From a bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes a fascinating exploration of one of humanity\'s oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing.
An admirably lucid, level-headed History of outbreaks of joy from Dionysus to the Grateful Dead.--Terry Eagleton, The Nation. . .
Fascinating .
Original, exhilarating, and deeply optimistic, Dancing in the Streets concludes that we are innately social beings, impelled to share our joy and therefore able to envision, even create, a more peaceable future.
Yet outbreaks of group revelry persist, as Ehrenreich shows, pointing to the 1960s rock-and-roll rebellion and the more recent carnivalization of sports.
The elites\' fear that such gatherings would undermine social hierarchies was justified: the festive tradition inspired French revolutionary crowds and uprisings from the Caribbean to the American plains.
Ultimately, church officials drove the festivities into the streets, the prelude to widespread reformation: Protestants criminalized carnival, Wahhabist Muslims battled ecstatic Sufism, European colonizers wiped out native dance rites.
Although sixteenth-century Europeans viewed mass festivities as foreign and savage, Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greeks\' worship of Dionysus to the medieval practice of Christianity as a danced religion.
Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture.
Here, she explores the opposite impulse, one that has been so effectively suppressed that we lack even a term for it: the desire for Collective joy, historically expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing.
From the bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes Barbara Ehrenreich\'s fascinating exploration of one of humanity\'s oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy In the acclaimed Blood Rites , Barbara Ehrenreich delved into the origins of our species\' attraction to war.
From a bestselling social commentator and cultural historian comes a fascinating exploration of one of humanity\'s oldest traditions: the celebration of communal joy expressed in ecstatic revels of feasting, costuming, and dancing
