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    Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
    Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
    Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
    Ebook443 pages6 hours

    Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

    By Barbara Ehrenreich

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich's fascinating exploration of one of humanity's oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy

    In the acclaimed Blood Rites, Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species' attraction to war. Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing.

    Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and "savage," Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a "danced religion." Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites. The elites' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains. Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent "carnivalization" of sports.

    Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future.

    "Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead."—Terry Eagleton, The Nation

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateDec 26, 2007
    ISBN9781429904650
    Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
    Author

    Barbara Ehrenreich

    Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-2022) was a bestselling author and political activist, whose more than a dozen books included Nickel and Dimed, which the New York Times described as "a classic in social justice literature", Bait and Switch, Bright-sided, This Land Is Their Land, Dancing In the Streets, and Blood Rites. An award-winning journalist, she frequently contributed to Harper's, The Nation, The New York Times, and TIME magazine. Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, when it was still a bustling mining town. She studied physics at Reed College, and earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University. Rather than going into laboratory work, she got involved in activism, and soon devoted herself to writing her innovative journalism.

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    4/5

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    • 5/5
      I loved this book! It was joyous to realize that I have forgotten to dance and in so doing lost a lot of joy in my life. I have a tendency towards depression, but when I was able to dance as part of my daily exercise I got a lot of joy from it and lifted me from depression and or sorrow. I have arthritis in my knees. Ehrenreich's history of dance and its repression is enlightening. I like her comparison of how in fundamentalist religions from Christianity to Islam, in particular the Wahhabi and the Pentecostal that my maternal family practices, dance, secular music, art, and with Wahhabism, even musical instruments are banned. I remember my maternal Pentecostal grandfather condemning dance, music, and television as the "work of the devil." In my case, I think that is why my mother and I had and have depression, we were raised in an atmosphere that didn't encourage joy. For Ehrenreich communal dance gives us joy that bonds us. Ecstatic ritual dance strengthens our empathy with one another where we are all equal. She shows how elites throughout history have attempted to suppress dance because many times under elites oppressive regimes after communal dances and rituals people have revolted. For her civilization is built on a class system. From warrior kings and priest kings to Nazi and Communist dictators have banned ecstatic dance and celebration fearing a revolt that may and has come out it. Instead they stage their own very tightly controlled and choreographed celebrations. Yet I still like what the anarchist feminist Emma Goldman was quoted as saying, "I don't want to be part of your revolution if I can't dance."
    • 5/5
      As joyful as a scholarly book can get. Inspiration abounds
    • 2/5
      Ehrenreich begins with the observation that a lot of cultures worldwide seem to have collective ecstatic rituals that usually involve dance, where individuals enter a state of ecstasy that makes them lose their sense of individuality and feel a part of a collective whole. She then asks why we don't have those rituals in modern Western culture, and then traces all the reasons why we have rejected those kinds of rituals and why we dismiss them as "primitive" when we encounter them in other cultures. It more or less boils down to the fact that the kind of community created by ecstatic ritual must be small, and it doesn't scale up to the giant civilization that developed in Europe and the areas Europe colonized. Large civilizations require political hierarchies and systems of control, and thus suppress collective rituals.This is going to sound really snobby, but I'm a historian, and anthropology makes me really squeamish and this book is a great example of why. The book starts off by comparing ecstatic rituals throughout the world and throughout history, and arguing that these rituals share some common features. But there is absolutely no discussion of the various sources from which we have learned about these rituals. Part of her argument is that when Europeans encounter these rituals in indigenous cultures, they are critical and disdainful of them, yet Ehrenreich assumes that European descriptions of the rituals are accurate. Then she traces the history of ecstatic ritual in Western culture, starting with ancient Greece and Rome and continuing to the modern day. Yet again, she takes descriptions of rituals at face value, and draws some really huge conclusions based on her analyses (or, more often, her acceptance of other historians' analyses). There is no discussion of her sources, or how she knows what she claims to know about these rituals. She is clearly not an expert in all of the times and places she examines in this book. The whole book would fall apart if just a few of her examples were wrong (and I suspect many of them are).Ehrenreich is arguing that ecstatic ritual is a universal human tendency, and that modern European culture is unusual for repressing it.... and yet she does not talk about whether these rituals have been repressed anywhere else in the world, and how or why. She makes a really dubious argument that the decline of ecstatic ritual can be tied to the rise in rates of depression. It's an interesting theory, but it is unproveable, even though she tries to prove it by citing rising rates in suicide as a measure of rates of depression. There are so many things wrong with this argument and the evidence she uses to support it. Just because historical records show a rise in suicide cases does not mean there was actually a rise in suicides - it could be that they were just reported more. A rise in suicide does not necessarily correlate to a rise in depression - it could be that in different times and places, suicide is a more acceptable response to depression or other problems. The end of the book was really unsatisfying, because Ehrenreich's conclusion seems to be "well, sure is too bad we don't do this any more." She doesn't really offer any conclusions about how our society would be better or worse with ecstatic ritual, other than to suggest that people might not be so depressed.
    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed the topic, questioned some of the conclusions.
    • 4/5
      I liked this and found it an interesting read. Ehrenreich presented some historical events in an unusual light - the rise of Protestantism as a reaction against the increasing disapproval by the Catholic Church of public celebration being the main example. I was also fascinated by the idea, provocative although not well-supported, that the early Christians were shaped by Dionysian cults, because the Roman Jews were also followers of Dionysus. I'd love to see some more evidence along those lines - it's definitely not a modern article of Jewish faith.

      That said, there are some substantial criticisms I could make. Looking at a couple thousand years of European history through a single narrow lens is interesting but not at all convincing - I don't believe the author thinks she's found the key to all history or anything, but the presentation is shaped that way and I found it thin. Secondly, the Eurocentrism - which she explicitly apologizes for and explains - is tedious. Certainly for someone who's more a journalist than a serious historian or anthropologist, focusing on Europe is the path of least resistance, but it's not nearly as compelling. My third big objection is that she makes very little effort to make her thesis relevant to modern life. She discusses sports, briefly, mentions Halloween literally in one offhand remark, and doesn't touch on flash mobs, the effect of the internet, modern religious or secular holidays, or anything else in the current day at all. I'd be happy to read a second book focused on that, to be honest - maybe happier than I was with this one.

      To be clear, I liked and enjoyed the book, and it gave me some interesting things to think about. A work of major scholarship it is not, but it's worth a read.
    • 4/5
      I enjoyed this. A lot of it is speculative, as the author herself admits. Really, how could it be anything else - how precisely would one go about proving, for example, group dancing helped to build social cohesion among Neolithic hunters? But I'm okay with the speculation.

      One reason I'm okay with it is that Ehrenreich doesn't make over inflated claims about what she's doing. She's entertaining some theories and raising some questions based on her reading on the subject. She's not pretending to have the last word. Which seems fair enough to me.

      Also I'm okay with it because the questions and speculations are kind of fascinating. Was life different for people when public dancing and celebrations were a regular and frequent part of their lives? What were the social and emotional functions those celebrations played? Why have they declined where they have declined, and how has that changed people's experience?

      Interesting things to think about. Interesting historical tidbits, strange parallels and commonalities, all of which to me at least are great loads of fun. Regardless of whether the questions are entirely answerable.
    • 3/5
      I've enjoyed other books by Ehrenreich and figured that this would be a take on public celebrations like Carnivale and sporting events. These things get a mention toward the end of the book and Ehrenreich makes a (convincing) case that what passes for collective joy in modern times is merely a shadow of the ecstatic experience of our ancestors. Ehrenreich goes way back to prehistoric peoples by way of the "primitive" cultures encountered (and destroyed) by Europeans in the Age of Exploration. Early Christianity seems much more lively due to it's overlap with the Dionysian cult. And while today we fear crowd ecstasy due to it's association with Italian Facist and Nazi rallies, Enrenreich deconstructs what were actually carefully staged performances rather than expressions of the mob mentality. Overall this is an interesting analysis of a fascinating topic.

    Book preview

    Dancing in the Streets - Barbara Ehrenreich

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