Background on informant: Informant is a senior at USC, studying international relations. He is from the Bay Area and lived and studied in Russia for a year.

Informant: Whenever a new member of our family gets initiated, we’ll tell them that there’s a really special handed-down object that only people in the family know about and have seen. And we’ll basically bring some kind of bag or container and be like, alright we need to do this practically. And now that you are officially initiated you can see it. And we’ll open it up and it will be an ICE.

Analysis: The interesting thing about this initiation is that it asks the participant to engage with the initiation — the participant knows that the initiation is taking place — but then it turns out to be a trick, and a good trick, of course, if the participant happens to like Smirnoff ICE. Moreover, the initiation has a clear frame but seems to change every time it is performed — with a different bag or container, as informant says “some” bag or container. It also has all the other aspects of an initiation; it serves as a rite of passage for the participant, who once he has done the initiation has passed through the liminal space, is in on the trick, and is thus a full member.

Background on informant: Informant is a sophomore at Harvard, from Los Angeles, and studying psychology. He is also involved in an outdoor club and intramural crew.

Informant: There are four challenges you’re supposed to do at Harvard. I don’t know the origin of these challenges but I know they are important, from a sort of personal pride perspective and maybe a bit of peer-pressure. The first is to urinate on the foot of the John Harvard statues, a popular tourist destination–it is a tradition for tourists to rub the foot for good luck. It’s not good luck; it’s just unsanitary. The next is to have sex in the stacks of the library. This one’s pretty self-explanatory, but you don’t want to get caught obviously, so there’s some strategy required. Next up is jumping off the John Week’s Bridge which connects Cambridge and Boston over the Charles River. The Charles is notoriously nasty and until quite recently, it was too unclean to be safe to even swim in. But given the 25 foot drop off the bridge, this one is a good one for adrenaline seekers. The next and last is to participate in the Primal Scream, a biannual event in which a huge cohort of naked students sprint a lap around the yard.

Analysis:  The informant’s phrasing of “four challenges you’re supposed to do at Harvard” is interesting because it suggests that these initiation practices are integral to claiming an identity to the institution. In this way, they operate in a liminal space, serving as a rite of passage. Interestingly, as well, all of the challenges require that the participant take a risk or give something of himself or herself. In order to be a part of the community, in might suggest, the participant must make a sacrifice that is tangible and could potentially have real consequences.

Background on informant: Informant is a sophomore at Harvard, from Los Angeles, and studying psychology. He is also involved in an outdoor club and intramural crew.

Informant: My friend at Harvard was telling me about initiation for an exclusive male “final club.” For initiation, the newly minted members were told to chug beer–the nasty, watered-down college type of beer. However, the beer these members chugged contained goldfish. Not the “snack that smiles back” cheese-flavored Peppridge Farm kind, but the living, gill-containing, fish-flavored animal goldfish. Through a beer bong, these members apparently chugged live animals, often multiple at a time. Apparently one kid got 12 in one go. There are a lot of stories at Harvard, about it’s history, about it’s students, about it’s weird institutional traditions, and I think most of them aren’t true.

Analysis: This initiation story, as the informant tells it, assumes a sort of fantastic quality. There is a shock value to it, and it’s rather hard to believe. In this way, it could also perhaps be classified as a legend. It also operates in the liminal space. In order to be a member of the fraternity, you must do something thought of by the society in which you live as repulsive. It’s, in fact, one of the things that makes you different, distinguishes you and therefore perhaps makes you a member, in a strange way, of the particular group. I found this story to be outlandish, at first. “There’s no way this happened,” I said to myself. But then later in the day, I was talking to about it with a friend at USC who is active in Greek life. He said it was hardly outlandish and that he too had heard of something similar once. Therefore, this folklore not only distinguishes people within the subgroup but also students involved in social clubs and students not involved in social clubs.