Dancing In The Streets: A History Of Collective Joy (2007) - Plot & Excerpts
Barbara Ehrenreich is one of my hero authors because of her books Nickel and Dimed and Bait and Switch. She has written a number of other books but these two address social issues that I find particularly compelling. They are also books where her writing is quite personal and succinct. On the other hand Dancing in the Streets hammers home its points by excessive repetition. For example, in the Introduction Ehrenreich writes a twenty page thesis on ceremonies that she considers celebratory in some way. Hardly any of these examples, and there are many, are unique. Most are of the same nature but in different cultural settings. She calls these ecstatic rituals. This point is made and made, then made again. Enough, Barbara, I get the point. She concludes “If we possess this capacity for collective ecstasy, why do we so seldom put it to use?”In Blood Rites she explores the negative collective action of war. In Dancing in the Streets she looks in the other direction for positive examples. This takes the form of an academic thesis, like Blood Rites, with fifty pages of notes, bibliography and index. I am tempted to put both these books in the reference section of the library and only go to it when I am interested in seriously exploring the topics. These are not for bedside reading tables. I cannot celebrate Dancing in the Streets although from the catchy title I expect an enjoyable experience. But it is more represented by the serious subtitle A History of Collective Joy. And since so much of the book is devoted to the loss or absence of festivals, we might subtitle it The Loss of Collective Joy.So, I guess, my reaction to the book really had to do with expectations. I was looking for something catchy and readable and I got a deep, serious viewpoint. I was hoping for the happy personal celebration of a sports victory of my home team but got the formal experience of the choir singing the Hallelujah Chorus.“Go back ten thousand years . . .” Ehrenreich likes to start at the beginning with the prehistoric times. “We can infer these scenes from prehistoric rock art depicting dancing figures, which has been discovered at sites in Africa, India, Australia, Italy, Turkey, Israel, Iran, and Egypt, among other places.” With the help of modern anthropologists she can “infer” quite a bit and sometimes I wonder what came first, the conclusion or the inference. She sees “marching, chanting, dancing” everywhere she looks. She spends many pages delving into Dionysian worship asserting that it wasn’t “fundamentally sexual in nature” challenging a common modern day assumption. On the other hand “With his long hair, his hints of violence, and his promise of ecstasy, Dionysus was the first rock star.” There is some conflict about sexuality in this statement given our current stereotype of rock stars! Furthermore, she explores the collapse of paganism beginning with the rise of Christianity. “In a world without Dionysus/Pan/Bacchus/Sabazios, nature would be dead, joy would be postponed to an afterlife, and the forests would no longer ring with the sound of pipes and flutes.” Far from that state, Ehrenreich sees Jesus as taking on many of the characteristics of Dionysus as one way to explain his rise to prominence and the effort of his followers to fit him into the world as he found it. The parallels between Jesus and Dionysus are striking as Ehrenreich lists them. She also observes that Jesus “was born into a Jewish culture that had embraced, to a certain extent, the pagan gods, especially Zeus and Dionysus.” The phrase “to some extent” may be a key to understanding the view Ehrenreich takes. It is fair to say that first- and second-century Christianity offered an experience in some ways similar to that provided by the Greek mystery cults, and the “oriental” religions in Rome – one of great emotional intensity, sometimes culminating in ecstatic states. Christians . . . sang and chanted, leaped up to prophesy either in tongues or in normal speech, drank wine, and probably danced and tossed their hair about. Having said all that and more, Ehrenreich is bold enough to say that “Generalization is unwise here . . .”! She goes on to explain the current Christianity as “diminished” from its Dionysian origins. The current conflict in the Church between speaking in tongues and patient listening, between ecstatic dancing and sedate sitting was in the front of my mind as I read this section. To accept the course of evolution (if I may use that word!) of the church as expounded by Ehrenreich requires an open mind and rather flexible beliefs. It mostly does not work if one is dogmatic. Ehrenreich explores the reasons carnivals, large public parties, declined in frequency. One conclusion is that “Without question, industrial capitalism and Protestantism played a central role in motivating the destruction of carnival and other festivities.”Although there is no answer to “the question of whether carnival functioned as a school for revolution or as a means of social control,” the book provides some gruel for thought.Ehrenreich does occasionally drift off course. Sometimes the drift is interesting but only tangentially related to collective joy! And it should be emphasized that the new concern to separate eating from excreting, and one human body from another, had nothing to do with hygiene. Bathing was still an infrequent, even – if indulged in too often – eccentric, practice, the knowledge that contact with others and their excreta can spread disease was still at least two centuries away. In what seems to me to be another excursion into the barely related, Ehrenreich devotes a twenty page chapter to melancholy in the 1600s ascribing it as the 17th century version of our depression. What does this have to do with Dancing in the Streets? If the destruction of festivals did not actually cause depression, it may still be that, in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for it. What was the cure for melancholia in the late 16th and early 17th century? Eat, drink and be merry. Go to a festival! What, you say the festivals have been excluded from the churches and banished from the countryside? Oh my!So what should we do in today’s modern or post-carnival era about depression? I know of no attempts in our time to use festive behavior as treatment for depression, as if such an experiment is even thinkable in a modern clinical setting. There is, however, an abundance of evidence that communal pleasures – ranging from simple festivities to ecstatic rituals – have served, in a variety of cultures, as a way of alleviating and even curing depression. And she goes on to give a number of examples suggesting in conclusion that we should not reject “one of the most ancient sources of help – the mind-preserving, lifesaving techniques of ecstasy.” Actually sounds like a prescription for a party is called for!But the years of European expansionism sent somber folk out to conquer the world and end the festivities wherever they were encountered. We are still talking about loss of Dancing in the Streets. And then – Sieg Heil! – back come the massive crowds to adulate their fascist leaders. But are they experiencing joy or crowd psychology?And then we are brought to the present time when Dancing in the Streets is brought to you by rock concerts indoors and then outdoors. And the thrill of the home run or goal or basket or great play or political victory can bring a crowd to their feet in collective celebration. We have lived this part of celebration and it brings the book to an ending where Ehrenreich ponders whether the days of carnivals will ever return with its ecstatic joy. The book has mostly related the extinction of carnival-like events over the centuries. Ehrenreich closes by saying that we need more chances “on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration.”I didn’t find very much to jump up and dance to in this book. It is full of academic speculation and recollection. It seems to go back to the beginning of human life in a well researched canvas of vanishing planned and spontaneous collective joy. It is too much like a book that the professor might assign parts of for a sociology class.Dancing in the Streets is similar to Blood Rites in its academic approach to the topic. And since I had already read Blood Rites, I was not crushed with disappointment to find the drone of an academic thesis. I just did not find excitement in either book. Lots of information, that’s for sure, but not much excitement. It wouldn’t make a very good movie either.I just was not ready for so much more academia in Dancing in the Streets so I am giving it two stars: “It was OK.” I was hoping for something a little more user friendly. I also would have appreciated a few portions about how to find the path to more collective joy.
ON COLLECTIVE ECSTACY Starting back at the dawn of time and bringing the reader up to the present, Barbara Ehrenreich charts the history of collective joy in her recently published book "Dancing in the Streets". The book itself isn't one that's easy to pigeon-hole, in part a work of synthesis, it brings into close focus those fragments of information we have from the past that relate to her subject matter. It also reflects, and speculates on, the expressions of collective joy and ecstatic rituals which are broadly defined as festivals, carnivals, holidays and fairs in which the participants actually participate, as opposed to spectacles of where one just gawps and which reached their hellish epitome with the Nazi rallies of the 1930's.The earlier section of the book which deal with the pre-historic times are necessarily speculative, one activity that appears frequently in cave paintings would appear to be groups of early men and women dancing. Moving onto the ancient world of the Greeks and Romans Ehrenreich has a greater amount of evidence available and looks at the differences between Roman and Greek (and others) attitudes to collective joy. Her reading of Euripides "Bacchae" reveals an early example of the tension between the rulers and the ruled with regard to over exuberant festivities. In this case the King is torn to pieces during the annual festival in the Greek world where women ran riot, danced, hunted animals with their bare hands and ate them raw. The King was mistaken for a lion.The book progresses through time, including speculation on how much of Dionysus practices were taken assimilated by the early Christians, and moves on to later accounts of ecstatic, communal dancing in Churches and the conflicts that emerged between the religious hierarchy who frowned upon this from the late middle ages onwards, and those who fought to maintain the practice. Ehrenreich also ponders a number of questions, whether the function of communal ecstatic rituals was to strengthen community solidarity; how Calvinism and Industrial Capitalism hardened rulers attitudes to the carnivals, fairs and festivals of the lower orders; the increasing albeit anecdotal emergence of depression (or melancholy) as a phenomena as these influences take hold and the opportunities for a community to get together and let it all go gradually disappear. As we move on to more recent times the material becomes increasingly familiar (free rock festivals, etc) though still of interest.As in all Ehrenreich's writing the prose is energetic, clear, frequently funny and aptly playful, and holds a wealth of (often quite unexpected) information about the apparent human need for ecstatic rituals and festivities involving feasting, masking and dancing that can generate intense pleasure without the need for organized entertainment or the intervention of authorities. A fascinating and rewarding book that I would heartily recommend to all but the most dedicated of kill-joys.
What do You think about Dancing In The Streets: A History Of Collective Joy (2007)?
I have a deep, deep appreciation for the combination of music and dance - it's led me to impromptu dance parties, raves, drum circles, and hippie music festivals among other events. There's nothing like a beat to make you move, and nothing like losing yourself in a large group to make you feel totally and truly human. This book is about that: large-scale celebrations of music, dance, and general carnival. The author has some really interesting ideas - from the idea of collective joy as an adaptation for survival to the possibility that the depression of our age is really just us bereft of that connection that's only possible through festivals and group dance. Although certainly a lot of the book is speculation on things no one has studied or proven, there's a lot of interesting ideas and also a lot of historical fact and research. A thoroughly enjoyable book. Read it, if only because you'll want to start a dance party afterwards.
—Anie
A lament for the disappearance of communal celebrations, this work is an analysis of the role that 'festivals' have played in uniting people, in creating community. The author believes it has been significant - indeed, believes it is one of the major reasons for human success. Believes that the ability to form groups larger than a nuclear family was essential for human survival - essential for gathering food, hunting, fending off predators. And believes that the means of binding together people, both kin and strangers, was participation in festive rituals - rites involving rhythmic music and dance - that is, in the stereotypical primitive rite: the gathering around a roaring fire, sharing food, singing, dancing wildly to rhythmic music until exhaustion or until a state of ecstasy was achieved, a state in which individuality was lost in the solidarity of the group. And the author believes that this, or the pre-disposition to this type of activity, is programmed into human genes - like other advantages essential to evolutionary survival, it was encoded into human genes to guarantee the creation of durable human groups. Course, that is not provable. And she makes no attempt to prove it - providing only suggestive anecdotal evidence as to its probability. The most supportive evidence is the ubiquity of this type of primitive ritual across the world - among the Native-Americans, the tribes of Africa, the Islanders of the Pacific, etc. Regarding this 'festive' need as basic to community, the author searches history to find modifications of this 'basic' rite and to find a corresponding creation of community. And she finds such connections in cultural practices that span the history of the western world - see resemblances to it in the mystery religions of the classical age, in the medieval carnivals, in the secular festivals of the French Revolution, etc. The author is not an anthropologist - is rather a social/cultural historian, whose strength is not in doing original research, but in pattern recognition. And she has a real talent for this. Whether the reader will find convincing the anecdotal evidence she provides in demonstrating their resemblance in intent and result to the primitive rite is unlikely. Many of the details of the argument she makes for any particular correspondence are questionable. Are anecdotal - and are based on reliance on an eccentric selection of secondary sources. For example, she sees a resemblance to the primitive rite in early Christian worship - suggests that Christian gatherings originally included music, dancing, glossolalia, and other practices that created in the participants a state of ecstasy, a oneness with God, with each other. Even suggests, more controversially, a resemblance between Christianity and Greek mystery religions, suggests that Jesus may have viewed himself as Dionysus. While her arguments for a particular instance of 'correspondence' may be unconvincing, they are always interesting, are always thought provoking, Less satisfying is her discussion about contemporary celebrations that she regards as 'rudiments' of the primitive rite - rock concerts and sporting events. The author regards these as surviving vestiges of it or perhaps as its reemergence. While it is true that folks at rock festivals don special clothing, indulge in mind-altering substances, and ecstatically lose their quotidian personality, becoming one with the crowd of rock fans swaying, clapping, shouting as one, and while it is true that sport fans put on team colors, paint themselves, drink alcohol and ecstatically lose their individuality, becoming one with the crowd of screaming fans doing the 'wave', both are self-selected groups - people of a particular age, or sex, or economic class - and the community they create is temporary or partial - the solidarity only of limited duration, of limited significance. The original, archetypical rite united the whole society - and established enduring bonds. But the real weakness of the work is her explanation for the decline of festivities, for the loss of both the rite and the sense of community. Blames it on the elites - on authoritative power structures wishing to control the masses - to organize them vertically, not horizontally - to counter and crush any hint of social equality - so because those festivals created a sense of solidarity, a sense of equality, they were suppressed- and so was lost the sense of community they created. Although her argument is more detailed and more fully developed and is supported by some evidence, it is not convincing. Such a major change in human society cannot be imposed from above. The transformation from an agricultural economy to a mercantile, and then to an industrial economy certainly contributed much more to the loss of community, as did increasing urbanization, than did an oppressive elite. Like Ehrenreich, I want to engage in some speculation. Will posit that the major reason loss of community was not these, but rather the change from an illiterate society to a literate one. Reading changed everything. In a small village, everyone saw the same things, ate the same foods, had the same thoughts. But with literacy came the opportunity to know a wider world, to think larger thoughts, to know more than the man working next to you knew, to think differently, to develop an interior life that was not shared with others, to develop a distinct personality. And so entered difference and alienation. This theory has the advantage of explaining the epidemic of 'melancholy' that occurred in the late 16th through the 17th century - the time when, after the invention of the printing press, books were becoming widely available and the habit of reading 'took off' - as did the incidence of suicide. Reading not only changes what the reader thinks but how he thinks - from material images to abstract words, to concepts that can be joined together into rational arguments. Literacy creates a distance between the reader and the material world, and creates a difference from others - an ineluctable alienation. The real value of this book, its heart, is the author's plaintive description of what was lost - the loss of community, the disappearance of a rite by which people came together and shared food and music and joy with each other - the disappearance of an occasion when individuals could shed their personalities, could stop playing the role society assigned them, and be just one human in harmony with others, equal, united solely in their humanity - an occasion when one could enjoy real ecstasy, could escape from oneself, from one's limitations, and become one with something larger, more powerful, more significance than oneself.
—Robert
Ever since I read that the massacre at Wounded Knee was instigated by soldiers thrown into a panic over native Americans who were dancing in ecstatic prayer (imagine that, murdering men, women and children because they were dancing)I've known that the western world has a strained relationship with ecstatic behavior. I am delighted to have stumbled on Ehrenreich's book that explores this phenomenon. The way I came across this book was by reading Ehrenreich's memoir Living with a Wild God, a book I at first thought was a brilliant analysis of her own visionary experience, but as the book proceeded, I realized that she was willing to explore any conceivable explanation as long it doesn't include God.It reminded me of the Catholic Church in the middle ages that permitted any explanation of the rotations of the planets as long as it kept earth in the center. Erhrenreich's claim to be open-minded in all things except one mars my trust in her analysis. Otherwise, she's brilliant.
—Jerry
