Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy | 
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Author: Barbara Ehrenreich
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $16.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 169150
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 336
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 1
ISBN: 0805057242
Dewey Decimal Number: 394.26
EAN: 9780805057249
ASIN: 0805057242
Publication Date: December 26, 2007
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Condition: *New Book From Independent Bookstore With Many Best Of Awards During Past 25 Years. We recommend EXPEDITED Shipping option selection for 2 to 6 business day delivery time ; as STANDARD media mail i
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Product Description
“Fascinating . . . An admirably lucid, level-headed history of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead.”—Terry Eagleton, The Nation Widely praised as “impressive” (The Washington Post Book World), “ambitious” (The Wall Street Journal), and “alluring” (The Los Angeles Times), Dancing in the Streets explores a human impulse that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for collective joy, historically expressed in revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing.
Drawing on a wealth of history and anthropology, Barbara Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. From the earliest orgiastic Mesopotamian rites to the medieval practice of Christianity as a “danced religion” and the transgressive freedoms of carnival, she demonstrates that mass festivities have long been central to the Western tradition. In recent centuries, this festive tradition has been repressed, cruelly and often bloodily. But as Ehrenreich argues in this original, exhilarating, and ultimately optimistic book, the celebratory impulse is too deeply ingrained in human nature ever to be completely extinguished.
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A Good and Informative Read July 8, 2008
Good research comes from good questions. Barbara Ehrenreich's book is the result of two excellent questions that she writes are prompted by a sense of loss: "if ecstatic rituals and festivities were once so widespread, why is so little left of them today? If the `techniques' of ecstasy represent an important part of the human cultural heritage, why have we forgotten them, if indeed we have?"
Going chronologically from the stone age cave drawings where the collective experience of dancing and feasting was felt so important as to record it, Ehrenreich sweeps through to present times, to what she calls an age of spectacle and sports. Along the way, Ehrenreich tells you about anthropologists who in the beginning neglected dance altogether and psychologists who are still too busy studying only the depressed individual to take any notice of those of us who experience joy. She takes a long hard look at Calvinism through the immensely troubled life of John Bunyan and tracks the dance mania in the 13-15th century Europe that ended in a crackdown on bodily movement from both Church and State in the 16th century. Ehrenreich cleverly posits this crackdown could very well be linked to the European Depression in the 17th century and she cites evidence in the novels, poetry, and autobiographies of the times. She finds only sporadic outbreaks of collective joy in present times, one such episode emanating from the sixties culture.
Coming to this book as a dancer and knowing the joy of dance I interpret Ehrenreich's work as demonstrating the struggle that exists in the physical body when you dance. In other words, to move or not to move. In reference to society, the ability to dance and feast and move the boundaries of gender, ethnicity, and social position versus the habit of sitting still for fear of losing both self-control and social positioning.
Ehrenreich's examples are interesting, her connections are insightful, and the book is easy to read. If humans for so many years devoted so much time and energy to the pursuit of collective joy what threatens us from pursuing this experience now? She does answer her questions. You'll have to read the book to find out what they are.
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