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
