Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich (Metropolitan Books, 320 pages)
Saturday's antiwar march featured thousands of protesters on the National Mall, celebrity speakers, a well-financed lobbying campaign, and ample media coverage. And yet it's unlikely that the troops will be sent home now; the escalation may even move forward. But despite these grim realities, many people were smiling, friendly and playful. They took pictures of the more creative signs, such as Bush's head superimposed on a chicken. Some wore the costumes of Guantanamo Bay prisoners. Some young women formed circles, stomped their feet and clapped their hands like cheerleaders, singing antiwar chants. A group of dread-locked college students danced to the sound of their own music. The spectacle was the triumph of hope over experience.
As Barbara Ehrenreich shows in her fascinating new book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, in prehistoric periods such group dancing could have been a defense mechanism. Vulnerable individuals gained strength in numbers, "enlarged through the artifice of masks and sticks," against "any non-human beast." If Saturday were any measure, I'm not sure how far we've progressed since then.
But this weekend's antiwar rally, Ehrenreich would argue, was an anomaly. Such group activities, found in the forms of carnivals and ecstatic rituals, were once so widespread, so fundamental to human experience, she argues, that their absence in modern times is profound. Even as she traces the historical reasons why we no longer come together in this way, she wonders why we don't tap into our potential for collective energy more often. There is still room for it in our culture of work and militarism. Even the Greeks, she shows, those who genuflected at the altar of the rational, exhibited ecstatic behavior.
And Saturday's showing may prove fruitful yet. Sometimes populist fantasies come true. The emblematic example is the carnival uprising at Romans in 1580. Visionary rebels planned the revolt well in advance of the festivities, seeing in carnival the perfect setting. Disorder is expected. Free-flowing alcohol could confound law enforcement. Masks could conceal criminals' faces. And so these insurgents brandished swords, brooms, and flails, danced violently to form an intimidating mass, and announced that they wanted to "kill everything." But premeditation or no, anarchy could still ensue. Historians cannot know, for example, whether the riot that broke out during the pre-Lent carnival at Udine, Italy in 1511 was actually intended or whether it was some spontaneous outburst. On some level, though, it doesn't matter. The result is the same: 50 nobles and their retainers were murdered and 20 palaces were looted. The thought of populist dreams realized in the uprising at Romans is certainly cause for alarm for those in power. But the case of Udine teaches a somewhat different lesson: when individuals simply come together to form the "public," they pose a very serious threat to authority.
Those in power finally caught on to this idea by the mid-to-late 16th century, suppressing traditional festivities and carnivals until the 19th century. They were never fully restored, and this is where Ehrenreich takes off.
Dancing in the Streets shares the defiant spirit of Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. Ehrenreich writes this book in spite of a decrease in collective gatherings over time, in the hopes of resurrecting them. Solnit admits that what prompted her to write her book was "the despair that followed a season of extraordinary peace activism in the spring of 2003." But Solnit eschews despair, focusing instead on what the peace movement may have accomplished, choosing to view the future as mysterious, not terrible.
Both authors recognize that revolution is a slow, painstaking process. By Solnit's measure, some people never see the fruits of their labors. In Ehrenreich's account, however, revolution has become more complicated over time. She connects the eradication of the carnival festivities in the old world with the suppression of the ecstatic rituals of "savages" in the new world. Diaspora religions gave slaves a reason to congregate and provided opportunities for insurrection. In early 19th-century Brazil, for instance, candomblés were centers of rebellion, and some Cuban Santeria meetings were tied to slave revolts. Medieval European peasants, by contrast, were able to express their discontent in rituals blurring social boundaries -- when a man dressed up as a "king of fools" and mocked a real king -- during a carnival sanctioned in part by the Church. The 16th-century carnivals at Romans and Udine were the last of their kind.
In the 20th century, the collective need for catharsis found its mode of expression in the rock ‘n' roll of the '50s and '60s, and in the sports events of the ‘80s and ‘90s. But as Ehrenreich makes clear in the February issue of Harper's, her proposal that we reclaim the collective joy that carnivals or rock concerts should not be confused with the faddish positive-psychology movement of the 21st century. The thrust of her book is indeed inherently more compassionate than a nagging injunction to think positively in the face of, say, perpetual unemployment. And while she wants us to have fun feasting and dancing because it is good for us, she understands from a socio-economic perspective why we sometimes can't. In that way, her compassion -- evident in Dancing in the Streets and in her other recent books, Bait and Switch and Nickel and Dimed -- is a godsend.
But especially for those who are socio-economically disadvantaged, Ehrenreich notes that ecstatic rituals provide much more than the opportunity for rebellion. For those enslaved or colonized, rites and cults may have offered only a "psychic benefit," which in the face of hardship is no small thing. And for medieval peasants, carnival may have merely provided a controlled outlet to upend the status quo and express dissatisfaction.
When Reformation Protestants criminalized carnival, they were, in effect, denying people the right to get outside of themselves. In her most brilliant chapter, Ehrenreich sees a particular confluence of events in the late 16th century -- the disappearance of carnival, the rise of subjectivity or discovery of the inner self, and the rise of upward mobility and its attendant individualism -- as no accident. At the time, the loss of community precipitated a painful self-awareness of detachment from others; and the consciousness of other people's judgments produced an epidemic of depression. Yet Ehrenreich is careful not to take her connections too far. "If the destruction of festivities did not actually cause depression, it may still be that, in abandoning their traditional festivities, people lost a potentially effective cure for it." The hopefulness of Saturday's antiwar protesters may be one indication that she is right.
Jeanine Plant is a New York-based freelance writer.
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