Amateur anthropology

Dutch Student Initiations

An unavoidable consequence of being an expatriate is amateur anthropology. Around lunchtime on Sunday I heard boisterous chanting coming from the road nearby. This kind of thing is nothing unusual. Sufficient Heineken will cause the locals to get clingy and sing boisterously at 2am in the morning, while using the marvelous nation wide urinal system the Dutch have installed.

But not on Sunday morning. So I looked out the window to find a human snake, consisting of Dutch students winding its way through the center of town. Interesting. Later I managed to take a photo of the snake as it spiraled to a stop, five layers deep on the other side of the canal. This human snake appears to be part of initiation week activities for Dutch first year students. It is unclear to me what they are being initiated into ?

Dutch Student Initiations 2

Again, this morning on the way to work I encountered the following scene. Orderly queues of students standing out in the rain, their luggage near by, all under the watch of other students dressed in tuxedos. It seems I am not the only one to be curious about all this, from Alison:

“I did ponder the idea of actually asking someone about all of this today, but the early hour and the heavy rain didn’t really make me feel all that social.”

Indeed. Go check that blog post for more great pictures, especially the one of two students in tuxedos under the umbrella. So there appear to be subtle regional differences: in Leiden you make human snakes, in Utrech they drink champagne and make you sift though your luggage − rain or not. At Groningen University this year they took it to whole different level:

One student, dressed in a Sinterklaas outfit, asked the others to set him on fire. Another threw inflammable sic. liquid over the suit and lit it. The victim then turned into a ‘fire ball’ and jumped into the lake to put out the flames. It was not until some 40 hours later that his wounds were treated.

That 40 hour wait must have been profoundly horrible. And in case you’re wondering, this is Sinterklaas (he’s the one in the middle). What Sinterklaas is, and what he’s doing with two black faces will have to be a topic for another post. It turns out that the student in question was undergoing hazing ritual that involved sleeping only four hours per day. Clearly the Groningen students need to rethink their hazing protocol, more fun and less torture. My suggestion: human snakes. Lot’s of fun, and unlikely to kill you. Unfortunately it has happened (not with human snakes thankfully):

Initiation rituals are common to join Dutch student societies and often hit the headlines. In 1997 a student in Groningen died after drinking an entire bottle of jenever, a type of Dutch gin. In 2005 a student was forced to drink so much water he ended up in a coma.

I will cut the locals some slack as initiation rituals or rites of passage are universal, at least according to Wikipedia. Try any of the articles from this search for much worse examples. Experts can’t seem to agree why we do this:

The practice of ritual abuse among social groups is poorly understood. This is partly due to the secretive nature of the activities, especially within collegiate fraternities and sororities, and in part a result of long-term acceptance of hazing.

Why don’t they go under-cover ? They probably considered it but figured the funding proposal wasn’t workable: faculty will go undercover at student society to experience ritual abuse and alcohol intoxication for research purposes only. Anyway, what interests me is not why we do this (bonding obviously) but why we choose to do it in these particular ways.