rise of the anti-smoking movement; and that must be seen in relationship to the opportunity presented by the decline in support for almost all varieties of tobacco ritual. On my sociological argument, the public availability of the same data in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s would not have caused the mobilization of a victorious anti-smoking movement.23
The Vulnerability of Situational Rituals and the Mobilization of Anti-Carousing Movements
Consider the structure of opposition set up by carousing as a pure form of situational stratification. Any ritual generates situational ranking among those who are at the center of attention, followers, mere observers, and finally the totally excluded. In pure sociability rituals, the terminology has changed over the centuries with the fashions of slang, but the structure is the same. This is the ranking between the popular
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and the unpopular; belles and beaus vs. wallflowers and duds, the cool and the uncool, party animals and nerds (Milner 2004; Coleman 1961). This is a dimension of social life where sociology has failed to be perceptive; our focus has been so narrowly on the structural stratification of class, ethnicity, and gender that we have overlooked the situational stratification that is for participants often the most salient dimension of everyday life.
The spread of cigarette smoking in the early twentieth century (like the other kinds of tobacco fads or movements previously) flowed through circuits of sociability, and reinforced the stratification between the smoking elite and the non-smoking periphery. Those at the center of sociable gatherings, with their situation-dominating talk, joking, gossiping, sexual flirtation, are those most prone to adopt fads; their central network-positions both enables them to do so quickly, and to reap the emotional energy and situational dominance of being local exemplars of widespread images of prestigeful behavior. At the height of the cult of smoking paraphernalia the ritual promoted a hierarchy, with the most elegant smokers at the center, surrounded by their admirers and followers; other, less sociable smokers further out; and non-smokers beyond the pale.24 The smoking hierarchy was reinforced by the use of cigarettes for sexual flirtation, thus tending to coincide with erotic popularity.
Situational subordinates are in an especially weak position to mount a counterattack against the rituals that subordinate them. By the nature of ritual assembly, the situational subordinates are those who lack social organization, honor, and emotional energy. They cannot well use their exclusion or dishonor as a basis for collective identity, because achieving "class consciousness" or group consciousness as non-carous-ers ("wallflowers," "duds," "nerds" etc.) is to heighten dishonor. Thus situational subordinates are for the most part merely latent opponents of the carousing rituals that subordinate them. Situational subordinates can mobilize only if they can invoke alternative criteria of stratification, either structural location or a different form of situational honor. They must rely on standing in the "serious" rather than sociable realms, that is, work and educational careers, politics, religion, and moralistic social movements. These can counterbalance the carousing culture, but do not guarantee victory over it; serious absorption in these pursuits is often the butt of jibes from the carousing culture—to the effect that work, studies, religion, etc. are dull pastimes for those who are failures at popular carousing.
Until the mid-twentieth century, the strongest opponents of carousing rituals came from professions and status groups whose claim for precedence rested upon exemplifying and enforcing moralistic stan-
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Figure 8.7 The height of the socially legitimated carousing scene (London during World War II).
dards of social legitimacy. Tobacco has usually been opposed by religious leaders, especially in evangelical movements, and by politicians taking the political niche of moral reform. Anti-carousing movements were mobilized in times of religious upsurges as well as during the intensification of feminist politics. Sometimes these were entwined with ethnic politics, as in the alcohol prohibition movement in the United States, which Gusfield (1963) has interpreted as anchored in the status concerns of rural Anglo-Protestants against the bar-room centered rituals of urban immigrants. Anti-tobacco movements were thus part of a cascade of related movements.25 But these movements generally ran against the grain of modern social life; since they were rooted in small-town and old-fashioned status hierarchies, they were delegiti-mated in the self-consciously "modern" or "progressive" world of urban life, public entertainment, and modern business. Moreover, the situational dominants of the carousing elite had their structural allies as well. In the nineteenth century, the cult of cigar-smoking was supported by the status rituals of the upper class and those who emulated them; just as in the 1920s the full paraphernalia of the cigarette cult was connected to the fast world of High Society.
What brought about the reversal of fortunes in the late twentieth century? Briefly: the disappearance of elegance rituals conveying struc-
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tural stratification; a greatly increased strength in the structural positions allied to the situational subordinates of carousing; and an episodic development of social movements that mobilized youth at least temporarily onto the moralistic and anti-carousing side. To put it another way: the decline of elegance rituals; the rise of the "new class" of technocrats or nerds; and the side-effects of the 1960s counterculture movement.
By the mid-twentieth century, the complexity of lines of opposition among smokers and anti-smokers had simplified. Cigarette-smoking had become the overwhelmingly predominant form of tobacco ritual. Snuff and chewing tobacco were minor, archaic practices, without prestige. Pipes had become a fragmented world of solitary introverts, carrying an aura of rather old-fashioned respectability that cut them off from the modern connotations of cigarette smokers.26 The defense of tobacco in the twentieth century was now a unisex world. To overthrow tobacco, the anti-smoking movement, for the first time in history, had only one task. It did not have to take on several kinds of tobacco rituals. It was no longer split between those oriented toward tobacco-ritual upward mobility, so to speak—those whose opposition to tobacco was based on being excluded by gender, and who could be mollified by gaining entry to the tobacco cult—and those opposed to the carousing culture. The aesthetic attack had been tried and failed. The successful attack of the late twentieth century was couched in terms of health issues; but its rapid mobilization as a social movement was fueled by the politics of ritual in everyday life.
The elegance rituals that supported smoking up through the 1930s were declining in the 1940s and 50s; in part through the leveling of social barriers in the military solidarity of World War II; in part through the American cult of casualness with the suburbanization of the postwar period. This is not to say structural stratification had disappeared (although economic differences diminished for several decades before the reversal of the 1970s); but its public expression was becoming illegitimate. Claims to prominence were now made solely in terms of situational stratification.27 This focused attention on carousing rituals, but it also meant situational stratification stood on its own, without support from structural stratification. Elegance rituals of tobacco were evaporating.28 This left purely privatized forms of smoking, such as a work adjunct or as solitary withdrawal, without any cultural resonance or social support.
As the ritualism of tobacco narrowed, anti-carousing forces were bolstered by what has sometimes been called the rise of the nerds. Structural stratification in the later twentieth century was channeled increasingly through a lengthening educational system and rising for-
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mal credentialing for elite jobs. Greater structural importance was given to competition over school grades, studying, and technical knowledge. Although it is an exaggeration to see this as an entirely "new class" of experts (and thus omitting the continued importance of cultural acceptability and of organizational politics rather than utilitarian performance), the contemporary world of professional credentials, bureaucratic careers, and financial manipulations shifted the culture of careers from the leisured atmosphere of well-established businesses and the elite professions that had supported the elegant carousing culture of the earlier part of the century. Wagner (1997) sees the anti-smoking movement, along with other forms of late-twentieth century neo-puritanism, as expressions of the rise of the new middle class, imposing its Protestant Ethic upon upper and lower classes. This has an element of truth, but it can be stated with more refinement. On the macro-structural level, the new prominence of the anti-carousers, the "nerds," is not just a middle-class phenomenon but a style of career behavior found cutting across class levels; and on the micro-situational level, the attack against smoking attacks not just leisure classes but situational dominance through carousing ritual.
All highly politicized protest movements tend to be moralistic, in the sense that dedication and sacrifice to the cause are extolled against the complacency of conventional carousing; historically, radical movements often have had puritanical overtones against the corruption of existing elites. The 1960s Civil Rights / anti-war movements had been mobilized around churches (both black and white) and long-standing "do-gooding" groups, and their organizing bases spread especially to the elite university campuses where their strength was among the "intellectuals" in opposition to the campus carousing culture of the jocks and fraternities. Thus the 1960s movement had many ingredients of religion plus revolt of the nerds.
The anti-smoking movement, however, has not been merely the case of one lifestyle displacing another lifestyle, but a politicized social movement using state power as well as direct action tactics against its foes. This movement mobilized into mass support, like many others, in the wake of the 1960s / early 1970s civil rights and anti-war movements. It is conventional to see the second-wave feminist movement, gay rights, ecology, animal rights, and other movements as building upon the networks, tactics, and ideology of the civil rights movement, emulating its success in attracting public attention and its victories in legislation and overt lifestyle. The contemporary anti-smoking movement should be added to the list. The 1960s movement set the pattern for prestige of a highly moralistic movement that was also a youth movement against established lines of stratification.

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Figure 8.8 "Hippie" counterculture. Its ritual was smoking marijuana, in pointed contrast to the cigarette-smoking and alcohol-drinking of the previous generation (late 1960s).
The case is made made more complex by the overlap of these political movements with the so-called "counterculture" movement, the "hippies" with their ideology of sexual liberation and psychedelic drugs (Berger 1981; Carey 1968). This was a type of carousing culture in its own right, although it was both a moralistic and an explicitly oppositional one. Smoking marijuana and taking LSD were interpreted in an ideological context of religious experience modeled on religious mysticism. Left-wing radicals and members of communes were especially likely to use psychedelic drugs (Zablocki 1980); they pointedly regarded their own use as being in sharp contrast to the conventional drinking cult of "jocks and cheerleaders," and were often rather
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puritanically proud of their nondrinking. Hippie anti-ritualism opposed the conventionally dominant carousing cult, with its weekend drinking parties and its date nights, its hierarchy of the fashionably dressed and socially popular. The "counterculture" counterposed its own style of dress and demeanor (long hair and beards for men, no makeup for women) and pointedly overthrew existing polite rituals of social deference and gender etiquette. The ethos of sexual liberation (or casual sex) and ubiquitous use of psychedelic drugs was in many respects more symbolic than real, but it dramatized the oppositional ideology that sociable pleasures can be enjoyed without formal scheduling and without constraint from the popularity rankings of conventional carousing rituals.
The counterculture of the 1960s was ephemeral, but it gave impetus to long-term shifts: to the near-terminal decline of elegance rituals, the disappearance of older standards of deference and demeanor; to the preeminence of situational stratification; and to the culturally dominant prestige of expressing an oppositional stance to conventional symbols of structural stratification. The 1960s movements set the pattern for youth culture for the remainder of the century. Inadvertently it opened the way for a massive push against smoking rituals. In undercutting the prestige of the partying culture, the carousing style that came in with cigarettes in the 1920s, it reversed the association of cigarettes with an oppositional youth culture and left them open for portrayal as part of a despised Establishment.
The trends set off by the 1960s counterculture combined to boost the anti-smoking movement of the following decades: the attack on conventional sociability rituals by the counterculture, and its undermining of elegance rituals in the name of radical egalitarianism; its moralistic tone; its tactics of direct action confronting government officials and segregationists; its left-wing rhetoric attacking business corporations. By one of those strange twists that often convert some components of a successful movement into challenging its other components, these characteristics of the counterculture merged with the backlash against the drug culture, the anti-drug movement. The movement to extirpate smoking marijuana set the legislative pattern that paved the way for tobacco prohibition, and tobacco companies could be blamed for inculcating the taste for tobacco in the same way that drug pushers were regarded as responsible for the drug culture. The anti-tobacco movement of the 1970s and thereafter drew upon the ideological and tactical frames of 1960s movements by targeting the tobacco industry as the primary culprit, and thus portraying smokers as dupes and victims. Persistent smokers could also be directly confronted with the activist rhetoric reminiscent of Vietnam war confrontations accusing them of
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being killers. The anti-smoking movement has been unusually successful, compared to most other reform movements of this era, because it managed to combine both left- and right-wing support: the Left with its anti-business stance and its favor for government regulation; the Right in the form of religious and lifestyle conservatives who have attempted to ban the substances of carousing for centuries.
The success of the anti-smoking movement, after centuries of failure, came about by a concatenation of changes in the ritualism of sociability that prepared the way for a social movement attacking tobacco rituals while enjoying the moral prestige of a popular progressive movement. Whether or not these particular ritual and anti-ritual movements are nearing an historical end, it is altogether probable that movements of these sorts will develop around the ritual substances and practices of the future.