 Dancing in the streets, a history of collective joy.
Author: Ehrenreich, Barbara Published: 2007 Investigative journalist Barbara Ehrenreich here 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 ecstatic rituals and festivities involving feasting, masking, and dancing. Although sixteenth-century Europeans began to view mass festivities as foreign and 'savage', Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greek's worship of Dionysus to the medieval practices of Christianity as 'danced religion'. These festivities have been brutally stamped out by the elites, who fear that they will undermine social hierarchies. Protestants criminalised carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonisers wiped out native dance rites. But they have never been eliminated, and Ehrenreich explores recent outbreaks of group revelry from 1960s rock and roll to the 'carnivalisation' of sport. |
