Booze & Culture: Prof serves up shots of anthropology

Anthropology professor Kirk French hears it all the time—“I wish they had a class like that back when I was at Penn State”—in reference to his Anthropology of Alcohol (ANTH140) class, also known as Booze and Culture.

Indeed, current PSU students flock to the class. Since he started teaching it in 2016, the class has become the most popular anthropology course in the country, with more that 700 undergraduate students in attendance each semester. 

Around town, proud students can be seen sporting Booze and Culture gear with the clever slogan “Take a shot of anthropology” on the back, proving the impact that French is making on campus. 

Throughout the course, undergrads take a trip around the world and back again, looking at how alcohol is produced and consumed. From the first beer made in Henan, China, in 7,000 B.C to local craft breweries, and from ceremonial fermented mare’s milk in Mongolia to ritualized tailgating at Beaver Stadium, students study alcohol through the lenses of archeology, biological anthropology, and cultural anthropology. 

While the class may sound like fun and games, French designed it to leave a sobering message as the last taste in the mouth for students, diving into the darker side of alcohol abuse and misuse. For the last few semesters, he has been aided in those efforts by Jim and Evelyn Piazza, who share with the class the story of how their son, Timothy, died in 2017 during alcohol-based hazing at a Penn State fraternity. It is powerful stuff.

French has been teaching at Penn State since 2009, and he has an interesting resume beyond his booze and alcohol class. In 2010 he co-developed and hosted the Discovery Channel series American Treasures. More recently, he finished his first feature-length documentary, Land and Water Revisited, which was nominated for an Emmy, took home several awards from international film festivals, and is available for streaming on PBS. He is currently working on his second film, A Century After Nanook.

His interest in alcohol and culture began while he was doing archaeological research on Mesoamerican and Mayan culture.

“With all my research down in Mexico and Guatemala, essentially, it’s a work hard, play hard life down there,” says French. “We would experiment with a lot, and different workers would introduce us to things that we’d never heard of before, alcohol wise. I realized that there’s so much alcohol out there that you can’t buy in a bottle. It’s made on back porches, and it’s made in yards and that kind of thing.”

Later, he started a research project on moonshine in North Carolina. Eventually, he started incorporating some of these findings into his intro-level classes, telling stories and making connections.

“I realized the students really like stories about alcohol,” says French. He eventually created a whole lecture on the subject, and lo and behold, it became the students’ favorite class. He figured he was on to something and developed a proposal for a whole course on the matter, thinking he would never get it approved. But his department head and dean surprised him.

“They saw the potential of a lot of asses in seats, you know. I presented in a way that it wasn’t just a big bar tour, and they approved it, and then it kind of came together,” says French. He knew the class would bring in a whole new group of students to the work that he has dedicated his life to. Every semester he is proven right on the first day of class, when he asks students if they know what the study of anthropology is. Only a handful raise their hands. 

“The reason I like anthropology is that it shows us that we’re way more alike than we are different. … This is totally counter to everything we are told every month, on a minute by minute basis, from Republicans and Democrats, to black and white, Christian, Muslim, it doesn’t matter, right. It’s like opposites, and that’s not the case, when you back up from it all. By knowing that we’re more alike than different, it helps us to appreciate differences. That’s why I like anthropology,” says French.

“It gives me an opportunity to kind of provide this message, a little dose or a shot of anthropology, to a lot of students. I realized that you can talk to more people about booze than you can about something like archaeology.”

French says a highlight of the course is a study of Penn State tailgating. During a home game weekend, students talk to fans outside the stadium before the game. They come back the next morning before the Office of Physical Plant cleans everything up to examine and study the party, like archaeologists at a historic dig.

“This project is so cool because here’s what we end up finding out, which is kind of the hypothesis: higher quality food and beverages are going to be near the stadium; the lower quality stuff, the cheaper stuff, is going to be out in the hinterlands, out on the pasture out there. And it was true,” says French. “And as archaeologists, we see that at ancient sites. The really nice pottery and all that stuff, it’s up near the temples. Out in the hinterlands, you get the cruddy pottery. So, they were able to see these parallels between … what’s going on today in a tailgate and what we’ve seen going on in an ancient Mayan city.”

The last two weeks of the semester take a closer look at the dangers of alcohol, from abuse to the way it factors into sexual assaults. 

“The whole class is pretty light, and it ends in a very dark way. I designed it that way. The last two weeks of the class are really just all about the dangers and how things can go sideways so quickly with alcohol. To be able to have the Piazzas come in, and they are just rocks. Everybody channels their grief in different ways. But they come in there and they just tell the story of what they went through. … There is not a dry eye in the room. It is really powerful,” says French. “I want the last things that [students] remember about this class is to take this seriously. Because [the Piazzas’] message is to look out for your friends. Go out, drink, have fun, look out for each other. And that really is a pretty golden message. Just look out for each other.”

When all is said and done, French hopes the students “learn to view alcohol differently. I think that if you view something differently when you know more about a particular subject, no matter what it is, your views of that subject change. There has to be an increase in a level of respect for alcohol with this class. I don’t know how much difference it makes, but I know the students have told me that it has. It’s not like they’re going to stop drinking or stop getting drunk or anything like that. It’s just thinking about it differently.” T&G

Staff writer Vincent Corso enjoys drinking local and meeting new people at central Pennsylvania’s many interesting establishments.