Please Be Conbibial

‘To drink’ and ‘to be drunk’ are most simply, if also strangely, linked through the grammatical relation of voice: in drinking one (actively) drinks a substance, an actor, an assemblage, and in being drunk one is (passively) drunk by another actor or assemblage of actors. With alcohol (the substance perhaps most pertinent to 'being drunk'), these assemblages necessarily involve the microbes that are central to the production of alcoholic beverages in the first place, as well as the co-constitutive microbes of our bodies that help us metabolise these substances and propagate our bodies in time and space (these assemblages could also be spiritual agents, as many cultures conceptualise and ritualise the experience of alcohol, and other psychotropic substances). We can therefore think of 'being drunk' as not only a specific psychotropic and phenomenological state, but also as a coevolutionary companionate one, rendering humans instrumental to the agency of non-humans and more-than-human assemblages in furthering their own aims. What would this move mean for drinking and conviviality — both the conviviality that happens around the table, but also the broader conviviality of developing strategies for living well with others, human, non-human, and more-than-human, in everyday life? What sort of metaphor does it turn 'drinking' into, as a particular type of agency associated with ingestion and consumption, both material and metaphorical? Rather than a more conventionally scholarly approach to this linguistic–ethnographic investigation, I offer as a starting point a poem from the perspective of the original Drinkers — the small, alcohol-producing critters that have directed our appetites since long before we became human, and continue to shape the makings and remakings of civilisation as a more-than-human achievement. The poem initiates a reworking of Haraway’s ‘companion species’ concepts — ‘critters’ who are ‘good to think with and eat with’ — that opens up a more variegated and so far under-theorized landscape of different mutually ingestive–digestive, eating–feeding relationships. Bonds of intoxication do different work here from those of nourishment. The relation is something psychotropic, imaginative, primarily symbolic — something powerful in spite of being less than, or at least not obviously, adaptive. Or perhaps, as these Drinkers imply, it is adaptive and co-adaptive, albeit in a slightly loopier, more subtle way than neo-Darwinism might permit. Nor is companionship, breaking bread together, the only kind of conviviality, of trying to live together well. Arachaeologically — materially and symbolically — it is hard to say that either bread or drink has priority over the other; though, as the Drinkers also remind us, it does seem to be the case that hominids have been directing ethanol-oriented fermentation since long before the emergence of Homo sapiens, and therefore certainly long before the emergence of bread-making. The history of companionship, then, intra- or interspecific, might well be situated within a much longer history of conbibionship — of drinking together and, as these Drinkers would have us think, trying, through listening and wondering and co-producing for each other’s benefit, to drink together and to live together well. These are but a few of many ways in which, rather than being a trivial or indulgent afterthought, this kind of creative, co-productive inquiry can open up new ways of thinking with and (re)making kin in the Anthropocene.