DEBORAH REED-DANAHAY / U N I V E R S I T Y F T E X A SA T A R L I N G T O N O

Chamoaone and Chocolate

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"Taste" and Inversion in a French Wedding Ritual

W shall not deal with the roast that is brought to the nuptial e bed-a rather foolish custom which is grievous to the bride's modesty and tends to undermine the unmarried girls who take part in it. -Georges Sand,La mare au diable Tastes are perhaps fist and foremost distastes, disgust provoked by horror or visceral intolerance ('sick-making') of the tastes of others. -Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique o the f Juaemmt of Taste
A CURIOUS PRACTICE persists in the mountains of rural Auvergne. In the early morning hours after a wedding, a group of unmarried youths bursts into the room to which the bride and groom have retired for the night and presents them with a chamber pot containing champagne and chocolate. This mixture is then shared and consumed by all present. Although sexual meanings are at work here, it is the scatological connotation of this rite, involving the symbolism of urine and feces, that is made particularly explicit by the participants. As they say, however, even though this concoction may appear to be disgusting (dkgozitante; dkgueulasse), it really tastes very good (c'est dkllicieuse). For the Laviallois, villagers in a farming community where I first conducted fieldwork in the early 1980sand to which I have returned most recently in the summer of 1996, this practice constitutes an important rite of passage into married life and expresses many of their concerns and preoccupations regarding marriage and family life. An analysis of the ritual on that basis alone forms an interesting and provocative story about the symbolism of the couple in rural France, but it would ignore the wider cultural sphere in which this practice takes place. La &tie, as the chamber pot and its conDEBORAH REED-DANAHAY is Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX 76109.

tents are called, speaks to issues concerning class, regional identity, and associated notions of "taste." These are made explicit by the Laviallois but are also present in the reactions to similar practices that I have encountered in the scholarly literature. In general, I have encountered a surprising degree of silence about la &tie and related wedding rituals in the literature on rural France, despite the fact that such rituals appear to be quite widespread. I suggest that this is a result of a combination of the bourgeois sensibilities of most observers of rural France, of the reluctance on the part of local populations to appear "crude" and "backward" to researchers, and of a "reverse orientalism" that constructs France as a "nonexotic" place. In this article, I intend to make use of this "exotic," scatological ritual in order to question some anthropological assumptions and silences concerning French culture and society. La r6tie is a useful focus for such questioning because its participants are themselves actively engaged in both dialogue with and resistance to stereotypes about them. The kind of anthropology that I adopt here is informed by a reflexive approach that questions relations of power and knowledge in the ethnographic enterprise. I also adopt a practice approach, which assumes that my informants are actively shaping and responding to their world, and that culture is a contested domain of social life that is continually being negotiated. Rural France is approached here as a real place, but also as a site of discourses of identity, which inform anthropological knowledge and practice. I knew nothing of this practice until I was told of its existence by young women, both married and unmarried, in Lavialle. I was shown chamber pots that had been used in weddings, and was sent an elaborate, bawdy description of this ritual on tape at the occasion of my own wedding in 1983. When recounting this ritual to me, informants stated that this practice was indicative of something "special" about this part of the Auvergne, with which they felt certain that I would be unfamiliar. In describing the contents of the chamber

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pot, informants were explicit about the "disgusting" nature of the idea of drinking a symbolic mixture of urine and feces but were also very conscious of the ways in which this violated accepted codes of taste. Whereas earlier generations would undoubtedly have been reluctant to tell a foreign, educated person about such a practice, women of my generation in Lavialle were much less hesitant to hide their explicit mocking of bourgeois sensibilities than were their mothers and grandmothers. I learned about this practice not because I was studying wedding rituals and asked about it but because the topic was introduced to me by the young women themselves after several months of acquaintance. I was in Lavialle to "study up," to look at interactions between local families and the national school system. I was studying local responses to a modern institution, and did not focus my research on traditions of this sort. Nevertheless, I was increasingly drawn into such local practices by my informants. I was taken to a traditional healer when I hurt my back and was told stories of local beliefs about spells and of visionaries in the local region who could help find lost objects and identify the perpetrators of misdeeds. Among most Laviallois, I encountered resistance to my attempts to learn more about supernatural beliefs. When I asked the daughter o a woman who I had been told was able to f "put out" fires whether she knew anything about such powers (without specifically naming her mother), she responded emphatically that this was impossible. As Jeanne Favret-Saada (1980[ 19771) has maintained on the basis of her experience in the study of witchcraft in the Bocage region of eastern France, it is not possible to understand such beliefs without personal involvement in the process. Local people, she argues, will not reveal their knowledge of witchcraft or other forms of nonorthodox practice to "objective," outsider researchers, whom they mistrust. My research interests did not lead me to pursue questions about these practices, however, and to do so would have diverted my time and attention away from the study of schooling and socialization practices. Since my focus of research was elsewhere, I did not take the time to penetrate this realm of belief in Lavialle. However, as an unmarried woman and later a new bride myself, I was more easily implicated in marriage ritual and permitted access to secrets about the chamber pot ceremony. It was the Laviallois themselves who directed me to the study of this ritual. Favret-Saada writes, "There is one precept of British anthropology-perhaps the only one in which I can call myself an ethnographer-by which the native is always right, if he leads the investigator in unexpected directions" (1980[ 1977]:13). La rbtie operates at two different levels. It expresses important local meanings about the ties of mar-

riage and local identity and it articulates tensions between rural "paysan" culture and urban "bourgeois" culture. La rbtie expresses elements of traditional rural culture associated with the primacy of the family as an economic and procreative unit but also defines and characterizes unique features of rural Auvergnat culture through its explicit mocking of bourgeois tastes and sensibilities. Mary Douglas (1970) is helpful in understanding the ways in which this practice expresses meanings at these two levels, with her observation that the body is often used as a symbol of boundaries and of mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion. The practice of la rbtie uses the body (through a symbolism of bodily fluids) to look inward toward the family and farm and outward toward those systems of power and meaning lying beyond them. Pierre Bourdieu (1984) is also helpful in pointing to the uses of concepts of taste in the social construction of class in modern society, in which la rbtie surely plays a role. The type of discourse concerning the aspects of good and bad taste that is expressed both through the ritual of la rbtie itself and in talk or the absence of talk about it is addressed by Bourdieu in his self-proclaimed "sort of ethnography of France," Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984). In this book, Bourdieu argues that there is a close relationship between aesthetic taste and social class, so that tastes are "markers of 'class' " (19M2). The practice of la rbtie involves the subversive use of foods connoting "high culture" and good taste by rural dwellers, in a practice considered as extremely vulgar and coarse by the urban middle class. In this practice, foods associated with, in Bourdieu's terms, the "sacred" domain of culture (i.e., champagne and chocolate) are used to express "natural" bodily processes and products, inverting and desecrating their usual meaning. Bourdieu writes that "the art of eating and drinking remains one of the few areas in which the working classes explicitly challenge the legitimate art of living" (1984:179). In la rbtie, this challenge is taken to extremes. As practiced in Lavialle, the ritual of la rbtie embodies a Rabelaisian carnivalesque moment (Bakhtin 1968). It is a parody, a symbolic inversion (Babcock 1978) of food and excrement, high and low culture. That Rabelais, Bourdieu, and the Laviallois are all French is, I think, significant. The Laviallois, although late-20th-century "modern" people, illustrate the continuing contradictions between good and bad taste in France since Rabelais's time. And it is in France, where the "legitimate art of living" has been raised to such heights, that such contradictions are most acutely observed. "Rabelais' work is infamous for its breaches of 'good taste' " (Clark and Holquist 1984:296). In his own "vulgar" critique of "pure taste," Bourdieu draws upon Mikhail Bakhtin's analysis to make the point that

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the popular imagination can only invert the relationship which is the basis of the aesthetic sociodicy:responding to sublimationby a Strategy Of reduction Or degradation,as i n slang, Parody, burlesque or caricature, using obscenity or scatologyto turn arsy-versy,head over heels, all the 'values' in which the dominant groups project and recognize their sublimity, it rides roughshod over difference,flouts distinction, and, like Carnival games, reduces the distinctive pleasures of the soul to the common satisfactions of food and sex. 11984:4911 Bourdieu adds in a footnote that this type of popular challenge has been extinguished in modem society, where the popular festival has been "ousted by home entertainment" (1984:604, n. 10). His dismissal of contemporary popular resistance to hegemonic culture is, I believe, overdrawn. However, Bourdieu's critique of the use of taste to create and reinforce social distinctions, as well as his understanding that the inversion of this aesthetic presents a challenge to bourgeois order, can usefully be applied to an analysis of la r6tie and the discourse (and lack thereof) that surrounds it. The practice entails inversions at more than one level. It inverts and parodies marriage in Lavialle at the same time that it parodies bourgeois sensibilities. Despite its long history, la r6tie is not a fossilized survival of earlier peasant practices in France, but a very modern challenge to dominant, bourgeois culture and an expression of current concerns among the youth of Lavialle regarding the institution of marriage. Here I share Natalie Zemon Davis's vision of what she caHs "misrule" or "festive life" as operating "on the one hand [to] perpetuate certain values of the community (even guarantee its survival) and on the other hand [to] criticize political order" (1975:97). That numerous local variations of la r6tie persist in rural France indicates the ways in which local festive life is connected both to community values and to multiple types of political culture.

The Setting
The Auvergne is a region considered by Parisians and all those who identify with French high culture to be culturally antithetical to the refined, urbane, sophisticated world of Paris. It has been described as rustic, backward, traditional, and wild, and it is considered to be very much a peasant region. Auvergnats, traditionally referred to as bougnats, are described in popular accounts as cunning, clannish, country bumpkin types. Rural Auvergnats are viewed by others in France as lacking in culture, and their houses and persons are said to be somewhat dirty. At the .outset of my original fieldwork, I was told by several Parisians that this would most likely prove to be an unproductive and uninteresting place to do fieldwork, since there was not

much culture. As I have written elsewhere (1991, 1996), the Laviallois are aware of negative stereotypes of the Auvergnat, but they make use of their Auvergnat identity in order to keep the state and other agents of dominant culture at bay. Lavialle is a mountainous dairy farming community located in the department of Puy-de-D6me.' It lies in the the Second very heart Of the Auvergne region. up World War, Lavialle was isolated from centers of power and extremely poor. Today, the region is still off the beaten path for most travelers, but its farmers are holding their own in a precarious economy. The Laviallois depend upon small, family-owned farms for their livelihood, and most of Lavialle's inhabitants are full-time farmers. Lavialle has experienced a strengthening of its local economy during the past three decades. This is due to an intensified concentration of dairy farming and the loss of attractive industrial jobs in urban centers of the region that used to lure away the youth. Lavialle has a population of about 350 people who live in 18villages, and it is a vital place culturally as well as economically. The vitality of Lavialle has not diminished in recent years. Although by no means a completely cohesive or microcosmic community, Lavialle exhibits a much more self-conscious attempt to retain what are considered to be its traditions than neighboring townships. The national trend of rural depopulation hit Lavialle after the Second World War, and this has resulted in a lower number of marriages within the community than one would have found a century earlier. However, the percentage of 20- to 39-year-olds (those within marrying and childbearing age) has risen from 22 percent to 26 percent of the overall population since 1975, and the birthrate has also risen during this period. Most young Laviallois still marry spouses from the neighboring region, and there are still some marriages among Lavialle natives. An increasing number of young adults in Lavialle now choose to marry locally and remain in farming or other rural occupations. Even those married couples who leave Lavialle and do not farm retain close ties to siblings and cousins in the community and return often for visits. By French law, Lavialle has a system of egalitarian inheritance, but in practice a son (or, occasionally, a daughter) takes over the farm and then "pays off" shares to his or her siblings. Farm families are of the stem type, with a married couple and their children forming the core of the household, and incorporating elderly parents and unmarried siblings. La r6tie expresses important meanings about local cultural identity in Lavialle and about the tension between local farm families and wider cultural contexts.

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Marriage and La R6tie in Rural Auvergne: Rite of Passage

The ritual of la r6tie is but one element in the wider celebration of marriage in Lavialle. Weddings generally occur in the township of the bride, so that most weddings in Lavialle are hosted by the brides family. Several days before the wedding, the mayors office, church, and village of the bride (and, if he is native to Lavialle, the groom) are decorated with paper flowers made by the bride and her friends. This proclaims the impending marriage to the wider community and also expresses its involvement in the process. As is the French custom, weddings have two official parts-a civil ceremony required by law, which must take place at the mayors office, and a religious ceremony in the local Catholic church. In general, the couple and the wedding party visit the mayors office first and then proceed to the church to have the religious ceremony performed. After the two parts of the wedding are completed, there is a celebration of food, music, and dancing hosted by the brides family and usually held at the community center (a converted religious school). Only close relatives and friends of the bride and groom and their families take part in the wedding and feast, but other neighbors take a strong interest in the activities and watch the wedding party as it weaves its way through the village to the celebration. Many innovations to the ritual of marriage have been incorporated over the years, and it does not retain a static character. For instance, the important role of rugby and soccer teams in the community is now expressed in marriage ceremonies. An increasingly common practice at weddings in Lavialle is for the bride and groom to exit the church after the ceremony through a doorway surrounded by the grooms rugby teammates. Sometime late in the evening, the bride and groom take their leave of the wedding feast and drive off to a local house to spend the night. Public secrecy surrounds the location of the couples first night together, but the bride and her girlfriends make arrangements ahead of time with the household at which the couple will stay. About an hour later, when the wedding feast is coming to a close, a gang of unmarried youths (both male and female) go off in search of the newlyweds. They noisily, and drunkenly, go from house to house looking for the couple. Usually, they are offered a drink at the households they visit during the course of the search, and so the process of locating the couple can take a couple of hours. This quest is really only a pretext, since some of the brides friends already know which house has been chosen. When the gang determines that they have found the right location, they barge in through the door. The mistress of the household in which the couple hides initially denies that the

newlyweds are there and refuses to admit the youths until they insist on entering. They aggressively head for the bedroom. After locating the couple in an upstairs bedroom, the youths perform a ritualized practice called vider le lit (to overturn or, literally, empty the bed). They tip the bed over so that the bride and groom fall to the floor with the heap of bedclothes. Although they are expecting this invasion, the new couple feigns surprise and indignation. While it is assumed that by now the marriage has been consummated, a fiction holds that the couple may have been interrupted in the marriage act by the youths. The youths are raucous and loud, enjoying the liberty they are allowed to take. Eventually the newlyweds join in the gaiety and laughter. La r6tie is presented next. The youths prepare a decorative chamber pot, which may have a single eye painted on its surface. They pour champagne into this vessel and add bananas that have been coated with melted chocolate (replacing earlier additions of bits of chocolate). Toilet paper is also now included, and, recently, tampons colored with tomato sauce or food coloring have been added to the mixture. The newlyweds drink from the chamber pot, and then the others have a taste. A great deal of sexual and scatological joking accompanies this passing around and sharing of the contents of the chamber pot. When dawn approaches, the mistress of the house prepares an onion soup meal downstairs in the kitchen for the entire party. They all go downstairs and have the meal together, and then the intruders depart and the newlyweds go back to bed. Later in the morning, the bride and groom emerge from the house with a transformed public status of married couple, ready to set up house. The chamber pot will become a decorative element in their household, usually kept in the bedroom. The pot may also appear as a vase for flowers in an entryway or living room. Now that houses in Lavialle have indoor toilets, a chamber pot is no longer a utilitarian item, but it was in the recent past. Indoor plumbing did not become widespread in Lavialle until the late 1960s and early 1970s. When I began to search the literature for examples of other wedding practices like that I had come across in Lavialle, in order to help me decipher its origins and to see how widespread it was in France, I first turned to Arnold Van Gennep (1942,1946), the renowned folklorist of rural France. Van Gennep describes an abundance of variations of la retie, involving an array of foods, beverages, and containers, but all sharing bodily symbolism of some type. His composite description of the behavior of the unmarried youths in various regions of France before they present la r6tie to the bride and groom is strikingly similar to the practice in contemporary Lavialle:

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During the meal or after the dance, the newlyweds seize an opportune moment to escape. People pretend not to have noticed for a certain time, ordinarily about two hours. Then the youth form a group and search for the spot where the newlyweds are hidden. Sometimes the secret is well hidden; sometimes someone has spied on them; more rarely, they know in advance where to go to find them. In any case, n the search throughout the houses of the village, or even i the hamlets or neighboring villages, is one of the principle amusements and actually one of the rights of the Youth. . . . In the stairwell, there is a joyous climb, rarely silent, most often with a mounting degree ofjostling and shouting. [ 1946561; my tran~lation]~

What occurred after the youths surprised the newlyweds was very dependent upon the locale, according to Van Gennep-and both the contents and receptacle of la r6tie itself varied. The contents, he writes, generally involved a liquid-of either bouillon, soup, or wine-to which spices andor herbs had been added (Van Gennep 1942:60, 1946:561). The containers found in the different regions of France ranged from clay pots to plates t o simple soup terrines. Van Gennep considered la r6tie to be a typical rite de passage, expressing natural laws concerning the propagation of the species and conferring a new status on the newlyweds, putting them on an equal footing with other married couples (1946560). Victor Turner's (1969) concept of rite of reincorporation accurately describes la &tie in Lavialle, and this practice can be read to involve those elements of status elevation associated with such rites. Young married couples in Lavialle do not, in the traditional status system, achieve adulthood automatically through marriage. Marriage, although considered essential in the process of attaining adult status, does not constitute an abrupt departure from youth. Rather, for both men and women, becoming an adult is a gradual process occurring after the birth of the first and subsequent children and then the taking over of the management of the family farm. Therefore, it is significant that la r6tie occurs in the company of unmarried youth, thereby expressing the connective role the new couple plays between the youth and the adults of the community. La r8tie also expresses the newly elevated status of the bride and groom through a ritualized inversion of this new status. Turner emphasizes the humbling of the person receiving a higher status and the prevalence of rites of status reversal among structural inferiors (1969: 170-171). Being made to drink a symbolic mixture of feces and urine by one's new inferiors may, therefore, be interpreted as one such humbling experience for the new couple, as well as an expression of their reincorporation into social life with a new status, symbolized through the communal drinking out of the chamber pot and the shared onion soup meal which follow.

Ambivalence about the intimacy of married life is symbolized through the chamber pot and its contents, and expressed through the conflicting messages surrounding the tasty and distasteful aspects of the champagne and chocolate mixture. On the one hand, the newlyweds are being offered highly desirable luxury foods, reserved in Lavialle for special occasions. On the other hand, these foods are presented in a chamber pot and meant to symbolize bodily wastes. By stressing that this mixture tastes good, the Laviallois are expressing the desirability of marriage and intimacy. La r6tie speaks to the disruptive element of the formation of a newly married couple and potential family as it breaks away from the class of unmarrieds, as well as to the cohesion of the couple itself. Due to the important role of family farming in Lavialle, the family is the primary productive and reproductive unit there, and the individual is never viewed autonomously but as a member of both a peer group and a family group (Reed-Danahay 1996; see also Rogers 1991). And this is true even for nonfarming families. Married couples in Lavialle form the core of family farms and work together closely in terms of farmwork and decision making. Although there is a prescribed sexual division of labor, the roles of husband and wife in Lavialle are complementary and of a more egalitarian type than is usually found in southern Europe (cf. Dubisch 1986). In her history of French peasant marriages, Martine Segalen points out that in 19th-century French rural society, there was always a clear link between the body and the qualities of the farm (1983:116). In this, bodily imagery of the husband and wife as united was prevalent. Although Segalen does not make specific mention of any rituals like that of la retie, she does make clear that "during the celebration of the marriage, certain rituals suggest to us symbolic keys to an appreciation of what the stakes are in the relationship between man and wife and their farm" (1983:25). In its metaphorical expression of the intermingling of the bodily waste products of the husband and the wife in the chamber pot, la r8tie symbolizes the day-to-day intimacy of marriage in Lavialle as well as the fundamental unity of the couple. There is also an important allusion to fertility in this ritual since, on the dairy farms of Lavialle, the waste products of the cows are used to fertilize fields in which the cows then graze. In this sense, the couple is closely related to the fertility of the farm. As Van Gennep emphasizes, the use of wet substances to symbolize fecundity was common in such practices. The term la &tie has meanings associated with roasting and toasting, both of which are processes that dehydrate. Therefore, the paradoxically wet nature of la &tie in Lavialle suggests that the mixture is intended to counteract dryness or drought and thereby promote fertility-of the couple and also of the farm.

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An additional reading of la rdtie in contemporary Lavialle can be made, which takes into account the sexual symbolism implied by the more recent turns it has taken. Here is the seemingly unavoidable connection to be made between the insertion of the phallic chocolate banana into the wet (filled with champagne) vessel of the chamber pot. Champagne is itself associated with sexuality in Lavialle. When a champagne bottle is uncorked, jokes are made, particularly among younger adults, about male orgasm. A game is played in Lavialle after festive occasions during which champagne is served, whereby a male will keep the cork and a female will keep the metal cage. I was myself drawn into this game at a party of young Lavialle couples celebrating the New Year and was expected to carry around the metal cage for several days afterward. The man and the woman are each required to keep these items on their persons at all times, so that others can request that they produce them on demand-in order to spur laughter and sexual joking. Champagne (instead of simple white wine) and bananas are fairly recent additions to la rbtie, signaling a new emphasis on the sexuality of the couple, which is added to, but can also subvert, an emphasis on fertility. Moreover, the new addition of red-colored tampons likewise symbolizes the modem young wife whose menstrual period announces that she has avoided pregnancy. Although children are highly desired in Lavialle, families tend to have only two children now, and young couples often wait one or two years before they have their first child. Young women use birth control pills and other means of contraception. Work on the dairy farms of Lavialle is no longer labor-intensive, and children are less and less necessary for their labor. There is at present no shortage of heirs in Lavialle. While it symbolizes the closeness of the husband and wife in Lavialle, la r6tie also places the couple as a unit in relation to the community, the state, and the church. Segalen writes that "in traditional society, problems that would today be considered personal, whether to do with the intimacies of the heart or of the body, were the responsibility of the community" (198338). She neglects to mention, however, that in late-20th-century France, regulation of the body and of bodily processes is very much a concern both of the state and of the Catholic Church. It is not entirely a private or domestic matter. La r6tie can be viewed as an important element in the articulation of the public and private (or domestic) domains in Lavialle, in which bodily processes and products are ritualized in a semiprivate, semipublic setting. This part of the wedding celebration does, after all, follow public civil and religious ceremonies, which sanction and regulate the institution of marriage and the sexual life of the couple. It represents, however, a reinterpretation, or refashioning, of such

"official" contexts and rituals. La r6tie is the informal, semiprivate ceremony that confers a new status upon a couple (in contrast to the "official" ones). Although the meal and festivities occurring after the wedding in the community center constitute a local celebration of the marriage, they act more to confirm and fete the official rituals rather than to provide an alternative to them. It is the unmarried youth, rather than the adults of Lavialle, who are given the license to challenge and resist the status quo. There is a striking parallel between the association of the body with food in the chamber pot and in the ritual of communion in the mass that constitutes part of the wedding. However, in la r6tie, it is not the sacred body and blood of Christ that is ingested (in the form of the simple foods of bread and wine) but rather the "sacred" foods of a consumer economy (champagne and chocolate), which are used to symbolize the waste products of ordinary farmers. This wedding night ritual, therefore, entails a complicated inversion of the "official" religious ceremony, as well as a reformulation of the official register of good and bad taste in French society. La r6tie constitutes, therefore, a reconversion of elements of a sacred ceremony (Holy Communion) and sacred foods into a practice that is distinctly profane. However, it also creates a local sacredness and sanctity (in its ritualization of local values concerning the family and the farm) out of profane elements, that is, by creating something that "tastes good" out of something that is "in bad taste." This ritual expresses ambivalence among the inhabitants of Lavialle toward the values of the dominant culture, which defines them as backward and uncouth peasants (see Reed-Danahay and Anderson-Levitt 1991). The ceremonial chamber pot is a key symbol in Lavialle because it makes use of, recombines, and challenges elements of this dominant culture in order to reinforce local interests and local identity.

Inversions and Distinctions

Van Gennep makes the point that many authors and other observers have expressed repugnance toward such wedding rituals. Wanting for his part to remain tolerant of such practices, Van Gennep criticizes other observers (from the late 19th century to the early 20th century) for their condemnation of la r6tie as egrillard (lewd). He writes that the practice has been described as "shocking," "indecent and of such magnitude as to require suppression," and, by a turn-of-the-century observer of a region close'to Lavialle, as "a custom at once burlesque and in bad taste" (de mauvais g ~ f i t ) . ~ Van Gennep firmly dismisses any scatological aspects of la r6tie and states his preference for explana-

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tions of the ritual concerning either fertility or status elevation. Van Gennep regrets that several authors made much of regional variations of la rbtie involving white wine, chocolate, paper, and a new chamber pot, interpreting this emphasis as inaccurate. In his search for the authentic basis of French folklore, he writes that "one can doubt that this coprophagic aspect of la rbtie is really primitive and that one must bring in [to the analysis] the magical system of defecations ingested against the evil eye or evil spirits" (1946:561; my translation). Van Gennep, after a cursory dismissal of this scatological manifestation of the rite, quickly goes on to stress its many variations that did not involve chamber pots and to focus on those aspects related to fertility and virility. The liquid component of la r6tie symbolizes fertility, Van Gennep writes, and its spiciness, virility. Later in his text, he suggests that if there is an eye painted on the chamber pot, it must be seen purely in terms of a spirit of farce and not taken seriously as a magical symbol. The Laviallois themselves focus on the scatological aspects of la rbtie, the very topic avoided by scholarly observers. This is based on the explicit use of a chamber pot to contain, as one female informant put it, "a liquid and a solid." She used a euphemistic phrasing to describe the champagne and chocolate, in a simulation of human waste, that deliberately mocked bourgeois sensibilities. The Laviallois recognize that this ritual mocks bourgeois tastes in its explicit playing with good and bad taste through scatological symbolisms. According to Van Gennep, "one can regard la rbtie as universal in France, not only during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but almost up until our times" (1946:560; my translation). Although still widespread in rural France at the time of his researches in the early 20th century, la rbtie had disappeared in the region of Paris, Van Gennep writes, due to the bourgeois practice of newlyweds leaving the night of the wedding for honeymoons in Italy or on the French Riviera (1946565). The origins of the term la rbtie have been attributed to an earlier form of this ritual in which a roast chicken was placed in the chamber pot and presented to the newlyweds (Gachon 1975).5Also mentioned in folklore accounts of wedding rituals in Auvergne is the placing of a dessert made with eggs and cream into the chamber pot (Gachon 1975). Both of these earlier forms of the ritual point to a concern with the fertility of the couple (since chickens and eggs were symbols of fertility in rural France) and may relate to a contemporary form of this ritual in Brittany, where a doll is placed in the chamber pot (Ellen Badone, personal communication, 1990). Versions of this ritual in rural French weddings appear to have a long history. Natalie Zemon Davis (1983) found evidence of such a practice in which the

mixture was called la resveil, in the 16th-century marriage of Martin Guerre. She writes: "After an evening of banqueting, the couple was escorted to Bertrande's marriage bed. Into their room at midnight burst the young village revelers led by Catherine Boera . . . she was carrying their 'resveil.' Heavily seasoned with herbs and spices, the drink would ensure the newlyweds ardent mating and a fertile marriage" (1983:18). The term resveil, significantly, refers to awakening or arousing. Pierre HClias describes a form of this wedding ritual in the Bigouden area of Brittany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in which a milk soup (soupe au lait) is served to newlyweds (1975:39-41). According to Helias, two versions of this soup were served: one at the banquet feast, at which it symbolized a hope that the marriage would never turn sour, and another three days later. The second soup was oddly seasoned and brought to the newlyweds in their bed by the youth of the community in a carnival-like spirit of sexual joking. HClias writes that "the soup recipe varied from one area to another according to the imagination of the youth, but it always included a string of garlic heads" (1975:39-40; my translation). In this rite, the "official" soup, properly seasoned and publicly served to all present at the wedding, is deliberately and self-consciously inverted by the spicier soup served by the youth in a more hidden, private ceremony. Sexual joking and inversion are important features of the ritual, but scatological connotations are not mentioned by HClias. He indicates some local discomfort with the bawdy nature of the milk soup ritual by telling how his parents refused the ceremony because of its excesses, and that he participated in the ritual as a youth "without too much shame" (1975:41; my translation). As with the soup served to Martin Guerre, the milk soup in Brittany is a savory, not sweet, concoction. Over time, the contents of the chamber pot presented to the newlyweds have changed in some regions of France from a spicy potion to a sweeter mixture of wine and chocolate. This reflects the increasing commodification of tastes and the growing desirability of "sweetness" (Mintz 1985) in European society. These changes in la rbtie parallel those changes associated with marriage and sexuality expressed through the expression "honeymoon"-in French, la lune de miel. However, as Mintz (1985) points out, the French were more reluctant to embrace sugar in their diets than were the English. Contemporary versions of la rbtie in Lavialle, with its excessive combination of two sweet foods (champagne and chocolate), may, therefore, represent an intensified critique of bourgeois taste beyond those associated with the scatological connotations of the chamber pot itself. This change also expresses the additional layering of an emphasis on sexuality in marriage over the earlier one on fertility. In the everyday cuisine of

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France, sweet and savory or salty foods are not generally mixed. As Yvonne Verdier (1966) illustrates through a structural analysis of Normand cuisine, during festive occasions such as weddings, an inversion of everyday practices entails the mixing of sweet and salty. Verdier also suggests the ways in which the overuse of sweet foods in festive meals symbolizes pleasure and sexuality. Apart from Van Gennep and a few obscure authors cited by him, references to la r6tie and its variants in contemporary sources on French ethnography and folklore have been, with the exception of a very recent example to be described below, extremely brief. I have already mentioned Martine Segalens omission of such rituals in her otherwise detailed history of marriage practices in traditional French society. French ethnographer Franqoise Zonabend,who has provided an excellent analysis of ritual life in a Burgundian village, makes only the most perfunctory allusion to what is called la t r m p b e in that region. As in Lavialle, this practice involves champagne, chocolate, and a chamber pot (see Zonabend 1980:181). Yvonne Verdier (1966 101) describes la retie in lower Normandy as a soup composed of cider and bread crusts served in a chamber pot. The scatological nature of this mixture is mentioned only in passing by Verdier, when she curtly writes that the symbolization of excrement is evident (1966:lOl). Lucien Gachon (1975), a popularizer of folklife in Lavialles own region of Auvergne, provides a diluted, brief description of this practice in his book on the Auvergne. The ritual as practiced in the Lorraine (also with champagne and chocolate) is, again, briefly mentioned in passing by Susan Carol Rogers in her discussion of marriage (1980:84-85). M own hesitation to include y this practice in earlier ethnographic descriptions of Lavialle is, I hasten to add, part of the same trend. The silences concerning la r6tie in recent ethnographic descriptions of rural France are striking, especially given the seemingly widespread nature and rich symbolism of this practice. A recent exception to the silences about this ritual is Bernadette Buchers (1995) description, replete with photos, of a contemporary wedding ritual in the Vendee region of western France.6 Bucher describes a savory, spicy onion soup served late at night to the newly married couple. This soup contains a phallic-shaped carrot joined to garlic heads that symbolize testicles and is presented in a chamber-pot-like vessel (which is not, however, a real chamber pot) with a painted eye on the outside. Whereas Bucher makes passing reference to scatological connotations associated with the vessel (a symbolic chamber pot), she stresses the obvious sexual symbolisms of the rite-which are also those stressed by her informants. Bucher interestingly relates this ritual to overall values of sociability among the inhabi-

tants of the region she studied in the Vendee, which was

historically associated with the Chouan revolt resisting French nationalism and supporting the monarchy in the early 1790s. Few descriptions of la r6tie since those of Van Gennep have broached the topic of its meanings. However, in a recent, sweeping history of private life, Antoine Prost (1991) interprets la r6tie as a reflection of class differences associated with notions of privacy. In contrast to the bourgeois practice of a secret honeymoon destination, where the couple is alone for the consummation of their marriage, h o s t writes:
Among peasants and workers . . . the custom in most regions of France is for members of the wedding party to visit the newlyweds in their bed in the wee hours of the morning and to present them with a concoction known as la &tie, a mixture of white wine, eggs, chocolate, and biscuits delivered in a chamber pot. This ritual embodies the communitys control over the most private of a l acts. In a society l where domestic values occupy a central place, it is essential that the marriage be consummated. When the family is the basic social cell, the union of husband and wife must be made public. [ 1991:67]

As does Van Gennep, Prost distinguishes between bourgeois French customs and those of workers and peasants, and he has, perhaps, made use of Van Genneps research in his own book (although he does not cite Van Gennep). He emphasizes the nonbourgeois individuals lack of autonomy from the community. The form of social relationships surrounding the ritual is contrasted with the more private version of the bourgeois wedding. In hosts analysis, sexuality and fertility are subsumed in a sanitized discussion of overall domestic values. The meaning of the contents of la retie is totally ignored. What of the fact that these people drink a symbolic mixture of feces and urine from a chamber pot? Why has this been overlooked, glossed over, or ignored in most descriptions of the ritual?

As I have written and talked about la r6tie in rural Auvergne since my first encounter with it over a decade ago, I have learned a great deal about tendencies in anthropology and other disciplines to deny the exotic in France. Discomfort with a scatological ritual appears to be intensified when it occurs in a Western nation, rather than among those othersocieties in which one expectsto find such practices. Discourse surrounding la rdtie, a widespread practice with a long history in France, reveals its troublesome relationship to a bourgeois aesthetic-aptly illustrated in the quote at the beginning of this text by Georges Sand, in her description of wedding ritual in the region of Berry.

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Unease, embarrassment, and, at times, revulsion have been common reactions among colleagues (anthropologists who work in Europe, other anthropologists, and, especially, European intellectuals) to whom I have described this practice. That la rdtie occurs in the stereotypically civilized and refined nation of France may help explain this reaction. The embarrassed reactions to la r6tie that I have encountered among intellectuals say a great deal about our own cultural and classbased attitudes toward bodily products and p r o c e ~ s e s . ~ They also signal a "reverse orientalism," through which the presence of the type of "vulgar" ritual usually associated with "archaic" cultures is denied in a modern, Western society. I have had the impression in some discussions with both nonanthropologist French people and American anthropologists that not only this ritual itself, but my telling about it, is considered to be in bad taste. I suspect that had I observed a similar practice in a non-Western context, its scatological connotations would not be so repugnant. I have been particularly struck by the reactions of incredulity about this practice that I experienced among Parisians and other urban, middle-class French with whom I have discussed la r6tie. Reactions of discomfort with the entire topic were combined with affirmation that their views of rural France as backward and crude were valid (see Reed-Danahay and Anderson-Levitt 1991). During my search for historical and ethnographic references to la r8tie, I learned that such reactions are typical, as in the illustrations of reactions offered by Van Gennep that I mention above. Arjun Appadurai (1986) has usefully drawn attention to the linkage in anthropological theory between certain types of places and certain types of research and theory. India, for example, is associated with caste and hierarchy in "metropolitan anthropological discourse" (1986:360). Appadurai argues that a "reverse Orientalism" operates in anthropology, whereby non-Western societies that exhibit "complexity, literacy, historical depth, and structural messiness" are given less attention than are those characterized more easily as "smallscale" and "face-to-face."This may also be seen within Europe itself, where much of northern Europe, with the exception of Ireland, received much less attention than did the "peasant" societies of the Mediterranean region during the early years of European anthropology as practiced by Anglo-American researchers. Rural France has typically symbolized the quaint and the picturesque, particularly in Anglo-American culture, and the romanticization of the French peasant and rural life has a long history. However, rural France represents a fairly domesticated "nature," not one in which one expects to find repugnant or crude behaviors. Relatively few anthropologists have studied France, in comparison to other parts of the world or

even of Europe, due in part to its perceived lack of such exoticism. Early anthropological research in France was biased toward the study of rural settings, but these were approached as small-scale, face-to-face communities rather than as places of structural messiness. In order to correct a decidedly rural bias in early ethnographic research, anthropologists who study Western Europe have increasingly urged a turn to topics related to modern institutions and urban settings. During the past two decades, a dominant trend in Europeanist anthropology has been to repudiate the community study approach popular in the postwar period and to portray the study of rural Europe as often wedded to an outdated enterprise, hardly relevant to the study of an ever-urbanizingand ethnically diverse Europe. We now know that traditions are invented, that communities are imagined, and that occidental society is increasingly multicultural. And yet, we are still a long way from resolving our understanding of rural, postpeasant European cultures and of their place in the postmodern imagination. Silences surrounding the ritual of la rdtie, even among those who have an intimate knowledge of rural French culture, are indicative of the impact of wider cultural and class-based influences on the production of knowledge. La r6tie provides rich ground for thinking about two related issues in cultural anthropology: the persistence of cultural diversity in modern cultures and ethnographic renderings of Western versus non-Western cultures. Several observers of contemporary culture have suggested that the homogenizing forces of modernization have been exaggerated, and that it is in reworkings of, and resistances to, homogenization that cultural forms and meanings are re-created and produced.8 The recent concern in anthropological thinking and research with the dialectic between the concepts of "the other" and of "US" has shaped a new critique of anthropology based upon its preoccupation with difference.' James Carrier has made use of the concept of occidentalism to describe "the essentialistic rendering of the West by Westerners" (1992:199). Like Appadurai's notion of "reverse orientalism," this concept points to a tendency in scholarship on the West to reify European cultures, the danger being that we will ignore certain aspects of those cultures while focusing on others.

Conclusions
In its blending of older and newer cultural forms and meanings, la rdtie demonstrates the ways in which such practices do not disappear but are reshaped during processes of modernization and change." Rituals are refashioned in light of contemporary arrangements of power and of discourse. Rayna Rapp (1986) has, for

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example, demonstrated the renewed relevance of the communal festival in a southern French village that she studied and its changing significance in a changing world. French rural peoples conduct much of their social life in the context of wider systems of meaning than either the community or local region. La retie as practiced in Lavialle embodies an awareness of different systems of value concerning good and bad taste and represents an attempt on the part of the Laviallois to situate themselves within a wider frame of reference. A thorny problem raised by this analysis, one I cannot resolve in this article, is that of the degree to which la retie represents a form of resistance to a hegemonic bourgeois notion of good taste. It does not constitute the type of subtle, hidden, everyday resistance described by James Scott (1985), in that it is blatant in its mocking of bourgeois culture. The use of champagne and chocolate to symbolize human waste is an explicit challenge to class-based attitudes toward taste and high culture. L retie is also certainly not a a response to class culture of the self-consciously upwardly mobile petite bourgeoisie in France (Bourdieu 1984), those who, as Prost explains, have abandoned practices such as la retie. Nevertheless, may this practice not be seen to involve some assimilation of dominant values? The discomfort with which the Laviallois themselves describe this ritual suggests an ambivalence toward, rather than a complete rejection of, dominant values. Silence in the ethnographic record on this practice, despite evidence that it has not disappeared and is quite active in many regions, indicates a self-consciousness on the part of its practitioners, an attempt to hide from the bourgeois gaze this practice that would evoke disgust in the outside observer. There are tastes in anthropological research, just as there are tastes in ones choice of food and its presentation. Bourdieu has offered in many of his writings an insightful critique of our academic practices that can be said to constitute an ethnography of the social sciences (see especially Bourdieu 1977, 1988). My main point in this article has been that practices like la &tie in rural France have been subject to a reverse orientalism and an occidentalism that silence certain types of knowledge in the anthropological record, based upon criteria that share some features with those of taste. Bourdieu himself has inadvertently contributed to this, as I have argued elsewhere (Reed-Danahay 1995). It is only by placing rituals like the one I address in this article within the framework of wider cultural processes, such as concepts of the exotic or of class-culture, that we can make sense of their meanings both for their participants and for anthropological knowledge. Increasingly, our informants are doing this themselves as they participate both in a postmodern world of shifting realms of discourse and in everyday life in their own

communities. And it is vital that we listen to what they have to say about their own practices, to the meanings that they ascribe. La rbtie, while it may not appeal to everyones tastes and may undermine some conceptions of what is really important to study in modern Europe, has provided me with some delicious ethnographic material.

Acknowledgments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 1990 American Ethnological Society Meetings in Atlanta, Georgia. I am grateful for the comments and suggestions on that version offered by Natalie Zemon Davis, Michael Henfeld, Susan Carol Rogers, Pamela Quaggioto, Wendy Weiss, and Mary Steedly-who suggested the revised title of Champagne and Chocolate. I would also like to thank reviewers for American Anthropologist for their very useful suggestions. As always, I am indebted to the inhabitants of Lavialle for sharing their lives and enriching my own. The fieldwork upon which this article is based was funded by a National Science Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and a Bourse Chateaubriand. Further research was conducted during the 1990 NEH Summer Seminar The Poetics of Social Life,held at Indiana University. A return visit in the summer of 1996 was funded by the Faculty Research Enhancement Program of the University of Texas at Arlington. 1. For a fuller description of Lavialle, see Reed-Danahay 1996. 2. See Delsaut 1976 for an interesting twist on marriage customs in an urbanizing France, which, curiously, makes no mention of la r6tie. 3. The licentious, boisterous features of youth gangs in France have long been chronicled. See, for instance, Davis 1975 and Rapp 1986. For a related discussion in the context of wedding celebrations, see Rogers 1980. 4. Van Gennep 1946560;my translations. That Van Gennep relied heavily on local schoolteachem as informants on folklore, which FavretSaada helpfully points out (1980:231), goes a long way toward an understanding of the approach he takes to la r6tie. As Kathryn Anderson-Levitt and I (1991) have noted in our observations of contemporary schoolteachers in urban and rural France, teachers attitudes toward rural dwellers are very colored by an ambivalent view toward traditional practices. 5. In Lavialle, the term is pronounced in such a way as to sound close to the word roter, which means to belch or burp. Before I began to investigate the historical and ethnographic literature on this practice, I was under the impression that this was what the Laviallois were calling the mixture. It seemed odd, but also seemed to fit, given the contents of the chamber pot! 6. This text became available to me just as I was completing the final typescript of this article and is a welcome addition to the literature on la rdtie. 7. See especially Corbin 1986; Douglas 1970; Loudon 1977; and Martin 1987.

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8. Certeau 1988; Fiske 1989; Hannerz 1992; Marcus and Fischer 1986; and Rogers 1991. 9. Carrier 1992,1995; Fabian 1983; Herzfeld 1987; and Said 1978. 10. This is the very point made by Susan Carol Rogers (1991) in her analysis of change and continuity in household form in her study of rural Aveyron. 11. I have described forms of everyday resistance among the Laviallois elsewhere (Reed-Danahay 1993,1996).

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