Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  The silence demands some sort of explanation, so let us give the enemies of festivity—or at least the revolutionaries among them, like Robespierre and Lenin—their due. What is lost is not that important, they would argue, should they be good-humored enough to even entertain the argument. And indeed you would have to be a fool, or a drug-addled hippie, to imagine that a restoration of festivity and ecstatic ritual would get us out of our current crisis, or even to imagine that such activities could be restored in our world today, with anything like their original warmth and meaningfulness. No amount of hand-holding or choral dancing will bring world peace and environmental healing. In fact, festivities have served at times to befuddle or becalm their celebrants. European carnival coexisted with tyranny for centuries, hence the common “safety valve” theory of their social function. Native American Ghost Dancers could not reverse genocide with their ecstatic rituals; nor could colonized Africans render themselves bulletproof by dancing into a trance. In the face of desperately serious threats to group survival, the ecstatic ritual can be a waste of energy—or worse. The Haitian dictator “Papa Doc” Duvalier actually encouraged Vodou as a means of strengthening his grip on the population.

  My own Calvinist impulses—inherited in part from those of my ancestors who were genuine Calvinists, Presbyterian Scots—tell me insistently to get the work done, save the world, and then maybe there’ll be time for celebration. In the face of poverty, misery, and possible extinction, there is no time, or justification, for the contemplation of pleasure of any kind, these inner voices say. Close your ears to the ever-fainter sound of drums or pipes; the wild carnival and danced ritual belong to a distant time. The maenads are long dead, a curiosity for the classicists; the global “natives” have been subdued. Forget the past, which is half imagined anyway, and get to work.

  And yet … It does not go away, this ecstatic possibility. Despite centuries of repression, despite the competing allure of spectacles, festivity keeps bubbling up, and in the most unlikely places. The rock rebellion broke through the anxious conformity of postwar America and generated an entire counterculture. Then, at the other end of the cultural spectrum, where the spectacle of athleticism merged with nationalism, people undertook to carnivalize sports events, reclaiming them as occasions for individual creativity and collective joy. Religions, too, still generate ecstatic undertakings, like the annual Hasidic pilgrimage to the Ukrainian town of Uman, which has sprung up just since the fall of communism and features thousands of Hasidic men, dressed entirely in white, dancing and singing in the streets in honor of their dead rebbe. The impulse to public celebration lives on, seizing its opportunities as they come. When Iran, which is surely one of the world’s more repressive states, qualified for the World Cup in 1997, “celebrations paralyzed Tehran,” according to Newsweek. “Women ripped off their government-mandated veils; men gave out paper cups of strictly forbidden vodka as teenagers danced in the streets.”7

  There are also cases of people coming together and creating festivity out of nothing, or at least without the excuse of a commercial concert or athletic event. Thousands of women gather every summer for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, described on its Web site as “the best party on the planet.” Gay male culture features “circuit parties,” involving dancing and sometimes costuming, and, with some help from chemical stimulants, these can go on for days. It was gay culture, too, that first appropriated Halloween as an adult holiday, now celebrated with parades of costumed people of all sexual inclinations. The historian Nicholas Rogers summarizes recent observances of the holiday.

  In San Francisco, alongside huge gay promenades at Castro and Polk, the Trocadero Transfer Club ran a three-day bash on the theme of the Australian cult movie The Road Warrior [sic]. At Salem, Massachusetts, witchery generated forty events for some 50,000 visitors. Even in Salt Lake City, where the Mormons frowned on public profanity and excess, private clubs promoted Halloween parties with gusto. One observer remembered pregnant nuns and lewd priests cavorting on the dance floor, and three gold-painted angels mimicking the figure atop the city’s Mormon temple.8

  We might also note such recently invented festivities as the Berlin Love parade, an outdoor dance party that has attracted over a million people at a time, or the annual Burning Man event in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where thousands of people of all ages gather annually to create art, dance, and paint and costume themselves.

  And whatever its shortcomings as a means to social change, protest movements keep reinventing carnival. Almost every demonstration I have been to over the years—antiwar, feminist, or for economic justice—has featured some element of the carnivalesque: costumes, music, impromptu dancing, the sharing of food and drink. The media often deride the carnival spirit of such protests, as if it were a self-indulgent distraction from the serious political point. But seasoned organizers know that gratification cannot be deferred until after “the revolution.” The Texas populist Jim Hightower, for example, launched a series of “Rolling Thunder” events around the country in the early 2000s, offering music, food, and plenty of conviviality, and with the stated aim of “putting the party back in politics.” People must find, in their movement, the immediate joy of solidarity, if only because, in the face of overwhelming state and corporate power, solidarity is their sole source of strength.

  In fact, there has been, in the last few years, a growing carnivalization of protest demonstrations, perhaps especially among young “antiglobalization” activists in Europe, Latin America, Canada, and the United States. They wear costumes—most famously, the turtle suits symbolizing environmental concerns at the huge Seattle protest of 1999. They put on masks or paint their faces; they bring drums to their demonstrations and sometimes dance through the streets; they send up the authorities with street theater and effigies. A Seattle newspaper reported of the 1999 demonstrations: “The scene … resembled a New Year’s Eve party: People banged on drums, blew horns and tossed flying discs through the air. One landed at the foot of a police officer, who threw it back to the crowd amid cheers.”9 The urge to transform one’s appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.

  And why, in the end, would anyone want to? The capacity for collective joy is encoded into us almost as deeply as the capacity for the erotic love of one human for another. We can live without it, as most of us do, but only at the risk of succumbing to the solitary nightmare of depression. Why not reclaim our distinctively human heritage as creatures who can generate their own ecstatic pleasures out of music, color, feasting, and dance?

  A couple of years ago, on the stunning Copacabana beach in Rio de Janeiro, where the mountains march right down into the water, my companion and I were drawn by the sound of drumming. Walking north along the beach, we came to a phalanx of samba dancers, about ten people abreast and at least a block long—members of a samba school practicing for carnaval, we were told. There were people of all ages, from tots of four or five up to octogenarians, men and women, some gorgeously costumed and some in the tank tops and shorts that constitute Rio street clothes. To a nineteenth-century missionary or even a twenty-first-century religious puritan, their movements might well have seemed lewd or at least suggestive. Certainly the conquest of the streets by a crowd of brownskinned people would have been distressing in itself.

  But the samba school danced down to the sand in perfect dignity, wrapped in their own rhythm, their faces both exhausted and shining with an almost religious kind of exaltation. One thin lattecolored young man dancing just behind the musicians set the pace. What was he in real life—a bank clerk, a busboy? But here, in his brilliant feathered costume, he was a prince, a mythological figure, maybe even a god. Here, for a moment, there were no divisions among people except for the playful ones created by carnaval itself.

  As they reached the boardwalk, bystanders started falling into the rhythm too, and, without any invitation or announcements, without embarrassment or even alcohol to
dissolve the normal constraints of urban life, the samba school turned into a crowd and the crowd turned into a momentary festival. There was no “point” to it—no religious overtones, ideological message, or money to be made—just the chance, which we need much more of on this crowded planet, to acknowledge the miracle of our simultaneous existence with some sort of celebration.

  ALSO BY BARBARA EHRENREICH

  Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

  Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (with Arlie Russell Hochschild)

  Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America

  Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War

  The Snarling Citizen

  Kipper’s Game

  The Worst Years of Our Lives: Irreverent Notes from a Decade of Greed

  Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class

  The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment

  Re-making Love: The Feminization of Sex

  (with Elizabeth Hess and Gloria Jacobs)

  For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women (with Deirdre English)

  Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers (with Deirdre English)

  Complaints and Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (with Deirdre English)

  Praise for Dancing in the Streets

  “With characteristic frankness and an anti-authoritarian edge … the history of collective joy as related here is lurid and alluring.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “An impressive work.”

  —The Washington Post Book World

  “An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of collective joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead. In the end, Dancing in the Streets is not just a history of festivity, one that packs a remarkable amount into its relatively slim compass, but a timely political meditation.”

  —Terry Eagleton, The Nation

  “Combining thorough research with her tart, skeptical eye, Ehrenreich constructs a vivid narrative of early Christianity and ‘deliberately nurtured techniques of ecstasy.’”

  —The Baltimore Sun

  “Intriguing.”

  —Elle

  “A terrific counterpart to Blood Rites. A-.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “The same brave, brilliant writing that Ehrenreich has always used to expose the dark underside of human nature, she now employs to illuminate sources of communal joy and bonding that we as a society have historically denied and continue to sweep under the rug. Tracing the long history of Europe’s fight against its better impulses, she ends with the return of the repressed, as she joyously hunts ecstasy out of its hiding places—the rock rebellions of the 1960s, the carnivalesque that often pervades protest movements—and urges us to let it back into our lives.”

  —Wendy Doniger, author of

  The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was

  “Barbara Ehrenreich shows how and why people celebrate together, and equally what causes us to fear celebration. Here is the other side of ritual, whose dark side she explored in Blood Rites. She ranges in time from the earliest festivals drawn on cave walls to modern football crowds; she finds that dancing has been a way to address personal ills like melancholy and shame, social ills as extreme as those faced by American slaves. Dancing in the Streets is itself a celebration of language—clear, funny, unpredictable. This is a truly original book.”

  —Richard Sennett, author of The Culture of the New Capitalism

  “A fabulous book on carnival and ecstasy, skillfully arranged and brilliantly explained.”

  —Robert Farris Thompson, author of Tango: The Art History of Love

  “Witty and quizzical, Ehrenreich covers her vast terrain comprehensively yet incisively, casting her net wide and landing delicious detail at the same time as more strictly germane matter.”

  —Simon Callow, The Guardian

  “A thought-provoking and sober look at a delightfully unsober topic, worth reading for the key chapters on Dionysus and Jesus alone.”

  —London Review of Books

  “The title of this book alone did my weary heart good … . What this timely book forcefully shows is that we are social beings with a potential for collective activity that is not always destructive or docile but may be powerfully restorative. With the world political scene in crisis and the planet profoundly in need of our remedial help, it is a message to be welcomed, pondered—and enjoyed.”

  —Sally Vickers, The Times (London)

  “Barbara Ehrenreich’s absorbing study of collective celebration does the essential job of reminding us that humans are happiest when doing things together … . Ehrenreich has an ability to write as though she has lived through the history she relates … . She draws on research from prehistory, classical civilization, theology, anthropology, neuroscience, literature and pop-cultural studies to present a convincing case for a return to spontaneous (but not too spontaneous) celebration. In doing so she alerts us to the elements of human experience that are universal and so have the possibility of equality among men … . Once reconciled to the counterintuitive nature of spending hours alone reading a book that suggests you’d be better off dancing instead, time will fly and you’ll end it convinced that you’ve been in happy, wine-fuelled conversation with the author herself.”

  —Lynsey Hanley, The Daily Telegraph (London)

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION: INVITATION TO THE DANCE

  1 Quoted in Oesterley, p. 2.

  2 Quoted in Moorehead, p. 30.

  3 Quoted in ibid., p. 94.

  4 Quoted in ibid., pp. 128-29.

  5 Quoted in Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, p. 249.

  6 Frey and Wood, p. 147.

  7 Quoted in ibid., p. 59.

  8 Quoted in Cowley, pp. 40-41.

  9 Quoted in Raboteau, p. 62.

  10 Quoted in Murphy, p. 149.

  11 Quoted in Oesterreich, pp. 140-41.

  12 Quoted in Frey and Wood, p. 25.

  13 Buchan, p. 83.

  14 Hambly, pp. 16-17.

  15 Cheeseman, p. 124.

  16 Quoted in Oesterreich, pp. 285-86.

  17 Goodman, p. 36. See also Platvoet.

  18 Quoted in Oesterreich, p. 286.

  19 Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: London: Routledge, 1993), p. 241.

  20 Conrad, p. 32.

  21 Oesterreich, p. 237.

  22 Street, p. 62.

  23 Davenport, p. 243.

  24 Ibid., p. 306.

  25 Kreiser, pp. 257-58.

  26 Oesterreich, p. 237.

  27 Weidkuhn.

  28 Stoler, p. 125.

  29 Quoted in Kupperman, p. 107.

  30 Quoted in Stoler, p. 124.

  31 Crapanzano, p. xiii.

  32 Turner, The Ritual Process, p. 7.

  33 Ibid., p. 129.

  34 Ibid., pp. 138-39.

  35 Ibid.

  36 Crapanzano, p. 234.

  37 Quoted in Castillo.

  38 Quoted in ibid.

  39 Sass, p. 362.

  40 Trish Hall, “Seeking a Focus on Joy in the Field of Psychology,” New York Times, April 28, 1998.

  41 Quoted in Stallybrass and White, p. 190.

  42 Lindholm, pp. 57-58.

  43 Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, p. 64.

  44 Suryani and Jensen, p. 173.

  45 http://www.psychnet-uk.com/dsm_iv/depersonalization_disorder.htm.

  46 Lindholm, p. 66.

  47 Ibid., p. 70.

  48 Lofland.

  49 Turner, Celebration, p. 12.

  50 See, for example, Beverly J. Stoeltje, “Festival,” in Bauman, pp. 264-66.

  51 Ibid., p. 262.

  52 Quoted in Raboteau, p. 223.

  1. THE ARCHAIC ROOTS OF ECSTASY

  1 Garfinkel, p. 11.

  2 John Pickrell, “Unprec
edented Ice Age Cave Art Discovered in U.K.,” National Geographic News, August 18, 2004.

  3 Dunbar, pp. 147—48.

  4 Freeman, p. 129.

  5 McNeill, Keeping Together in Time, p. 2.

  6 D’Aquili, p. 22.

  7 Sandra Blakeslee, “Cells That Read Minds,” New York Times, January 10, 2006.