Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy - Softcover

Ehrenreich, Barbara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0805057242 ISBN 13: 9780805057249

Verlag: Holt, N.Y., 2007

Inhaltsangabe

The author of the critically acclaimed Blood Rites examines the human impulse toward collective joy, historically expressed in communal celebrations, reflecting the human nature as social beings and involving ecstatic revelries of feasting, costuming, and dancing, from the ancient Greeks worship of Dionysus to the more recent carnivalization of sports.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Barbara Ehrenreich (1941-2022) was a bestselling author and political activist, whose more than a dozen books included Nickel and Dimed, which the New York Times described as "a classic in social justice literature", Bait and Switch, Bright-sided, This Land Is Their Land, Dancing In The Streets, and Blood Rites. An award-winning journalist, she frequently contributed to Harper's, The Nation, The New York Times, and TIME magazine. Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, when it was still a bustling mining town. She studied physics at Reed College, and earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University. Rather than going into laboratory work, she got involved in activism, and soon devoted herself to writing her innovative journalism.

Barbara Ehrenreich is the bestselling author of Nickel and Dimed, Bait and Switch, Bright-sided, This Land Is Their Land, and Blood Rites, among others. A frequent contributor to Harper's and The Nation, she has also been a columnist at The New York Times and Time magazine. She is the winner of the L.A. Times Book Prize for Current Interest and ALA Notable Books for Nonfiction.

Ehrenreich was born in Butte, Montana, when it was still a bustling mining town. She studied physics at Reed College, and earned a Ph.D. in cell biology from Rockefeller University. Rather than going into laboratory work, she got involved in activism, and soon devoted herself to writing her innovative journalism. She lives and works in Florida.

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Dancing in the Streets

A History of Collective Joy

By Barbara Ehrenreich

Henry Holt and Company

Copyright © 2006 Barbara Ehrenreich
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8050-5724-9

Contents

Title Page, 
Introduction: - Invitation to the Dance, 
1 - The Archaic Roots of Ecstasy, 
2 - Civilization and Backlash, 
3 - Jesus and Dionysus, 
4 - From the Churches to the Streets: The Creation of Carnival, 
5 - Killing Carnival: Reformation and Repression, 
6 - A Note on Puritanism and Military Reform, 
7 - An Epidemic of Melancholy, 
8 - Guns Against Drums: Imperialism Encounters Ecstasy, 
9 - Fascist Spectacles, 
10 - The Rock Rebellion, 
11 - Carnivalizing Sports, 
Conclusion: - The Possibility of Revival, 
ALSO BY BARBARA EHRENREICH, 
Praise for Dancing in the Streets, 
NOTES, 
BIBLIOGRAPHY, 
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS, 
INDEX, 
ABOUT THE AUTHOR, 
Notes, 
Copyright Page, 

CHAPTER 1

The Archaic Roots of Ecstasy

Go back ten thousand years and you will find humans toiling away at the many mundane activities required for survival: hunting, food gathering, making weapons and garments, beginning to experiment with agriculture. But if you land on the right moonlit night or seasonal turning point, you might also find them engaged in what seems, by comparison, to be a gratuitous waste of energy: dancing in lines or circles, sometimes wearing masks or what appear to be costumes, often waving branches or sticks. Most likely, both sexes would be dancing, each in its separate line or circle. Their faces and bodies might be painted with red ochre, or so archaeologists guess from the widespread presence of that colored ore in the sites of human settlements. The scene, in other words, might not be too different from the "savage" rituals encountered by nineteenth-century Westerners among native peoples of the world.

We can infer these scenes from prehistoric rock art depicting dancing figures, which has been discovered at sites in Africa, India, Australia, Italy, Turkey, Israel, Iran, and Egypt, among other places. Whatever else they did, our distant ancestors seemed to find plenty of time for the kinds of activities the anthropologist Victor Turner described as liminal, or peripheral to the main business of life.

Festive dancing was not a rare or incidental subject for prehistoric artists. The Israeli archaeologist Yosef Garfinkel asserts that dancing scenes "were a most popular, indeed almost the only, subject used to describe interaction between people in the Neolithic and Chalcolithic periods." When such danced rituals originated is not known, but there is evidence that they may go back well into the Paleolithic era, or Stone Age. At one recently discovered site in England, drawings on the ceiling of a cave show "conga lines" of female dancers, along with drawings of animals like bison and ibex, which are known to have become extinct in England ten thousand years ago. So well before people had a written language, and possibly before they took up a settled lifestyle, they danced and understood dancing as an activity important enough to record on stone.

It is not easy to read the excitement of a danced ritual into prehistoric drawings. The figures are highly stylized; many of those cataloged by Garfinkel are little more than stick figures or silhouettes; few possess facial features or anything like a facial expression. Even the identification of them as dancers takes some interpretive work; the figures have to be using their limbs in ways not associated with normal activities: holding their arms up, holding hands in a circle, raising their legs, or leaping, for example. Yet even in these crude, two-dimensional depictions, some of the recognizable ingredients of more recent festive traditions shine through — masking and costuming, for example. Some of the male figures wear masks in the form of animal heads or abstract designs; other dancers wear what archaeologists interpret as "costumes," such as leopard skins. In the clearest sign of motion, and possibly excitement, some of the figures have long, flowing hair standing out from their heads, as if they are moving rapidly and tossing their heads to some long-silenced drumbeat.

Clearly, danced rituals did not seem like a waste of energy to prehistoric peoples. They took the time to fashion masks and costumes; they wantonly expended calories in the execution of the dance; they preferred to record these scenes over any other group activity. Thus anthropologist Victor Turner's consignment of danced ritual to an occasional, marginal, or liminal status seems especially unwarranted in the prehistoric case — and more representative of the production-oriented mentality of our own industrial age than of prehistoric priorities. Surely these people knew hardship and were often threatened by food shortages, disease, and wild animals. But ritual, of a danced and possibly ecstatic nature, was central to their lives. Perhaps only because our own lives, so much easier in many ways, are also so constrained by the imperative to work, we have to wonder why.

Anthropologists tend to agree that the evolutionary function of dance was to enable — or encourage — humans to live in groups larger than small bands of closely related individuals. The advantage of larger group size is presumed to be the same as it is for those primates who still live in the wild: Larger groups are better able to defend themselves against predators. Unlike most animals — antelopes, for example — primates are capable of mounting a group defense: mobbing the intruding predator, threatening it with branches, or at least attempting to scare it off by making an infernal racket. In the case of early humans, the danger may have come not only from predatory animals like the big cats but from other now- extinct hominids or even from fellow Homo sapiens bent on raiding. And of course, in the human case, the forms of defense would have included fire, rocks, and sharpened sticks. But the first line of defense was to come together as a group.

In his justly popular book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language, the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar argues for an optimal Paleolithic group size of about 150. He speculates that speech — the gossip in his title — may have helped bind humans into groups of that size, much as mutual grooming — picking insects and bits of dirt out of each other's hair — appears to do in the case of other primates. But although it does not appear in his title, it is in fact dance that he invokes to hold these early human groups together. The problem with speech, according to Dunbar, is "its complete inadequacy at the emotional level":

Just as we were acquiring the ability to argue and rationalize, we needed a more primitive emotional mechanism to bond our large groups ... Something deeper and more emotional was needed to overpower the cold logic of verbal arguments. It seems that we needed music and physical touch to do that.

In fact, he sees language as subservient to danced rituals — "a way to formalize their spontaneity" and provide them with a "metaphysical or religious significance." And it should be noted that while hundreds of prehistoric images of dancing figures have been found, there are no rock drawings of stick figures apparently engaged in conversation.

Dunbar is not the only one to see group dancing — especially in lines and circles — as the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Holt, N.Y.
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2007
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0805057242
• ISBN 13: 9780805057249
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Macmillan Publishers International Limited; generalproductsafety@macmillan.com; ; (1st Floor, The Liffey Trust Centre, 117-126 Sheriff Street Upper, Dublin 1; Dublin; Irland