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Reviews
| Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, by Barbara Ehrenreich. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007. 320 pages. $26.00, cloth. $16.00, paper.
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| Barbara Ehrenreich, noted journalist and political activist, has written nearly twenty books, among which are several works of history. Whether looking at the history of women in medicine (Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers) or the human hunger for war (Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions for War), Ehrenreich has marked her historical research with a political interest in the present. So too with Dancing in the Streets, where, prompted by her concern with what she sees as a developing modern epidemic of psychological depression, she asks: "Could this apparent decline in the ability to experience pleasure be in any way connected with the decline in opportunities for pleasure, such as carnival and other traditional festivities?" (p. 132) She notes in the Introduction that in the last thirty years, Psychology journals have published thousands of articles on depression, but only four hundred on joy. The same observation can, by implication, be made about historical studies, where wars, power struggles, genocides, and clashes of civilizations trump the histories of fun or happiness. Dancing in the Streets offers a contrast to the more traditional topics of history; it explores collective joy, or the manifestations of social bonding that occur with a group's collective ritualized mockery of social hierarchy, or what Ehrenreich calls "the incommunicable thrill of the group deliberately united in joy or exaltation" (p. 16). She asks, "If ecstatic rituals and festivities were once so widespread, why is so little left of them today?" (p. 19) |
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Revealing chapter titles such as "The Archaic Roots of Ecstasy," "Jesus and Dionysus," "Guns Against Drums: Imperialism Encounters Ecstasy," and "Fascist Spectacles" demonstrate the scope of Ehrenreich's inquiry on the periodic manifestations and repressions of collective joy. She uses examples from Ancient, Biblical, and Medieval times, from Bacchus to Carnival, to show the powerful historic presence of these movements of ecstasy. She notes that the written record also reveals the social tension surrounding these rituals; she argues that among other things, the Protestant Reformation, increasing militarization, and imperialism repressed communal ecstasy in favor of hierarchal control of the people. However, she notes, that it is not modernization, capitalism, industrialism, and the large scale of modern society that has subdued collective joy, but its appropriation and manipulation by authorities who "fear the empowering rituals of the subordinates as a threat to civil order" (p. 251). By the twentieth century, spectacle in the form of orchestrated military displays or the Nazi Nuremberg productions replace the ritualized celebration of the collective joy of the people. Ehrenreich notes that people periodically attempt to revive such collective joy, such as the rebellion of rock music and the spontaneity of sports fans in the twentieth century. Nevertheless, Ehrenreich is not hopeful that such collective unity will resurface. She notes that in "the three-thousand-year-old struggle... between popes and dancing peasants, between Puritans and carnival-goers, between missionaries and the parishioners of indigenous ecstatic danced religions... the possibility of collective joy (has) been largely marginalized to the storefront churches of the poor and the darkened clubs frequented by the young" (p. 248). |
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The Joy of Dancing presents a global tour through the human history of communal festivals and their recurrent suppression. Ehrenreich acknowledges world historian William H. McNeill, who convinced her "that the subject was worth pursuing in the first place" (p. 303). The book includes an extensive bibliography, notes, and appendix. Although directed to general readers, The Joy of Dancing will be of interest to history teachers and their students, who should appreciate the provocative and unusual approach to history. |
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| California State University, Long Beach |
Linda Kelly Alkana |
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