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Happy New Year!
Did you spend last evening watching a countdown to midnight?
Or was your choice to eat 12 grapes? Or start a bonfire?
If so, the popular press wants you to know that you are taking part in New Year's traditions that are bound to particular cultural or national groups.
Tradition and culture: those are recognizably words from my discipline. That should make New Year's observations the territory of anthropology.
So it may be surprising that the main database of journals published by the American Anthropological Association yielded precisely four entries for "New Year" or "New Year's". And three of those were film reviews.
JSTOR yields a little more: 123 articles in anthropology journals that concern beliefs or observances about New Year's eve. Only one of those articles, though, even mentions the dominant form that New Year's celebrations take in the US today: there is no analysis of the dropping of a ball in Times Square beyond this one mention in passing.*
Contributions to the Journal of American Folklore make up the largest selection of anthropological articles in the JSTOR database that refer to New Year's Eve in the US, and all of these concern themselves with the traditions of groups treated as anomalies within the national scene: racial or ethnic others, or rural people presented as living in ways that have vanished from the rest of the country.
The paucity of research on such a major cultural landmark seems surprising. A current textbook for introductory cultural anthropology shares the same list of cultural practices marking New Year's as a 2013 story in Travel and Leisure on New Year's customs around the world:
The purifying power of fire is often used in such ceremonies: during the Scottish festival of Hogmanay, for instance, parades of village men swing giant blazing fireballs over their heads as they march through the streets. In Panama, effigies of popular celebrities and political figures—called muñecos—are burned on bonfires. Other bad-spirit-banishing customs are less fiery and more fun-like the Danish tradition of jumping off chairs at midnight.
Both publications likely got their lists from the same source: a holiday guidebook from 2008, cited in the textbook.
If you want an anthropological view of the US tradition that took place last night in Times Square, the best you will find is from a book about the redevelopment of the neighborhood, by cultural anthropologist Benjamin Chesluk. He writes
The ritual gathering on New Year's Eve continues to be the most obvious example of the way in which a throng of humanity can turn everything that is tedious, demeaning, and exploitative about Times Square into the stage for their own exaltation, their sense of being at the very center of the world's attention. New Year's Eve is where people make Times Square theirs, though they do so in tandem with the ever-intensifying efforts of local property owners and city authorities to control the gathering and to "brand" the event as a unified, marketable TV image. Of course, what gets created out of all this is not really some idealized vision of a diverse urban carnival, but, rather, on the level of the street, a night of boredom and immobility, punctuated by cruelty. And yet people still fill the Square, every year, to be inside and part of the magnificant spectacle (pp. 194-195).
How can we connect this view of the dominant US observation of New Year's with accounts offered by folklorists and the popular press, with their emphasis on exotic practices to "drive away bad spirits"?
My area of specialization is the study of the societies of ancient Mexico and Central America. In these areas, as was true for many other societies, the beginning of the New Year was synchronized with the agricultural year.
Among the Maya, the 365 day cycle began in the month of Pop. Anthropologist Victoria Bricker argues that when the Maya solar calendar was originally formalized, this month began on the winter solstice: December 21. She suggested that the equivalent solar year of the Mexica (or Aztec) began originally on the spring equinox (March 21).
In both cases, the solar calendar was made up of eighteen months of twenty days each, a total of only 360 days. The remainder of the year, the final days before the New Year began, was a set of nameless and uncounted days: the wayeb of the Yukatek Maya, the nemontemi of the Mexica. Among the Mexica, these were days when people would stay at home not working, to avoid peril.
Archaeologist Prudence Rice suggests the addition of extra days at the end of the calendar was seen as a dangerous violation of the cosmic order by human beings:
Throughout Mesoamerica, these extra days...are commonly considered unlucky or dangerous...These five days likely were not part of the fundamental cosmic order established by the original spirits or gods of the days....they were late additions by humans, thus perhaps having negative connotations as violations of the gods' initial structuring of the cosmos... and hence dangerous (pp. 65-66).
From this perspective, we could see the period of transition between years as one with a risk of failure. Human intervention was required to ensure the transition went well. An early Spanish chronicler, Diego de Landa, left a detailed account for the Maya of Yucatan of rituals taking place at this time, through which communities in Yucatan restarted the cosmos.
The Maya year ending rituals are thus comparable to World Renewal ceremonies of native North America. Through World Renewal ceremonies, groups like the Wiyot of northern California "'set the world right' and promote ongoing healing for the entire community". For the Hoopa, the world is renewed annually through a cycle of dances that removes evil and restores balance. These ceremonies happen at different points in the year, but their end effect is the same: to keep the universe in motion.
Chesluk's comments on the participants in New Year's eve at Times Square, while rooted in a fundamentally different view of the potential of human action to rebalance the universe, shares with the Maya, Mexica, Wiyot and Hoopa this "sense of being at the very center of the world's attention". Is it too far to go to suggest that, by being "inside and part of the magnificant spectacle"
these people-- and those who join them through virtual means-- have created their own (our own) form of world renewal?
It may not attain "some idealized vision of a diverse urban carnival", but by assembling in the cold and dark to wait for the triumph of light over death and ending, do we not assert that we are still here-- no matter what the year past has taken from us?
(*The one exception to the general anthropological silence about New Year's eve in Times Square: anthropological archaeologist Lynn Meskell, in her landmark article "Negative Heritage and Past Mastering", drew attention to the commemoration of victims of the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center through the inscription of names of the dead on the ball dropped on December 31, 2001.)
