Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy
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The ecstatic rituals of non-Western peoples often have healing, as well as religious, functions (if the two kinds of functions can even be reliably distinguished), and one of the conditions they appear to heal seems to be what we know as depression. To give a few examples drawn from very different sorts of cultures: The !Kung people of the Kalahari Desert use their ecstatic nocturnal dances to treat “the full range of what in the West would be called physical, psychological, emotional, social, and spiritual illnesses,” according to an ethnographer who actually participated in these rituals.68 Far to the north of the !Kung, in Islamic Morocco, rituals involving music, dance, and trance are used to cure “paralysis, mutism, sudden blindness, severe depressions, nervous palpitations, paraesthesias, and possession.”69 In Christian Uganda in the 1990s, danced rituals were used to help rehabilitate severely withdrawn children traumatized by their experience as captives of the murderous guerrilla movement known as the Lord’s Resistance Army.70
Italian folk tradition provides another example of the use of public festivity as a cure for depression. In chapter 4, we saw that the tarantula was blamed for dancing manias in Italy. In some accounts, the supposed effect of the spider bite was actually a melancholic syndrome, marked by lassitude to the point of stupefaction, for which the only remedy, according to the nineteenth-century historian J. F. C. Hecker, was dancing, preferably outdoors and for days on end. At the sound of the appropriate musical instruments, he reports, the afflicted “awoke as it were by enchantment, opened their eyes, and moving slowly at first, according to the measure of the music, were, as the time quickened, gradually hurried on to the most passionate dance.” These exertions cured them—at least for a while, because a year later whole villages full of sufferers “again grew dejected and misanthropic, until, by music and dancing, they dispelled the melancholy.”71 As mentioned earlier, the therapeutic celebrations were eventually institutionalized as regular, seasonal festivities featuring the kind of tune known generically as the tarantella.
Hecker reports a similar syndrome and cure in nineteenth-century Abyssinia, or what is now Ethiopia. An individual, usually a woman, would fall into a kind of wasting illness, until her relatives agreed to “hire, for a certain sum of money, a band of trumpeters, drummers, and fifers, and buy a quantity of liquor; then all the young men and women of the place assemble at the patient’s house,” where they dance and generally party for days, invariably effecting a cure.72 Similarly, in twentieth-century Somalia, a married woman afflicted by what we would call depression—often precipitated by her husband’s stated intention to take a second wife—would call for a female shaman, who might diagnose possession by a sar spirit. Musicians would be hired, other women summoned, and the sufferer cured through a long bout of ecstatic dancing with the all-female group.73 In his description of this phenomenon, I. M. Lewis emphasizes the sufferer’s potential material gains, since the shamans often recommend, as part of the cure, that the husband shower the afflicted wife with expensive gifts. But this seems to me an overly instrumental view of the situation. To believers, it is the danced ritual that exorcises the sar spirit, and their view deserves some respect.
We cannot be absolutely sure in any of these cases—from seventeenth-century England to twentieth-century Somalia—that festivities and danced rituals actually cured the disease we know as depression. But there are reasons to think that they might have. First, because such rituals serve to break down the sufferer’s sense of isolation and reconnect him or her with the human community. Second, because they encourage the experience of self-loss, that is, a release, however temporary, from the prison of the self, or at least from the anxious business of evaluating how one stands in the group or in the eyes of an ever-critical God. Friedrich Nietzsche, as lonely and tormented an individual as the nineteenth century produced, understood the therapeutics of ecstasy perhaps better than anyone else. At a time of almost universal celebration of the “self,” he alone dared speak of the “horror of individual existence,”74 and glimpsed relief in the ancient Dionysian rituals that he knew of only from reading the classics—rituals in which, he imagined, “each individual becomes not only reconciled to his fellow but actually at one with him—as though the veil of Maya had been torn apart and there remained only shreds floating before the vision of mystical Oneness … He feels himself to be godlike and strides with the same elation and ecstasy as the gods he has seen in his dreams.”75
The immense tragedy for Europeans, I have argued, and most acutely for the northern Protestants among them, was that the same social forces that disposed them to depression also swept away a traditional cure. They could congratulate themselves for brilliant achievements in the areas of science, exploration, and industry, and even convince themselves that they had not, like Faust, had to sell their souls to the devil in exchange for these accomplishments. But with the suppression of festivities that accompanied modern European “progress,” they had done something perhaps far more damaging: They had completed the demonization of Dionysus begun by Christians centuries ago, and thereby rejected one of the most ancient sources of help—the mind-preserving, lifesaving techniques of ecstasy.
8
Guns Against Drums: Imperialism Encounters Ecstasy
The reader might justifiably accuse me of eurocentrism in my emphasis, so far, on European developments—except for one thing: It was the Europeans—not the Chinese or Aztecs or Zulu—who forcibly imposed their culture and beliefs on people throughout the world. The centuries, roughly the sixteenth through the nineteenth, in which Europeans discarded and suppressed their festive traditions are the same ones in which Europeans fanned out all over the globe conquering, enslaving, colonizing, and in general destroying other peoples and their cultures. Technological advances—in navigation and of course in weaponry—made the European campaign of global conquest possible; perhaps the psychological changes discussed in the previous chapter—toward a more driven and individualistic type of personality—helped make it seem necessary and appealing. No doubt there are many reasons (economic, demographic, ideological, even sexual) to explain why Europe’s embrace of the new puritanism coincided with such a frantic burst of expansionism—a drive, it almost seems, to get away.
But it is the immediate consequence, rather than the sources, of European expansionism that concerns us here: The Europeans who explored and conquered and colonized were, certainly from the late sixteenth century on, fresh from their own experience of harsh cultural “reform” and had little tolerance for the exuberant rituals of other peoples. For example, a historian of Tahiti described the Protestant missionaries who settled on that sunny island in the early nineteenth century as followers of a “dour and cheerless creed,” who routinely dressed in black and “never laughed, never made a joke or understood anyone else’s, never enjoyed what they condemned as unseemly levity, and never let themselves forget for a moment the awful burden of the sins of the world.”1 Even in milder forms, the Christianity Europeans attempted to export to the world frowned on anything that looked to them like “emotionalism.” As an early-twentieth-century American professor wrote in condemnation of “primitive” religiosity, “The mature fruit of the Spirit is not the subliminal uprush, the ecstatic inflow of emotion, the rhapsody, the lapse of inhibition, but rational love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, meekness—self-control.”2
Sometimes the Europeans’ destruction of “native” rites was incidental to the physical destruction of the natives themselves: It would be shortsighted to complain about the abolition of Tasmanian or Carib traditions, for example, when the people who might have been carriers of these traditions no longer exist, having succumbed centuries ago to European weapons and diseases. In Australia, the missionaries’ efforts to uplift and “civilize” the Aboriginals were often overwhelmed by the more pressing business of burying them. One missionary outpost was abandoned with the explanation that “the termination of the Mission has arisen solely from the Aboriginals becoming e
xtinct in these districts.”3
On the whole, though, there was nothing “incidental” about the European campaign against the communal rituals of other societies. Most Europeans had little use for any aspects of non-European culture; African religions, for example, were described by an English promoter of the missionary effort as “little more than loose collections of ideas, vague and puerile, arising from a superstitious devotion to the life of Nature around.”4 Especially repellent to Europeans were the rituals of indigenous peoples, since these almost invariably featured dancing, singing, masking, and even the achievement of trance states. In large parts of Africa, for example, the identification between communal dance and music, on the one hand, and what Europeans might call “religion,” on the other, was profound. The term the Tswanas of southern Africa use for dance (go bina) also means “to venerate,”5 and in the Bantu language group of southern, central, and eastern Africa, the word ngoma can mean “ritual,” “cult,” “song-dance,” or simply “drum.”6
The anthropologist Jean Comaroff noted that of all the “native” customs and traditions in southern Africa, “collective song and dance were especially offensive to Christians.”7 As we saw in the introduction, Europeans tended to view such activities, wherever they found them, as outbreaks of devil worship, lasciviousness, or, from a more “scientific” perspective, hysteria. For example, a Jesuit missionary among the Yup’ik people of late-nineteenth-century Alaska wrote:
I have great hopes for these poor people, even though they are so disgusting on the exterior that nature itself would stand up and take notice … In general their superstitions are a fearful worship of the devil. They indulge profusely in performances and feasts to please their dead but in fact to please and corrupt themselves, in dancing and banqueting.8
So whether the goal was to pacify indigenous peoples in a military and administrative sense or, more generously, to impose upon them the supposed benefits of civilization, Europeans generally found themselves in furious opposition to the communal pleasures and rituals of the people whose lives they intruded upon.
The existence of a widespread European campaign against indigenous ritual is beyond dispute; some scholars mention it almost in passing, as if little elaboration were required. The anthropologist Jon P. Kirby, for example, tells us that missionaries in West Africa “were too busy suppressing traditional rituals and beliefs” to find out what they were and meant,9 while another anthropologist, Beverly Stoeltje, explains that the distinction between ritual and festival “evolved as a consequence of modern religious systems’ attempts to obliterate native religions.”10 Apparently, if native religious rituals could not be tolerated, they could still sometimes survive as “secular” festivities.
But it is frustratingly difficult to find blow-by-blow accounts of conflicts over specific native practices. One exception is Hawaii, where a three-way conflict—among white missionaries, white sailors, and native Hawaiians—has been documented. The Hawaiians, for the most part, wanted to continue their traditional pleasures; the sailors wanted to drink and exploit local women; the missionaries wanted to establish a kind of puritanical theocracy. Although the Hawaiians were organized into socially complex kingdoms, the white American missionary Hiram Bingham saw them as “almost naked savages,” having “the appearance of destitution, degradation, and barbarism.”11 He and succeeding missionaries fought, with mixed success, to suppress both the sailors’ carousing and such Hawaiian customs as surfing, canoe racing, lei wearing, and that “depraved native dance,” the hula.12
I could find only sketchy and scattered accounts of the encounters between high-minded Europeans and native “devil worshippers” elsewhere. What they suggest is that the global campaign against festivities and ecstatic rituals in many ways resembled the post-Reformation campaign against festivities within Europe: It was a sporadic undertaking, carried out by both secular and religious authorities, and subject to frequent setbacks. In some settings, repression had the force of law, taking the form of edicts against drumming, dancing, and masking, for example, with penalties of flogging or even mutilation. As Kirby notes, “Most missionaries considered the colonial administrations as allies in the essential task of destroying existing structures,”13 just as religiously motivated reformers within Europe could generally count on the assistance of secular authorities.
In other settings, where the colonial administration was still underdeveloped, individual missionaries usually attempted to halt the “devilish” native practices single-handedly, much like the puritanical preachers who took it upon themselves to tear down maypoles and disrupt festivities in their native England. Missionary accounts include many tales of such courageous, reckless, and, from a non-European point of view, surely ridiculous behavior. Early Catholic missionaries in Africa reported that, at the first sound of drums, they would “immediately run to the place to disturb the hellish practice.”14 A Capuchin friar in the Portuguese fort at Massangano, in what is now Angola, was almost stoned to death by an angry crowd “for endeavoring to oppose these people in their wicked ceremonies.” 15 In the mid-nineteenth century, a Presbyterian missionary found black Jamaicans engaged in what they called a myal dance, and rushed out to stop them, only to be told that the dancers were not, as he supposed, “mad.” “You must be mad yourself,” they told him, “and had best go away.”16
Again, as in Europe, collective rituals became what Comaroff called an “arena of contest” between the contending cultures—sites for the exchange of insults and threats, if not actual violence. Colonized peoples might use their rituals to mock the European intruders or, as the Europeans usually suspected, to whip up armed resistance. Or they might be attracted by Christian teachings, only to be repelled by Christian forms of worship. Nxele, a nineteenth-century Xhosa diviner, was originally drawn to Christianity, then decided that the right way to worship was not “to sing M‘Dee, M’Dee, M’Dee all day and pray with their faces on the ground and their backs to the almighty—but to dance and enjoy life and to make love, so that the black people would multiply and fill the earth.”17 For their part, the Europeans “focused their challenge on communal rites”18 and often judged the progress of their “civilizing” efforts by their success in suppressing such rites. A Methodist missionary in southern Africa, S. Broadbent, wrote in 1865: “I feel happy also in saying that the Bechuana customs and ceremonies are considerably on the wane. The native dance is, in some instances, kept up; but I frequently go at the time of the dance, oppose it, and preach to those who are willing to hear.”19 Among the Namaquas of South Africa, it was said of someone who converts to Christianity that “he has given up dancing.”20
European observers sometimes noted the parallel between the crackdown on native rites worldwide and the crackdown on carnival and other festivities within Europe. Recall their tendency, as mentioned earlier, to equate the “savages” of “new” worlds with the lower classes of the old world, and the occasional analogy drawn between European carnival and the ecstatic rites of distant peoples. The parallel extends, in part, to the motive for repression: One of the goals of the crackdown within Europe was to instill the work ethic into the lower classes and apply the time “wasted” in festivities to productive labor. Similarly, European colonizers were often appalled both by the apparent laziness of the natives and by the energy they invested in purely “superstitious” ritual activities, and to such a degree that their irritation sometimes extended to the flora that supported the supposedly easygoing, native way of life. The poet Samuel Coleridge, for example—surely a liberal by nineteenth-century British standards—once suggested that the South Sea Islanders’ breadfruit trees be destroyed, so that the islanders would be forced to learn hard work.21 Along the same lines, the historian Thomas Carlyle was incensed by the West Indian pumpkin: “Where a Black man, by working about half-an-hour a-day … can supply himself, by aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work!”22 Short of eliminating
these psychologically debilitating plants, Christianity could solve the problem, as proposed by the English promoter of missions quoted above: “One of the chief difficulties experienced by employers of labour in Africa is the unstable and undisciplined character of the native labourer. Christian teaching and industrial training can do much to remove this trouble.”23
But the parallel between repression within Europe and the cultural repression visited by Europeans on their colonial subjects in distant places goes only so far. Within Europe, elites recognized the human objects of repression—generally peasants, laborers, and artisans—as fellow Christians and, increasingly over time, as people who shared with them a sense of nationhood. Not so with the “savages,” whose skin color and facial features combined with their unfamiliar beliefs and customs to render them almost entirely “other”—to the point where their very status as humans was open to question. English settlers in Australia thought of the original occupants of that subcontinent as “a species of tail-less monkeys” or, if human in any sense, clearly the kind of human “nearest of all to the monkey or orang-outang.”24 Georges Cuvier, the noted early-nineteenth-century Swiss comparative anatomist, judged that “the negro race … manifestly approaches to the monkey tribe. The hordes of which this variety is composed have always remained in a state of complete barbarism.”25 This attitude helped justify a casual, even lighthearted, approach to genocide. “I took no more notice of a hundred armed Indians than I would have of a handful of flies,” wrote a Spanish conquistador,26 while an English bush ranger boasted he would just “as leave shoot [Tasmanians] as so many sparrows.”27